“You no speak okay?”

I nodded my head and slouched lower in our wreck of a Toyota Corolla shuddering up to the checkpoint. Snow sleeted down the mountain slope to lash through the yellow of the headlights.

“Say nothing okay. Nothing.”

I’d already had a lot of practice at this already, about a dozen times through the night. I was about to cross through yet another of the unofficial and always dangerous border crossings and military checkpoints throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina in the last days of the Yugoslav War.

I didn’t bother to ask who this group was. They’d be one of up to a dozen rag tag army militias or freelance brigands out to shake down travelers, hunt rival gang members, and just generally allow their varied psychoses run wild. All armed of course with anything from the standard and almost always rusty AK-47 up to shoulder mounted rocket propelled grenade launchers.

What I was doing was foolish in the extreme and the relief agency I was consulting for had collectively had a heart attack when I announced my plans.

It was a week before Christmas 1995 and I was travelling the length of the Former Yugoslavia with just a driver, headed for the dismal little town of Tuzla. There was no other way to get there other than disguise myself as a mute Bosnia/Serb/Muslim – whatever it needed to be in order to get through the myriad of little kingdoms and fiefdoms of a county hell bent on destroying every living thing in it.

The only people moving through this nasty patchwork of armed checkpoints, manned by men who clearly had lost any sense of restraint and who always reeked of slivovitz at any time of day or night, were international peacekeepers, gonzo foreign correspondents, and me.

As we coasted up to this latest checkpoint I mused yet again about my private theory that slivovitz had caused the Yugoslav war and its endless slaughter of its peoples.

You might know slivovitz as plum brandy but the stuff they made during the war was not nearly as nice as the stuff you can get in the liquor store. It had so much alcohol content that you could power an aircraft engine with a bottle of it.

At the end of that year I’d already spent several weeks in Croatia, Herzegovina, then still a separate and self styled country, before moving into Bosnia. What I was doing involved meeting a lot of local officials, local military commanders, gangsters, and relief workers. Except for the international relief workers, any and all meetings with the others started with a toast of slivovitz brewed under somebody’s unmade bed.

Let me tell you that a shot of that stuff at seven in the morning is precisely like pounding a six inch spike into your forehead. And it would never stop at one.

There were days when I would have to crawl off into some sleeping place I’d found in a roofless building at noon and sleep for several hours before starting all over with the slivovitz at night. No one else seemed to be affected by the stuff at all although they drank it like Russians drank vodka.

I am convinced that the former Yugoslavs turned into such murderous killers because of the toxic effects of slivovitz. But it was a private theory no one else ever bothered to consider, yet it gave me comfort while trying to decode the bizarre twistiness of Yugoslav politics.

A wrap on my window and some guttural Serbo Croat, or whatever the local faction had decided to rename their language. I rolled down the window and my driver leaned across and a highly slivovitz wave of spirited arguing started. A package of cigarettes got handed to the guard and the Corolla clutch shuddered forward.

At any one of these checkpoints, and I lost count at well over a couple of dozen during that 20 hour journey, I faced arrest, robbery certainly, a beating probably, and if I really came across a crazy I could have ended up with an AK-47 round to the back of my head.

So you ask, why dear stupid Mr Rick were you doing this?

CNN. That was why.

CNN had bought a house near the road to the Tuzla airbase that the American military were about to start using as they flooded the country with peacekeepers. I wanted publicity for the American aid agency I was advising and the only way to do that was to show up on CNN’s doorstep, try not to act like a Canadian, and offer to help fill their hours of empty airtime before the heavy lifters started landing.

Two other houses also got sold to media outlets and somebody bought the forest blocking the camera positions on the houses from a view of the airstrip. The forest didn’t last the day.

My plan worked. I got my employers noticed by the big networks as well as by most of the rest of the international media waiting at Tuzla for the troops.

To the BBC and Sky I was “British born”, to the American media networks I was either a presumed and unstated American or conveniently misidentified with the city of the aid agency paying me.  NBC was really creative and I was described coyly thus . . .“Mr Grant lives near Buffalo New York” (technically true because at the time I lived in Ottawa Canada).

