In the 1970s and 1980s, Texaco extracted more than a billion barrels of oil from the Ecuadorean rainforest but spilled an estimated 400,000. In 1993, locals filed a class action against the company. That case is —it’s a legal version of the Amazon, serpentine and vast, with the company still fighting an Ecuadoran judge’s record-setting $19 billion verdict—and is the subject of Paul M. Barrett’s serious but uneven book (Crown, $26).

Barrett, a senior writer at and author of the bestselling book , focuses on the activist lawyer, , who turned the case into a no-holds-barred crusade against Chevron, which acquired Texaco in 2001. Donziger is an abrasive attorney (I wrote about him for şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř in 2007), and Barrett exhaustively describes his errors: coaching experts and cajoling judges and carrying on like a guerrilla with a law degree. Last March, that Donziger had used coercion and bribery in Ecuador, which would keep him from profiting from the Ecuadorean case if and when it’s resolved. (Donziger is appealing the decision.)

As a protagonist, Donziger is Shakespearean in his tragic dimensions and a natural magnet for a writer’s pen. But the odd thing about Barrett’s book is that Donziger is its nearly exclusive target. Barrett describes him as behaving like a “mob boss” with an ego on “an Olympian scale.” That may be true, but some of Barrett’s critiques are petty. Donziger is chided for being married to a woman who works for a glossy-magazine publisher and for living in a two-bedroom Manhattan apartment with “high-end appliances” while his clients in Ecuador live in shacks. But if that’s hypocrisy, every public-interest lawyer with an espresso machine or a successful spouse is a scoundrel.

Barrett does dip into Chevron’s chicanery—the firm to follow Donziger and tried to persuade a freelance journalist to collect information about his Ecuadoran clients on a phony reporting trip—but the oil company gets far less scrutiny than its adversary. This seems lopsided, because the worst culprit in this case isn’t a quixotic lawyer who misplayed the bad hand dealt to him but the company that almost everyone agrees acted in a reprehensible way for decades. Barrett traveled to Ecuador, as I did, saw the pits of years-old oil that still dot the landscape, and heard the stories of that their survivors blame on oil. Even he concluded that the region is “no place I’d want to live.” But Barrett moves on too quickly from the environmental crime scene. Much can be said about Donziger, but despite his many flaws, he did not spill a drop of oil in the Amazon.

The post A Jungle Eco-Battle for Your Reading List appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

THE FRONT FOR THE DEFENSE OF THE AMAZON, like any progressive group whose name includes front and defense, is a no-frills outfit with ample supplies of devotion and very little clout. Its opponents are, in size and power, what elephants are to gnats. They include Chevron Corporation, the United States government, the armed forces of Ecuador, and the insatiable global demand for oil. (This is a partial list.)

Ecuador oil slick

Ecuador Map

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The Frente, as it's known, is based in Lago Agrio, a gritty oil town of 35,000 in northeastern Ecuador's humid, jungly Oriente region, in a second-floor warren outfitted with furniture the Salvation Army might reject. As a gnat, the Frente measures success in humble terms René Descartes would understand: We survive, therefore we are. But something funny is happening on the way to the glorious defeats that would seem to be its destiny. The group has a fighting chance of winning a landmark environmental-damage lawsuit against Chevron, one that could cost the conglomerate an estimated $6 billion in cleanup expenses. The suit was brought by 48 Oriente inhabitants on behalf of 30,000 fellow residents of the oil-rich region—members of the Cofán, Secoya, and other tribes, as well as settlers who arrived in recent decades. The plaintiffs allege that, between 1964 and 1992, Texaco (which merged with Chevron in 2001) dumped 18 billion gallons of toxic wastewater into an area the size of Rhode Island—a brew that allegedly included 18 million gallons of oil, nearly twice the amount spilled by the Exxon Valdez in 1989.

According to the suit, Aguinda v. ChevronTexaco (the first plaintiff listed is Maria Aguinda, a Quechua Indian), the pollution has poisoned the earth, rivers, and air, causing miscarriages, birth defects, and cancer rates three times the national average. Cows and chickens have reportedly dropped dead; fish have gone belly up. Mothers and children walking on the oil-soaked dirt roads, the plaintiffs say, have to wash their feet in gasoline just to remove the gunk.

