The Globe & Mail, 13 Jan 2007
Horror of horrors ...
CHRISTIE BLATCHFORD
I must set the scene here, in order that you can fully appreciate the horror of my recent experience.
One of the last trips I made in Afghanistan was from Forward Operating Base Zettelmeyer in the volatile Panjwai district to the sprawling NATO hub at Kandahar Air Field.
Now, all trips in that benighted country are a bit on the sketchy side — even during quiet periods, and the holiday season was one such, there is always the possibility of an improvised explosive device, suicide bomber or ambush — but usually, we reporters are wonderfully outnumbered by soldiers, and I was always able to console myself with the thought that beside me there were plenty of armed and capable men, most of them additionally burdened with the belief that women are deserving of their protection.
Besides, I always have that great reportorial ace in the hole, the unwavering, self-aggrandizing and monumentally vain belief that in the event of any catastrophe, I necessarily would be the lone survivor, because after all, someone has to write about the event. It is this belief that for decades has carried me serene through rocky flights, emergency helicopter landings, lunatic car rides and the like, blissfully sure, as Gloria Gaynor once sang, that I will survive.
Alas, on this particular occasion, there were seven of us crammed into the back of a Bison armoured vehicle — Globe and Mail photographer Kevin Van Paassen and me, Brian Hutchinson from CanWest/National Post, Bill Graveland from Canadian Press, a padre, a Dutch photographer-soldier, and two Afghan interpreters.
Now, the unnerving thought that I was, in essence, surrounded by people every bit as massively incompetent as I am, most of whom were equally entitled to emerge unscathed from whatever in order to document the whole thing, had occurred to me during the long wait for the rest of our convoy to join us so the trip could begin.
But it didn't fully register until one of the two Canadian soldiers up front — a driver and an air sentry, the latter being the fellow who rides shotgun in an open hatch — came back to check on his passengers before we took off.
We were sitting inside, in the frigid dark, ramp down, when he stuck his head in and asked, “Any actual soldiers back here?”
The Dutch fellow grunted, and the Canuck gestured toward a weapon strapped to the roof of the Bison. “Know how to use that?” The Dutch guy wrinkled his forehead, asked what it was, and then shook his head in the negative.
“Padre?” the Canadian asked, but the good father explained in a horrified voice that he was not armed.
“Jesus,” said the Canadian.
Then he looked at the Dutch guy and chirped, with unsettling good cheer, something like, “Well, if I go down, you're in charge, okay?” Then he mentioned, in passing the time, that he had in fact been hit, and had ended up on his back on the floor of the vehicle.
Oh good, I thought to myself. I am stuck in this thing with colleagues every bit as feeble and hopeless as I am, plus a Dutch guy who's better and more familiar with his cameras than his rifle, plus two worried-looking interpreters, plus a priest with no weapons and peace in his heart who was too handsome to be a priest anyway and was what Jerry Seinfeld once described as a “close talker” to boot.
We had another 45 minutes of waiting in the back, and during that time, I confess, I ran through every imaginable possibility, the most ghastly of which had me bleeding and dying in the arms of the close-talking priest, with him administering the last rites but a mere centimetre from my face and over my whispered protests.
Now, obviously, the trip unfolded nicely and we all made it safely to KAF (I did count 23 separate speed bumps on the road, each of which saw the vehicles slow down and felt like an eternity).
I describe all this only so that you may fully understand why, when this week I headed off to my local Loblaws, for what my late mother invariably described as a Big Shopping, I was still revelling in being home.
I was still giddily grateful for the delights of pavement, for food that doesn't come with silica packets to keep it “fresh,” for not sleeping in muck and mostly, for being able to get into a vehicle without vigorous clenching of both jaw and nether-region muscles.
So it was that I grabbed a cart and ambled, humming, into the store.
I wasn't two feet inside the door when a man, reasonably presentable and reasonably normal-seeming, approached me.
“You're a newspaper writer, aren't you?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“What paper do you write for now?” he asked.
“The Globe and Mail,” said I.
“Oh,” he said, and mentioning a name added, “I have a hemp proposal in with X right now.”
“Hemp?” I asked.
“To print The Globe on hemp,” he said, smiling. “It would save so many trees.”
“Yes, well,” I said, “that's not my baby. I'm just a writer.”
By now, I was in the fruit section, and my new best friend was at my side, like a long-suffering husband, and like one, he then upped the ante in order to get my full attention.
“Why don't you write about this?” he asked.
“I usually write about crime,” I said.
“I knew Bob Hunter,” he said, referring to the late TV personality and long-time environmental activist. “He once told me about a couple of guys who committed suicide because of recycling.”
He had my attention now; I stopped the cart by the bananas.
“Recycling?” I said. “You've got to be kidding me.”
“Well,” he replied, clearly a bit taken aback by my reaction, which, I have to tell you, had I been honest, would have involved me falling to the floor and howling with laughter, “this was in the '70s, when there was no hope.”
“But recycling?” I said. “I mean, of all the reasons to kill yourself, recycling?
“If Bob Hunter had told me that, I would have asked for names and dates and phone numbers.”
“I think Bob was worried about me,” he said, letting it hang there.
“What, he was worried you would commit suicide because of recycling?” I asked.
The man nodded sorrowfully and smugly, which is a profoundly irritating combination, and I muttered something about having to finish my shopping, and sped out past him and the rest of the vegetables.
“Cop out!” he shrieked.
“Cop out! Cop out! Cop out!”
And that was my flashback, and if ever I am felled by a stress disorder, this — how close I came to committing the first recycling homicide — will be the source of it.