The first thing the international military did, and most of the work was done by Canadian troops, was to dismantle the dozens if not hundreds of checkpoints throughout the country. A couple of days later I was able to sail south from Tuzla almost without stopping until I reached Split on the Adriatic coast. Ten hours later I was back in Canada in time for Christmas feeling pretty good.

But that nightmare ride through the snow and checkpoints will always sit in my head like some foul little animal that somehow managed to get itself soaked in slivovitz and slowly rot

This article comes from The Disaster Tourist and is copyright by Rick Grant

A few years ago I was splitting a bottle of Dewar’s Scotch with one of the most senior drug control police officers in the Afghan government, (drinking is an activity more common than you would think in that Islamic nation,) when the conversation turned to torture.

There had just been a sensational case involving the return of a Kabuli from many months in Guantanamo Bay. He had been hauled off the streets of Kabul, tortured by Americans at their

Bagram airbase north of the city, flown to Cuba, subjected to who knows what abuse, and then returned with no charges having been laid, and no apologies. This happened before we learned the true horrors of torture inflicted as U-S Government policy and before the reek of its contamination forever rotted American prestige. But even then you couldn’t be in Afghanistan more than a day before you learned that torture is built into the very fabric of the culture.

On the very first day I was in the country I met a linguist working for the NATO military command trying to maintain peace in Kabul. He offered to give me a Dari phrasebook, Dari being an offshoot of Persian or Farsi and the language of the new Afghan government.

We went to get it at his office in a crumbling ruin of a three storey building in the middle of the NATO base downtown. It had to have dated from the earliest part of the 20th century and had probably never seen a new coat of paint. When we walked into the main room I could see long streaks of dark that had dripped or run down the walls from just above head height. There were also misshapen blobs of darkness on the stone floor.

He saw me looking. “This used to be an interrogation centre during the Soviet occupation.”

“You mean, that’s blood?”

He nodded.

This wasn’t my first sight of a torture chamber. On my second trip to Albania, during the Kosovo War, I’d met with a senior security official of the Albanian secret police. The meeting was held in an unheated, unpainted, and foul smelling room in the downtown Tirana secret police headquarters. Apart from the filthy stench of the room it was a typical Albanian government office. There was the padded chair for the official, two hard backed chairs for myself and my interpreter, a computer that was only one step above a lump of rock, a phone that didn’t connect to anything, and two large ringbolts on each end of the desk. On the floor, just where I had my feet, were two more ringbolts.

This explained why I hadn’t had a lot of help from my translator during the interview. He knew exactly where he was.

“Mr Rick. That bad place. Very bad things happen there.”

No kidding. The whole floor, it turned out was a series of, not to put too fine a point on it, torture chambers. It also explained the smell.

I told that story to my police friend over the scotch. He grunted knowingly. “Same thing here. Anybody arrested by the police will get knocked around. Even I do it. But the secret police, they are the real monsters.”

That’s when I learned about the made in hell pact between some seriously sick American security people and the Afghan secret police.

If the holding cells at Bagram airbase were too full of suspected terrorists, or the waiting time for a torture chamber was too long, the Americans would hand over whomever they wanted questioned to the Afghan Security people who were conveniently located in a four storey white building just across the street from the American Embassy.

Now the curious thing about these Afghan torturers, and I met one a couple of years later when I was with the UN, was that they were not very good at their job. Oh sure, they could rip out fingernails, clamp electrical cords to testicles, and do awful things with body orifices, but they had a terrible record of actually learning anything from their victims. My drunken drug trafficker hunter put it this way.

“They like what they do too much.”

And sadists, as we know well from the endless and ongoing research into the lack of effectiveness of torture make really crummy information gatherers.

As a job, torturing is about as good as being a tenured professor or carpet bagging politician, in other words it is a job for life.

The black leather coated pain merchants in the Kabul white building working with the Americans were the same ones who worked for the Taliban. They also worked for their predecessors the Soviets and probably all the way back to when the British Army ruled the place.

In Albania torturers had survived a certifiably insane dictator, the fall of communism, the bankruptcy of Albania when it got caught in a Make-Money-Now internet scam, and a succession of not very able governments.