This isn't the first time a multinational has been accused of egregious misconduct in the Third World, but it is the first time a class-action-style environmental lawsuit this large has gone so far. Originally filed in a New York federal district court in 1993, the suit went through nearly a decade of pre-trial maneuverings that came to a halt in 2002, when a federal appeals court ruled that it had to be heard in Ecuador rather than the U.S.

At first, that looked like the end. Nobody thought Ecuador would hear the case; trials this complicated had never been held there, and the government in Quito was still relatively friendly to U.S. business interests. But in Ecuador, as in many developing countries in Latin America, such governments have been replaced by a new generation of left-leaning nationalist regimes. With popular sentiment shifting, proceedings opened in Lago Agrio's superior court in October 2003, less than six months after the suit was filed. Now, finally, resolution is in sight. The verdict—which will be decided by a single judge rather than a jury—is expected sometime next year.

On a muggy morning in October 2005 in the Frente's ramshackle offices, one big reason for the group's improbable success was standing in front of me. The chief American legal adviser in the case, Steven Donziger, was turning the office into a political stage by doing what he does best—plotting, joking, shouting, defaming, and, in general, behaving like Don Quixote with a Harvard law degree. At 45, Donziger is an imposing figure, with a six-foot-four physique and a face like George Clooney crossed with an Easter Island head. He was fulminating against Chevron for blocking a judicial inspection of the Guanta processing station, outside Lago Agrio, one of 122 allegedly toxic sites originally slated to be inspected in the case.

Under Ecuadorean law, the judge personally investigates evidence. In this dispute, that means making dozens of field inspections, which entail a traveling circus of lawyers, security guards, witnesses, journalists, and separate teams of experts for the judge, plaintiffs, and defendant—all jawing and sample-taking outdoors in whatever weather conditions prevail. The night before the Guanta inspection, Judge Efraín Novillo Guzmán had declared a postponement after Chevron's representatives said they'd been warned of potential violence by locals angry about the pollution. The delay seemed like a good idea for the oil company, in part because the Frente had lured a busload of Ecuadorean journalists out to Lago Agrio, a six-hour drive from Quito over narrow mountain roads. With no inspection, there would be nothing to write about.

But Donziger is savvy enough to spin a sunny day into a hurricane. He worked the phones in nonstop interviews, accusing Chevron's lawyers of everything from cowardice to genocide. When he went live with Paco Velasco—Ecuador's most popular radio talk-show host and, like Donziger, a fountain of addictive outrage—it was a meeting of like-minded vocal cords.

“Texaco doesn't respect the life of Ecuadoreans!” Donziger fumed in gringo-accented Spanish. “They are against the people. They are lying. People have died and people will continue dying because of the pollution!”Donziger was on a roll and he knew it. When the interview ended, he turned to an Ecuadorean activist and said, “That was good, wasn't it?”

In the next room, several young Ecuadoreans were making posters:TEXACO IS COWARDLY AND RACIST! TEXACO IS AFRAID! Down the hall, plans got under way for a day of protest; several dozen indigenous women, looking sullen but photogenic, would wave the posters in front of city hall. Meanwhile, Donziger was firing up the crew of journalists for a gonzo tour of the Guanta site, official inspection be damned.I wouldn't have thought it possible to pity a multinational oil conglomerate that has gotten its way worldwide since 1911, one that made $14 billion in profits in 2006 alone. But watching Donziger stir things up, I almost felt sorry for Chevron.

IT DOESN'T TAKE LONG TO REACH the thin air of the Andes from Quito, because you are already in the thin air of the Andes. Ecuador's capital is more than 9,000 feet above sea level, and if you drive east, toward Papallacta Pass, you enter a series of valleys whose stark grandeur makes you feel like you're inside an Ansel Adams photograph, albeit one that features the occasional llama.

Eventually, the road descends in ill-mannered serpentines toward SucumbĂ­os province, its capital of Lago Agrio, and the Amazon basin. As the terrain flattens, the scenery changes and the Andean cloudforest morphs into a steamy infection of stores, cattle, farms, and people. Curving along the highway is a thick pipeline filled with crude oil. It's used as an elevated walkway by children and adults who don't want to get stuck in the black mud below. They walk, literally and magically, on a path of oil.