So called advanced nations won’t have anything to do with torture. Even the United States government twists syntax, logic, decency, and common sense into uncommon and rather startling sexual positions in order to deny what goes on.

Canada and the United Kingdom face political scandals over whether their troops have willing handed over prisoners to the Afghan government knowing that they would be tortured. The government denials are no less farcical than the American denials.

Remember what I said about not having to be in the country a day to know what was going on.

The really odd thing about the torture culture as I saw it in Afghanistan, Albania/Kosovo, and to a lesser degree in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kenya, is that every professional intelligence officer will tell you that torture does not work, results in absolutely crap information, and weakens the justice of your cause.

But politicians really like it a lot.

This article comes from The Disaster Tourist and is copyright by Rick Grant

Northern Pakistan was hit by a 6.1 or possibly 6.4 earthquake this afternoon. The shaking was also felt throughout southern Afghanistan including Kabul.

There’s nothing unusual about this and indeed earthquakes are pretty common in the region.  They’re caused by the ongoing collision of the Indian subcontinent with the under belly of Asia.  It’s a collision that’s been going on for a few million years and the crumple zone is the where the Himalayas and Hindu Kush are, indeed they are the wreckage of the collision.

So much for the geology lesson. 

Today’s quake reminded me of yet another of the strange nights I spent in Kabul over my two long stays in the city.  There were a lot of strange nights but the one I’m thinking of was in early 2005.

I was living in the Tower at the Assa Guest House on Muslim Street.  It’s quite a nice place as these things go and even had a swimming pool but few ever used it.  At the time there was no chlorine and I don’t think the pumps worked anyway.  So every few days, at least once a week, the pool would be drained of the sick looking green water and refilled with fresh.  Since there was no heater for the pool either it was really like having our own ice fed mountain tarn to ourselves.  I only ever saw one person use it and that for only a few minutes until his core temperature started to plummet.

But it was nice.  There was a flower garden around it, some pet ducks, and a recently roofed patio at the main entrance to the guesthouse.

The roofing job had involved a week’s worth of welding by a couple of guys who didn’t bother too much with welding goggles.  I think that most of the steel structure for the roof came from nearby demolition projects because it all had a distinctly bent and twisted look to it.  The design called for an open grid of steel supports on top of which were placed large paving stones, about four feet by four feet.  The idea was that the second floor residents would be able to stroll out onto their own private patio overlooking the pool and garden.

And of course there were no permits or inspections or planning permission.  This was Kabul where you could do anything you liked and if anyone objected you could either exercise your armed guards to make your point or just pay them off.  This system is not unique to Kabul of course and has much to recommend itself.  Things get done quickly.  Perhaps not well or safely, but they get done which is more than I can say for where I live.

So, sometime in the early hours of  February 12  I was startled awake and instantly into reactive danger mode by heavy thumping at my door in the Tower.  (In war zones you learn to come awake, fully vibrating switched on alert awake, at the slightest thing out of the ordinary)

"Mister Rick, Mister Rick.  Hurry!  Is earthquake.  Big earthquake, quick come."

I hadn’t felt anything but I was not about to argue so I was into my clothes and out the door in seconds, fully aware of the fact that I lived in a building made out of cement mixed in what amounted to a mud puddle and put together by a couple of guys whose only idea about construction came from the house next door they were trying to copy.  Jericho needed trumpets, this place wouldn’t stand up to loud humming.

As I rushed down the stairs with the house manager I tried to get an idea of what was going on.  "How bad is it?  Has anybody been hurt?

"No, is coming.  Is coming soon. Very bad."

Not much was making sense but when someone is yelling fire you don’t start asking a bunch of questions, you just get out.

As I went through the door to the outside we were joined by an American mapping consultant who lived on the same floor as me.

"Do you know anything?" I said.

"No way man," he was very much still in his Vietnam years, "No way I felt anything."

"Please.  You stay here with the others." the house manager said.

The others were about half a dozen of the other expatriates living in the guesthouse and "here" was under the newly constructed patio roof.

"Did anyone feel it? my neighbor asked the others, most of whom at this hour of the morning where still drunk from the usual evening debauch or still deeply sleep lagged.  No one said anything.