This is the Trans-Ecuadorean Pipeline System, known by its Spanish initials, SOTE. More than 300 miles long, SOTE was built in the early 1970s; in 2004 it gained a twin, the Heavy Crude Pipeline (OCP), which doubled the country's capacity to transport oil over the Andes to the Pacific port of Esmeraldas, and from there to the United States. Ecuador now produces nearly 500,000 barrels a day. Every 24 hours, 300,000 of those are shipped to El Norte, making it Latin America's third-largest oil supplier to the U.S., behind Mexico and Venezuela.

Feeding this aorta is a web of smaller pipelines spread over the humid flatlands. The feeder pipes aren't buried or routed away from roads and people, as they would be in a wealthier nation. They rest on rickety pylons one or two feet high and just a few feet, or sometimes inches, from the road. If you swerve into one to avoid a pothole or lose control of your vehicle because you are drunk, you will create an oil spill. It happens all the time.

Thirty-five years ago, none of this existed. The road from Quito didn't extend beyond the Andes, and because there was no road, the 20th century hadn't penetrated the Oriente. It was a tangled expanse of jungle inhabited by indigenous Indians—Cofán, Huaorani, Secoya, Siona, and Quechua—numbering up to 20,000 or so at most. The territory was largely left alone until Texaco was granted the Oriente concession in 1964 and found oil in 1967.

What happened next is an old story. To extract and ship the dark product, hundreds of miles of roads were built, along with hundreds of wells, processing stations, and waste pits. A Wild West–style boomtown sprung up in the 1970s, replete with bars, prostitutes, and fistfights. Officially called Nueva Loja, the town quickly became known by its nickname, Lago Agrio—Spanish for “Sour Lake,” the name of the Texas town where Texaco was founded in the early 1900s. Settlers poured in. To prevent neighboring Colombia from snatching the sparsely populated Oriente and to relieve overpopulation elsewhere in Ecuador, the government offered free land to anyone who'd clear the thick jungle and start farming. Their numbers already decimated over the centuries by Western diseases such as smallpox, the Cofán and other tribes were pushed farther into the disappearing jungle. Today, perhaps 1,000 Cofán remain.

On paper at least, Ecuador's government was the controlling authority in this enterprise. Texaco entered a joint-venture accord with a newly created state company called CEPE (now known as Petroecuador) to co-manage the extraction. But the Ecuadoreans had little expertise in oil drilling. When crude began to flow, the country's oil industry, steered by Texaco, all but regulated itself.

Texaco took out 1.5 billion barrels over a 20-year span, bringing the company profits that nobody seems to agree on. The San Francisco-based environmental group Amazon Watch, which works with the Frente to publicize the damage in the Oriente, claims Texaco netted more than $30 billion in profits. Chevron insists that the joint venture grossed $25 billion but that only $490 million went to the American company after royalties and taxes. Whatever the numbers, Ecuador's national government embarked on an unchecked spending spree that far exceeded its revenues. By the end of the 1990s, the country was saddled with $16 billion in debt; about 70 percent of Ecuadorean children still live below the poverty line, according to UNICEF.

The long regulatory leash didn't work out so well. To industry critics, Ecuador is Exhibit A of what happens when an oil company operates unfettered in a remote corner of the world. During oil extraction, water is often pumped deep into underground reservoirs to force out the crude, and when it comes up, so does “formation water”—a cocktail of leftover oil, metals, and water that can include benzene, chromium-6, and mercury. The plaintiffs charge that, instead of reinjecting this wastewater deep underground or removing the contaminants—standard practices now, and often done back then as well—Texaco dumped it into tributaries of the Amazon and hundreds of unlined pits. Without naming specific sources, the suit alleges that “close to 83 percent of the population has suffered diseases attributable to contamination… the more affected population is that of children under 14 years of age.”

To buttress the suit's accusations, Donziger and others point to a number of studies, beginning with Amazon Crude, a 1991 environmental overview compiled by City University of New York law professor Judith Kimerling and published by the Natural Resources Defense Council; and the 1999 “Yana Curi” (“Black Gold”) report, conducted by two Spanish medical researchers in cooperation with the Department of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene at the University of London. That study focused on the town of San Carlos, a hub of Oriente drilling activity, finding 2.3 times more cancers in men than the average in Quito, along with lymphoma rates in women that were 6.7 times higher than those in Quito. But San Carlos has a population of only 1,000, according to the study; that's just a small sample of the Oriente's 300,000 estimated residents.