"No.  It coming.  Coming from Pakistan.  Soon. Very bad." the house manager said.

This was really confusing us.  "What do you mean it’s coming?"

"Holy man on radio.  In Pakistan.  He said big earthquake coming.  Many many dead soon."

Someone had figured out a way to predict earthquakes?  I didn’t think so at all. 

Then we all started to hear the same thing at once, traffic, lots of car traffic on the other side of the compound walls.  At this hour of the night there shouldn’t be any traffic at all other than the ever roaming Taliban looking for Russian or Kazakh hookers on the next street over.  It sounded like midday, a constant rise and fall of badly adjusted engines and misused gear boxes punctuated by every kind of car and truck horn made in south Asia.

"What the hell is going on?"  No answer and we just looked at each other as if there was an answer in our faces.

The house manager kept on babbling about this giant earthquake that was going to come from Pakistan and "kill millions" and there could be no doubt about the truth of it because a cleric had said so on some Pakistani radio station.

It was a full blown panic fueled by mobile phone calls and texts from Peshawar and Jalalabad.

Panic is contagious and its presence nearby can ignite odd feelings in even the most rational and under control person.  I think we all felt the same dread while the roaring traffic streamed by as people fled the city and the staff of the guesthouse curled up at the side of the building like frightened dogs. 

For a split second I think we all felt the same way.

We stayed that way for perhaps a quarter of an hour, not speaking much at all, and all wondering whether this so called holy man did have something going after all.

And then my arrested development hippy neighbor raised his hand and pointed.  "Do you see how they supported those stone slabs?"

I looked and immediately felt a fright like I had tumbled off a mountain edge.  The blocks were resting their entire weight, their 200 pound weight each, on the very edges of the steel rails forming the roof structure.  You could see the tack welds, the temporary and very insubstantial spot welds, holding the things together.

"Oh jeez.  If there’s any kind of tremor that’s all coming down."

"And we’re under it"

But not for long.  We were out from under in fractions of a second.  The house staff didn’t move and wouldn’t listen.

So, we sat at the edge of the greening swimming pool in the February night and waited for the never to arrive earthquake.  Someone had some Pakistan made scotch which is really just rebottled fuel oil as far as I am concerned, although don’t get me wrong I drank it too, and we waited until without a word we just all gave up and went back to our rooms.

As is often the case in these kind of things, Los Angeles psychics predicting the end of the world, spoon benders claiming fraudulent powers, and dishonest journalists predicting this and that, the failure of the quake to arrive was put down to divine intervention and the fact that it didn’t happen was proof absolute that the original prediction had been true otherwise it wouldn’t have been headed off by the prayers of the faithful.

It made sense to me.  I guess.

Almost a year later when I left Kabul that shoddy jerry-built patio roof was still standing.  Anytime it rained the water would shed in torrential falls into the now glassed in patio and the staff would just shovel it outside and no one seemed to notice. 

The pool still went unused and you could pretty well tell what day of the week it was by the smell.  And for all I knew mad clerics were still delivering their views and predictions by radio and people were still reacting to them by building rumors higher and hotter like bonfires until they swept through everything.  Very much like the lunatic television and radio networks at work in North America today.

But a lot of people were very badly scared that night which is really too bad for a nation that’s had two generations of war and god knows how much still to come.

This article comes from The Disaster Tourist and is copyright by Rick Grant

I see that General McChrystal, the most senior military commander overseeing the NATO operations in Afghanistan, has had to shut down all drinking at his headquarters in Kabul.

According to his daily report of activities released by his staff he decided to ban all drinking by his troops because too many of them couldn’t do their jobs –  they were either drunk or too hung-over.

In imposing the ban General McChrystal has highlighted one of the dirty little secrets of the War in Afghanistan and it will be interesting to see how the troops react.

I’m not yet clear on whether the ban only extends to the seven bars at the Kabul HQ or to all bars at all bases, and there are a lot of them. Some bars are little bigger than a city bus shelter but others  resemble sprawling Oktoberfest beer tents imported from Germany.

But it is not just a problem of bars. There’s also the booze culture that runs through the various army contingents like, well like, beer.

Dozens of countries send troops to help NATO and the ISAF contingent but as far as I know only one, the United States, sends abstaining soldiers.  U-S soldiers are flat out forbidden to drink.  Others such as the Canadians limit consumption to two cans of beer a day, and then only under rather strict conditions of time and place.

For others there doesn’t seem to be any restriction on them at all.

But for everyone working in the downtown headquarters compound there is supposed to be a limit of two cans of beer a night and a complete ban on hard liquor.

I spent a long time in Afghanistan, working first as a communications advisor to NATO/ISAF headquarters and then as the head communications guy for the United Nations disarmament programme, disarming the self-styled warlords and their private armies. So everything I say here is based on personal experience.

Sane people might say that soldiers should never be allowed to drink, especially if they are in a war zone, have a weapon constantly at hand, (even in mess halls and showers,) and have easy access to stuff that can blow cities apart.

But those so-called sane people have no idea how hard an on-duty soldier works under the kind of severe restrictions not seen outside a penitentiary, through months of quite truly life threatening stress, and especially in Afghanistan through a climate that is one of the toughest on the planet.

As far as I am concerned they deserve a beer.

The problem however is that something went wrong with the ISAF operation right from the beginning and boozing became as much a part of military life at headquarters as making up rules, devising acronyms but only afterwards devising projects and programmes to match the acronym, and driving like lunatics just because they can get away with it.

When I first arrived at HQ in the summer of 2003 I was appalled, nay shocked, to discover that I was only going to be able to buy two beers a day at the camp’s main bar.  The heat, the dust, the frustration of working with a military bureaucracy, devised it seemed by some deranged provincial tyrant from one of the crazier “Stans”, and my liking for a drink or a bunch all added up to what looked to be a huge personal crisis.

But that first night we had four or five beer and learned very quickly that no one but the Canadians located at Camp Warehouse to the east adhered to the two beer rule.  At HQ, and I learned later at all the camps except of course for the poor bloody Americans who weren’t allowed to even smell the stuff, the two beer rule was only for show to satisfy the politicians and local media back home.

It’s not that everyone got to be falling down drunk.  No, I’m saying that only a few were falling down drunk, the rest were, well, tipsy a lot of the time. A lot of aspirin was sold at the PX’s or military shops on base.

At ISAF headquarters in Kabul, just down the street from the American Embassy and close to where the Afghan secret police practice their unmentionable arts on prisoners, Thursday night is the biggest drinking night of the week, as it is for all the international aid workers and so on elsewhere in the city. But unlike aid workers, soldiers in a combat area are pretty well expected to be ready to respond to armed attacks.

Come midnight at headquarters and about the only people sober enough to fight would be the soldiers on active guard duty at the gates and on the walls. Places such as Camp Warehouse out on the Jalalabad Road became nothing less than seething masses of drunken soldiers passed out in the dust or throwing up on each other.

Friday mornings echoed to the moans of the hung-over.

You might ask where all the beer came from?  Well like everything else it was flown in at immense cost on chartered cargo jets along with  more beer, wine, and hard liquor for the three main civilian PX’s in the city.

The three main ones when I was there were Blue, Supreme and Ciano’s.  Only diplomats, UN (non Afghan) workers and other relief workers were allowed to shop in them.  And so of course was the military although by rights they weren’t supposed to and were in fact forbidden to buy alcohol off base.

It was so common as to be beyond comment to see patrolling combat teams roll into the PX compounds with guns bristling, armored cars belching exhaust in dense clouds, command radios blaring.  In minutes the soldiers would load up their war wagons with scotch, rum, gin, wine, and of course wine.  More than once I saw soldiers struggling to get back into their vehicles because too much booze had been loaded inside.

Since no liquor taxes were paid to the Afghan government the cost of this stuff was remarkably cheap.  My regular trips to the PX’s for my own booze supplies typically yielded three bottles of scotch for the cost of one back in Canada.

Afghans were not allowed in these international stores but that was hardly a problem.  My drivers and my staff were not shy about asking me to buy alcohol for them and I was happy to oblige.  For those without that international connection there was no end of Afghan merchants dealing in alcohol, sometimes quite openly.  It was common to see stacks of canned Heineken beer prominently displayed by the side of the road wherever a merchant had set up shop.