Though there's a shortage of hard data, journalists regularly emerge from the Oriente with horror stories about sick people and livestock, and about polluted land, swamps, and rivers. In 2003, the Frente hired an American engineering consultant named David Russell to study the potential cost of a thorough cleanup. His Georgia-based firm, Global Environmental Operations, estimated a final price tag of $6 billion, a figure that Chevron disputes. Company spokesman Chris Gidez—a public-relations expert at Hill & Knowlton—calls this number “a wild claim.” Even Donziger is speculating when he says it could cost as much as $10 billion—or far less. The truth is, nobody knows for sure.

FOR DONZIGER, THE MORE PUBLICITY the better, in both Ecuador and the U.S.; he does his best to arrange a good show. For the Guanta inspection, in addition to the Quito journalists, he'd brought in a separate busload of photo-ready Cofán Indians, all of them wearing colorful native frocks and the unhappy frowns of the dispossessed.

Our first stop was town hall, an ugly, four-story, glass-skinned structure. The judge's chambers were on the top floor, inside a small, book-lined room never intended to be filled with lawyers, reporters, TV cameras, students, and Indians. Judge Novillo, a soft-spoken man who looks like he's on the tired side of his fifties, reacted calmly to the invasion. The latest book by Gabriel García Márquez sat on his desk, and he got a real-life dose of magical realism when the mob barreled into his office, accusing him of postponing the inspection at the behest of a foreign company.

“Texaco organized this!” shouted a law student from Quito who wore a bandanna around his neck in the imagined style of Che Guevara. His class was on a field trip with their professor, Alejandro Ponce VĂ­llacis, a 38-year-old lawyer who is one of the case's most prominent faces in Ecuador.

“This order is from state security,” Novillo replied, flashing an official-looking piece of paper.

“Let us see it,” Ponce demanded.

“I cannot show it,” Novillo said.

Howls of outrage filled the chamber. Giving ground, Novillo began reading the order, which he said had come from the local special-forces base, Rayo-24 (“Lightning-24”).

“'Military intelligence fears there could be a hostile situation,'” he read, but Ponce cut him off.

“The people have a right to know!” he shouted.

“You are not showing it!” the law student added.

The judge flashed the letter again, a bit longer this time. Not good enough. “This is a manipulation from Texaco!” someone shouted.”We have been hurt by the pollution,” a short Indian woman wailed.

I heard a baby cry. With all the bodies packed into the room, the humidity reached 1,000 percent. For the judge, there was no escape. He was being forced into a sort of data striptease, with information revealed piece by piece to the panting crowd. Finally, he held out the letter for everyone to read.

Donziger is not a member of the bar in Ecuador. With the judge, as in court proceedings, he let his Ecuadorean colleagues do the talking: Pablo Fajardo Mendoza, a ferocious 32-year-old who got his degree from an extension school and has emerged as the case's lead courtroom litigator; and Professor Ponce, whose father once defended Chevron. The Frente's legal coordinator, 44-year-old Luis Yanza, plays a key role outside the courtroom, and, like the rest of his team, he's patient. He laughed a little too hysterically when I asked if he'd ever thought the case would last more than a decade.

After the face-off with Novillo, the buses of Indians and lawyers and students and journalists rolled up to the army base on the outskirts of Lago Agrio. We stood outside the gate in a soaking drizzle, armed with cheap umbrellas. The special-forces commander, Lieutenant Colonel Francisco Narvaez, soon emerged, wearing fatigues and a burgundy beret.

“I do not know about the existence of the letter,” he told the crowd. His statement met with disbelief; everyone had seen that the order was signed by Narvaez's second in command.

“I am going to investigate it, and when I find the answer I will meet with you and tell you what is going on,” he said.

Donziger, Ponce, and Fajardo decided to try something new. “The Texaco staff stays here,” Donziger said to Narvaez. “There is an agreement.” This was cast as an accusation.