I have no doubt that the alcohol ban will fail.  Those who need the alcohol will find their own private supplies and quiet places to drink it.  Others will find ways of visiting neighboring bases where there is no ban, and others will find excuses to attend some of the truly hedonistic drinking parties put on by relief workers most nights of the week.

This article comes from The Disaster Tourist and is copyright by Rick Grant

What value can there be to yet another article about Las Vegas and in particular the “Strip”?  Thousands of writers have brought their analytic tools to the Present Arms! position and marched along the Strip through the searing light that can dull lasers and the oxygen-less exhaust heat from Hell that roils in from the Nevada Desert.  Hundreds of Hollywood films, show tunes, probably even poems, have been written about the place and yet it is because of all that staring attention, the stare of a rabbit caught in a headlight, that the place is beyond description.

It took a couple of hours for me to realize that the Las Vegas Strip does not exist.  It is a place that is so far from existentialist reality it might as well be located in Narnia or Erewhon, or Middle Earth.  It is cloaked in so much deliberately fabricated myth and illusion that it exists as a hallucinogenic bubble perched just outside our normal time and space.  But the sheer crushing pressure of its images and myths, by the cloaks of expectations wrapped around its reputation, it has forced a warp in the universe and the only way to experience it is to leave the wheat fields of Kansas behind, to creep like a country mouse into its blaze, to surrender all self and even then you will never be sure that you experienced anything, that you may in fact have been fed the experience through a tube inserted in your spine as you float in a nutrient bath in the midst of the Matrix.

Those first couple of hours in Vegas (one must say Vegas and not Las Vegas if you want to be taken as a Strip insider) hit me like a replayed Deja Vu that simply won’t stop playing out.  Everywhere that I looked as we drove up the lower intestine of the Strip from McCarran Airport looked like a painted  backdrop propped up in a Potemkin Village at the heart of a child’s imaginary country.  I was detached from my sense of place, my Cartesian locked in and geo-coordinated place in the universe.  I was nowhere and everywhere.

Now, had I been feeling this after burrowing deep into the teachings of the Buddha and meditating on the probable and not so probable existence of the Quark I might have been deeply pleased to shuck off the ego.  But this was no eight fold way, this was the Las Vegas Strip and philosophical meaning here had never progressed from “Let it ride!” and “Come on Baby!” so the very concept of transcendence on the Strip could only be thought of as an obscenity.

But that’s just another label that doesn’t work. 

Labels are supposed to be just that for all of us — labels.  They are signposts of meaning to guide us through the chaos of a reality that in itself can have no meaning.

Vegas is so outside reality, so at the edge of acceptability, so divorced from anything that could ever be considered normal that the rituals and processionals of New Guinea tribesmen, Papal aristocrats, and the Shamans of the High Arctic are clean, simple, honest purveyors of human guidance by comparison.

Because the place has been so much a part of our cultural life through the entertainment media, and yes even books, no one can come to it new and fresh the way one can breast a ridgeline in the Hundu Kush and gasp at the wonder of a valley that could only be Shangri La, or sail into the Coral Sea to watch the flying fishes play, and know the wonder of it all.  There can be no wonder in Las Vegas because we have all seen and heard it all before at many removes.  We have been there before – not quite like a past life but perhaps more like a made up life to be.

Still, there were some startling sights and experiences during the four night and five days I spent there.

In no particular order (How can there be order to absurdity?)

The numbers, the swarms, the seething masses of people.  Like screaming gulls at a garbage dump, and about as smelly, they drifted and jostled in fact waves of walking protoplasm.  They waddled and chirped and talked and smoked and moaned and complained and drifted about like zombies in search of fresh eating brains.  It was like the Strip was one over heated and poorly ventilated Petri dish full of slightly damaged RNA molecules churning out malformed DNA to become slightly putrescent mounds of meat that met none of the Darwinian principles of species survivability.