“There might be,” the lieutenant colonel responded uneasily.

Donziger had known for months that Chevron had built a villa at the base and agreed to give it to the military once the case ended. He hadn't publicly opposed the deal—Chevron is not popular in Lago Agrio, and its lawyers would be safer on the base. But with a dozen soggy, news-hungry journalists recording the moment, the Frente's lawyers suspected the time was right to accuse the military of colluding with gringos.It turned out they were correct. The accusation made headlines, and a few weeks later the defense ministry canceled all military contracts with oil firms and ordered Chevron off the base.

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THOUGH THE ORIENTE is clearly a disaster area, the scientific data is far from cut and dried, and Chevron denies almost every allegation that fell into its lap after its merger with Texaco.

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In Quito, I interviewed Rodrigo Perez, the Chevron subsidiary's chief legal adviser in Ecuador. Perez began working for Texaco in 1969, when he was a young man; he's 69 now, with the comforting manner of a family doctor. The case has taken its toll. “I am tired,” Perez confessed during my 2005 visit. “I would love to go to the beach for a month or two and write.”

But the attacks have been relentless, and Perez wearily outlined Texaco's position, as he's done for years. Any damage caused by the company was not nearly as severe as the suit charges, he said. Even so, dumping wastewater was “common practice” in the bygone days of oil extraction, which means Texaco wasn't doing anything out of the ordinary. “If you filter it first,” Perez said, “in 200 meters you don't have any way of knowing the water was dumped, because those are big rivers.” Poverty and the continuing operations of state-owned Petroecuador—a notorious polluter responsible for 117 spills in the first half of 2006 alone—are the real source of pollution and disease, the company insists. And the patchwork of medical studies don't prove higher incidences of disease that can be traced, absolutely, to Texaco's activities.

To get a firsthand look, I visited San Carlos and spoke with Oscar Ojeda, a doctor at the clinic there. He said the village has recorded what seems like an inordinate number of cancer cases, including leukemia, and he believes oil pollution is the cause. Throughout San Carlos, I smelled petroleum in the air, and Ojeda said he would never drink the water or swim in the rivers, as most local people continue to do. But even if a link could be proved between the village's cancer rate and pollution, the legal and scientific question remains: Were the cancers caused by Texaco before 1992, or by Petroecuador in the years since?

Chevron has a second line of defense: In the mid-1990s, Texaco paid $40 million to remediate some sites in the Oriente; in keeping with the roughly 30-70 management split between the companies, Petroecuador would be responsible for remediating the others (which it hasn't done). In return, in 1998, Ecuador's government indemnified Texaco from further claims.

Donziger describes this cleanup as a fraud, alleging, for example, that Texaco merely poured dirt over waste pits rather than removing the waste and subsoil. In his always-turn-it-up-a-notch style, he helped persuade the Ecuadorean government to open an investigation into the remediation, adding new fire to a separate case. In a New York federal court, Chevron is seeking assurances from the Ecuadorean government, stemming from the indemnification, that Petroecuador will pay any damages awarded in Lago Agrio. That trial is scheduled to begin in March.

Though it stretches the imagination to think of Chevron as an innocent party, the company is clearly not the only possible culprit. Texaco operated most of the wells in the Oriente until 1992, but other American companies were present, such as Occidental Petroleum and Maxus Energy, though their operations were generally regarded as cleaner than Texaco's. Pollution has not ceased since Texaco departed, thanks to the negligence of Petroecuador and a government in Quito that doesn't fully enforce its own regulations. Furthermore, oil pollution isn't the sole problem. Today, deforestation in the Oriente is so extensive that I could barely imagine, as I drove around, that the region was untouched rainforest only a few decades ago. Vast environmental crimes have certainly occurred, but who's to blame? Chevron suggests looking elsewhere.

“Despite Petroecuador's clear acknowledgement of responsibility and the substantial evidence of the company's poor environmental record,” Chris Gidez wrote me in an e-mail, “plaintiff's attorneys continue to solely target= Chevron not because it is the proper target=, but because it is the most convenient one and has the deepest pockets.”