In a nation where today even the Puritan Fathers would be castigated on national television for immoral behavior, where Martin Luther would be sent to Guantanamo Bay as a terrorist, where Torquemada’s torturers would be elected to high office, where the slightest imagined moral impropriety can ruin a politician’s life, the Las Vegas Strip stands tall with a ramrod backbone of hypocrisy. 

Where else can you be pestered for blocks by strung out drug addicts trying to press the calling cards of whores on you, where large trucks cruise up and down past the thousands of slack jawed tourists bearing huge signs advertising “Girls in Your Room in 20 Minutes!”.  Where the very existence of the Strip is designed to claw as much money out of a person’s life using every vice it can get away with, chief of which is gambling of a magnitude that even the most rapacious of governments would be ashamed at the amounts they could collect.

And then there is what the Strip does to the Poor Bloody Planet.  Christ –  people should be lined up in the front of the Bellagio fountains and shot for what they have been doing to the environment.

In a state where the dwindling supply of fresh water is now a major political player, where Lake Mead, the main source of water for all the surrounding states is draining faster than an alcoholics last bottle, we have a place that goes out of its way to waste water.

The Bellagio fountains spew their incredible displays more than two hundred feet into air off and on for twelve hours a day. 

Do you know how much of that sprayed water evaporates in the more than one hundred degree heat?  I don’t either but I will bet you that entire towns could live of that water every day.

Even more of the stuff gets spewed into the face of what has to be an even more chagrined earth god everyday from miles of tubing and nozzles lining stalls, shops, casinos hotels, and vacant lots.  The fine mist coming  from these devices is supposed to cool the heated and fretted brows of the bovine herds of tourists.  Trouble is that most days it is too hot and the mist has long evaporated before it gets anywhere near anybody.

And as bad as any of that is it doesn’t come close to the criminal, criminally insane, practice of cooling the outside.  As daft and cracked as it may seem it is common for sidewalk restaurants, patios and the entrances to casinos and hotels to be cooled by giant air conditioning vents. 

Think about it, think of all the energy it takes to generate the power, to cool the air, to pump the air, and then what . . .  throw it outside into the desert heat?  Does this make any sense?  Of course not.

It can only be put down to a genetically programmed psychopathy among those responsible.  It is as incomprehensible as ritual serial killing, cannibalism, infanticide, and being very very ignorant.

The planet does not have a chance, not one, not even a blind throw chance on double zero at a roulette table.

This article comes from The Disaster Tourist and is copyright by Rick Grant

I’m often asked if I worry about getting shot when working in some of the places I go to.

Not really.  I mean, it is something I am always aware of and something I try to be prepared for, but the possibility of getting shot is not nearly the nightmare that people assume it is.

No, the thing I am most afraid of, other than yet another severe digestive upset due to bad water, is stepping on a land mine. That would be followed in close order by being trapped in a minefield. Just being in a country where there are minefields is also bad.

Of all the instruments of war mines have got to be the most obscene, if obscenity can be said to have a scale. Mines are obscene because they kill and maim without any human direction.

While an AK 47 or an F 18 can murder with the best of weapons they still have to be pointed by a human mind. Whether a sane human mind is behind them or not is not an issue, the point is that some thinking, even on a barbaric level is necessary for all other weapons of war to operate.

A landmine though just sulks in the dirt and mud waiting for anything to come along, a goat, a truck, a six year old kid, a general, it really doesn’t matter what.  Its a type of killing that is so detached that it truly is an inhumane way of death.

My first experience with the things was during the civil war in Somalia. So many American and Soviet manufactured mines had been laid in the country that you truly were an idiot to go off wandering through the bush.

Along the border with Northern Somalia and Ethiopia the deposed regime in Mogadishu had laid some million mines in the sand and bush between the two countries. When the civil war hit Hargeisa the refugees only had one direction to flee, to the west and Ethiopia and through the unmarked mine fields.

So many refugees were killed and maimed crossing the minefields that the survivors I met in the Kebrebeyeh Refugee Camp in Ethiopia told tales of following in the tracks of the dead and staying as close as possible to the explosion sites where people had been blown apart.  By deliberately staying to tracks where people had died they were assured of a safer passage to Ethiopia.