Justice is rarely blind in Ecuador. Until recently, verdicts would never have favored the little guy with a grudge against well-connected gringos. But the nation's newly elected president, Rafael Correa, joins Venezuela's Hugo Chávez and other ideological soul mates in Bolivia, Nicaragua, Brazil, Argentina, Peru, and Chile. In Venezuela, Chávez has forced foreign oil companies to rewrite their joint-venture contracts, while Bolivia has just nationalized its oil-and-gas industry. In Ecuador, even before Correa was elected, the government imposed a windfall tax on foreign oil companies and terminated Occidental Petroleum's lucrative exploration contract.

Most Ecuadoreans never visit the Oriente or Lago Agrio, which is regarded as a kind of lawless Love Canal. But frequent coverage in Quito's newspapers has generated national interest in the case. An adviser for Chevron—who tracks public opinion in Ecuador and who asked to remain anonymous—told me that if the judge issues a verdict against the company, he'll be treated as a hero. This adviser was exaggerating, but only somewhat, when he added that any judge ruling for Chevron would be “carried out on his back”—in a coffin.

RABBLE ROUSING IS A VINTAGE Donziger tactic. He grew up in Jacksonville, Florida, his father a conservative businessman, his mother a teacher active in farm workers' rights. Not surprisingly, the son combines no-nonsense efficiency with the zeal of an agitator.

After graduating from Washington, D.C.'s American University in 1983, Donziger began his adult life as a freelance journalist in Nicaragua, covering the decade-long war between the Sandinista government and the U.S.-backed contras. He returned to America in 1987 and enrolled in Harvard Law School, where he participated in sit-ins against university policies he deemed insufficiently progressive. After graduation, he worked for two years as a public defender in D.C. and edited a 1996 book of essays, The Real War on Crime, that outlined inequities in the criminal-justice system. Because there is no lost cause he will not embrace, Donziger wrote a report on voter disenfranchisement after Al Gore came up short in the 2000 election.

Since 1993, Donziger has been a sole practitioner, spending much of his time on the Chevron case. He heard about it through a Harvard classmate named John Bonifaz. John's father, Cristóbal Bonifaz, is an Amherst, Massachusetts, public-interest lawyer and native Ecuadorean whose grandfather was president of the country in the 1930s. Neither Bonifaz has shied away from grand quests—on behalf of several soldiers, military families, and U.S. congressmen, the pair sued President George W. Bush in 2003 for waging war in Iraq without a congressional declaration. But Cristóbal Bonifaz didn't have the financing to take on an international case this big.

He enlisted the Philadelphia law firm of Kohn, Swift & Graf, which specializes in class-action suits brought under the Alien Torts Claims Act, a 1789 piracy law that was dusted off in the late 1970s as a way to sue U.S. individuals and companies for human-rights violations in foreign countries. According to a recent tally by Business Ethics magazine, 36 ATCA cases have been filed against corporations in the past 13 years, including a suit against ExxonMobil Corporation for abuses by Indonesian military forces protecting the company's facilities there. In 2004, in one of the most prominent of these cases, Unocal—which itself has since been bought by Chevron—agreed to settle a suit in which it was accused of responsibility for human-rights abuses, including rape and murder, committed by Burmese troops guarding a pipeline project.

Aguinda v. Texaco, as the suit was then called, seemed like a ludicrous mission. In the early 1990s, multi-billion-dollar lawsuits for environmental damage in the Third World were extremely rare. But more and more, the same fiber-optic cables that allow call centers in Bangalore to oversee flower deliveries in Boston have allowed lawyers like Donziger and environmental organizations like Amazon Watch to link up with citizens' movements in developing countries. What happens in Ecuador no longer stays in Ecuador, especially if you have access to a modem and a bullhorn. And while Donziger and the other attorneys stand to make a lot of money if they win—class-action lawyers typically take a third of any damages—Donziger says his team would likely take a much smaller percentage. He calls the case “hybrid pro bono”; when they signed on, a favorable verdict seemed unlikely, bordering on impossible.

Since 2003, Donziger has shuttled between his wife and child in New York and his work in Ecuador, where he's on a first-name basis with the staffs of hotels that corporate visitors might recoil from. Donziger gets by on an annual stipend from Kohn, Swift & Graf and by doing part-time criminal-defense work, but his budget is limited. He won't disclose the case's costs, nor will Chevron, but Donziger clearly doesn't have a blank check. Because of unpaid bills, he's no longer welcome at Lago Agrio's nicest hotel, where rooms go for $50 a night.

Donziger doesn't give up easily; more than once I interrupted him mid-discourse because I didn't have enough time or patience to hear all he wanted to say. In a one-on-one or a ten-on-one debate, he'd be a good bet to win. But even a legal marathoner can't outlast a Fortune 500 corporation willing to litigate until its accusers run out of money, or appeal until oil is found on Mars. ExxonMobil, for instance, is still appealing a $4.5 billion penalty handed down in 1994 for the Valdez disaster. In December, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco reduced the award by $2 billion.

Thus Donziger's attachment to guerrilla PR. For the plaintiffs and their lawyers, victory means not just a verdict against Chevron but a payment by Chevron—and those are vastly different things. Donziger wants to keep the public pressure on, to make the company so miserable that it throws in the towel and settles.

“This case has to be won both in and out of the courtroom,” he told me. “If you had the case without the pressure, you would never get a result.”

Not all of Donziger's allies agree. CristĂłbal Bonifaz, who is now less involved in the case, laughed when I asked him about Donziger's attention to the headlines.

“Chevron, of course, hates him,” Bonifaz said. “But my view is that you don't win these cases on PR. If this involved a shoe being sold, you could win that on PR. But the problem with Chevron and any oil company is that they don't give a damn. If I'm running out of gas, I'm pulling into a gas station. They sell a commodity.”

Chevron clearly doesn't appreciate Donziger's accusations. “Their strategy has been focused on trying to bully the company into a settlement,” Hill & Knowlton's Chris Gidez said.

In Quito, another Chevron spokesman visiting from the company's San Ramon, California, headquarters was more blunt. “In some places,” Jeff Moore told me, “they call it extortion.”

Last year, the company let loose with an unusually harsh statement, describing Donziger and Amazon Watch as “increasingly desperate as their case deteriorates” and accusing them of disseminating “misleading” and “deceptive” information and engaging in “outrageous and irresponsible behavior.”

Chevron seemed to be growing more frustrated as the bad publicity piled up. At its annual shareholders meeting last April in Houston, representatives from an investment fund called Trillium Asset Management offered a resolution (which failed to pass) demanding itemized accounts of the company's spending in the Ecuador case. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has requested information as well. Meanwhile, Bonifaz has lined up nine more Ecuadorean plaintiffs—all suffering from cancer—to file a separate Oriente suit against Chevron in a San Francisco court.

This is attrition warfare: death by lawsuit. How much pain can Donziger inflict? And how much can Chevron take? Even mild-mannered Rodrigo Perez took umbrage at one of Donziger's insinuations: that Chevron's Ecuadorean lawyers are traitors to their nation.

“He's not honest, and he lies,” Perez told me. “Of every five words he pronounces, three are lies. And he knows he's lying.” Still, Perez admits that Donziger is a formidable opponent. “Has he done a good job, from the point of view of his clients? Maybe he has, because he's a pusher and he works hard. But I don't have any respect for him.”

DISPENSING WITH NARVAEZ, the Frente's mobile horde now reassembled at the Guanta oil-processing station, about 20 minutes outside Lago Agrio. The size of several city blocks, Guanta is set amid a wheezing jungle that should be placed on an environmental respirator.

We pulled up in a drizzle at about 11 in the morning, but Petroecuador guards wouldn't let the group through the main gate. Because a security fence encloses only half the station, and because the guards seemed to care only about the gate, everyone simply slogged a few hundred yards through the waterlogged earth to an area that wasn't fenced.

To our right was a pit the size of several Olympic pools, filled with an oozy mix of oil and water. Smart people placed handkerchiefs over their mouths and noses. Red and yellow flames leaped into the air from a set of elevated natural-gas flares; I stood about 50 yards away but was blasted by the heat as fumes stung my throat.

“If you don't have a headache yet, you will soon,” Donziger warned. Ten minutes later, I did.

The pit didn't have a liner, which meant the gunk could seep, drop by drop and second by second, into the water table below. This is the technology, or lack of it, that Texaco had used decades before; although plastic liners were employed in many parts of the world, Texaco didn't spend the money to do it that way, and Petroecuador wasn't modernizing, either. There was a smaller pit across a dirt road and, a few dozen yards from it, a pond-size swamp. The swamp was black, filled with oil.