In the city of Mostar Bosnia I spent a fascinating if horrific day with a Danish mine removal expert. I learned that the warring sides during the disintegration of Yugoslavia had used some 14 types of mines in the millions.

Some were absolutely innocuous to people because they could only be set off by the weight of a tank, but others were deliberately designed to kill people.

There was one designed to look like a vacuum or Thermos bottle, a type that looked like a child’s toy and deliberately so in order to kill kids, and a type that looked for all the world like a hockey puck; three inches in diameter,black and and about an inch think.

They floated, and the savage killing armies of the Former Yugoslavia would do things like fill a five tonne dump truck with the things and dump them en masse into the rivers so they would be carried downstream to the children of their enemies.

In Tuzla I came across a farmer’s field very close to the town’s center. The whole thing was ringed by scrap panels ripped from shot up vehicles, a metallic fence so bizarre it would pass as post modern art.  But when you looked closely at the fence you could see wires strung out to grenades and land mines. I was told that the farmer had also seeded his fields with anti personnel mines in order to stop people stealing his crops.

In Afghanistan I never walked anywhere unless I was on concrete or I had received iron clad assurances from a United Nations demining expert that the area was clear.  The country is filthy with land mines and like the farmer in Tuzla Afghan farmers, especially the ones with poppy crops, dig them up to plant in their own fields.

I was at the Kabul Airport the day that passengers on Ariana Airlines, the state airline, had a grossly delayed arrival.

The land around and within the Kabul Airport has to be one of the most heavily mined areas in the world.  Even now after years of constant United Nations demining operations.

It had been mined first by the Soviet backed regime that took control of the country after the Soviets made the disastrous mistake of invading the country. When the mujaheddin warlords, one after another, captured the airport they added mines.  Then with the coming of the Taliban they mined it, and mined it some more.  There were so many that in some places they formed layers like sedimentary rock, going down several feet.

Even today when you look out over the taxiways and the main runway you can see hundreds of different colored flags marking out the known mines.

Now, the very first rule to follow if you find yourself in a minefield is Stop Moving, not as much as a centimeter. Wait for rescue. No matter how long it takes.

That Wednesday afternoon when the Ariana flight from, I believe it was Herat, arrived and accidentally, and very slowly, ran its nosewheel off the concrete taxiway and over about 20 feet of dirt.  You could hear the deep sucking sound of people throughout the airport gasping a lung of tense air and waiting for the explosion.

It didn’t happen but it took an army of blue suited mine clearance technicians moving with agonized slowness over the area to clear a safe path for the airline back to the concrete. I  didn’t stay for the end but when I left at sunset about seven that night the aircraft still hadn’t moved.  I heard later that after everyone had been safely removed from the aircraft it took the cleaners a very long time to return it to service. It had taken off from Herat with full toilets because there had been no way to empty them there.  After some eight hours of enforced captivity on top of a minefield the passengers ended up turning the cabin into a cesspool.

So, what do you do if you find yourself in a minefield?

You know the first rule, Do Not Move . Just sit very still and wait for rescue.

If you are in a vehicle and you can clearly see the wheel marks by which you got into trouble you can gamble your way to safety. Climb on top of the vehicle without touching the ground (and God help you if you drop anything out of your pockets as you do so) and climb down the rear of the vehicle and carefully walk, one pace at a time, along the dead center of the tracks.

But keep in mind that some mines are designed to detonate the second time that their trigger is depressed.

Personally I would wait until I was almost dead from hunger and thirst before trying that trick.

That also goes for amateur attempts to clear your own way out by probing the ground slowly and carefully with a long knife or thin piece of steel.

There is a particular technique for making this work but I’m not going to describe it because it is one of those craft type life skills that must be taught to you in person and practiced assiduously.

It’s not fear of lawsuits that prevents me from telling you how to do it because unless you are most unfortunate and you survive horribly maimed, the dead can’t sue. I just don’t want to be responsible for your death.

That said, I will amend what I just said in this way. It would give me great satisfaction to watch any of the people who designed land mines, or those responsible for planning the layout of minefields, to try to walk their way out of a minefield while wearing blindfolds and lead weighted boots.

This article comes from The Disaster Tourist and is copyright by Rick Grant