“Do we need to come here and look at this and have a debate?” Donziger asked. “I mean, honestly, why are we taking samples? In the United States, the EPA would say, 'Visible standing petroleum. You are obligated to clean it up immediately.'”

This was just one allegedly toxic site among more than 350—including as many as 1,500 pits, the Frente alleges—spread around the Oriente. So far, the samples have yielded a bonanza of data that has been interpreted in opposite ways by experts on both sides. Of the 35 site results reported to the judge so far, Amazon Watch said last September, 100 percent have revealed “shocking” levels of pollution containing “life-threatening carcinogens.” At a site called Lago 2, the group states, the plaintiffs' experts measured total petroleum hydrocarbons at 325,000 parts per million—3,250 times the legal limit in California and 325 times the limit in Ecuador.

Chevron counters that the Frente is cooking up phony science and testing samples at a substandard lab. “Many of their reports,” Gidez wrote me, “are so scientifically unsound they would never be allowed in a U.S. court.”

To get a better look, I met up with 33-year-old Donald Moncayo, secretary general of the Frente. Moncayo, whose father was a settler, remembers swimming in a local river that had veins of oil running through it. As a young man, he worked briefly in the oil industry as a roughneck but soon left for the ranks of environmental activists. He lives in a wood shack without running water or electricity; when I stopped by one afternoon, a very large pig was napping by the front door.

We bounced in my rented 4×4 over the red dirt roads that crisscross the feeble jungle around Lago Agrio and trundled past rickety homesteads made of salvaged wood slats. Our first stop was a dirt field the size of a soccer pitch that had, at its center, a rusted wellhead. Moncayo said the well was shut by Texaco in the early 1990s, and he led me to a grassy pond 50 yards away that was filled with brackish water in which I could see globs of oil. Oil that leaked into the ground long ago was resurfacing or being revealed as the ground cover eroded.

“Every so often, more oil comes out, and they put more dirt on it,” Moncayo said, referring to Petroecuador.

We drove another 15 minutes, parked at the end of a road, and walked through the jungle until we reached what looked like a swamp. This was another waste pit, filled with sludge. The remarkable thing was that there was no oil facility nearby; whatever well this oil came from had been closed long ago.

“What would happen in Texas if there was a spill like that?” Moncayo asked.

I said it would be cleaned up, quickly.

“We've been waiting 17 years,” he replied.

THE WAIT MAY END SOON. The remaining inspections are expected to happen this year, giving way to a period of damage assessment in which the court will analyze the results and figure out whether the pollution is significant and can be traced to Chevron. If so, a judge will decide on the scale of cleanup. Perhaps it will be Novillo, perhaps not; the chief judge's position rotates every two years, with Judge Gérman Yáñez now presiding.

One morning, I met Emergildo Criollo, a leader of the Cofán Indians. A short man in his late thirties, he was dressed in city clothes. We drove from Lago Agrio for a half-hour, turned onto a dirt road that led into secondary jungle, and soon reached a tributary of the Río Aguarico. Behind the village of Dureno, we boarded a canoe with an outboard motor and glided through a maze of narrow canals covered by a canopy of vines and branches low enough to smack your head. We emerged onto the Aguarico itself, a dirt-brown waterway as wide as the Mississippi. After ten minutes, we got out and walked a half-mile to Criollo's village, an assemblage of houses built upon stilts, with roofs of thatch and tin. Its population of about 350 makes it the largest Cofán community, according to Criollo. When I asked how long the village had existed, he smiled.

“It has been here forever,” he said.

At the start of the oil era, the gringos drilled wherever they pleased; the Cofán could not make their objections known, because they didn't speak Spanish or English. Occasionally the river turned black and fish rose to the surface, belly up. Villagers began to die of new diseases that had the symptoms of cancer, though the Cofán didn't know what cancer was.

Criollo waved at the jungle around us. The colonists—the settlers who cleared the jungle for ranches and coffee plantations—were even worse than the oilmen, he said.

“We didn't have borders,” he explained. “Everything belonged to everyone. But the colonists converted it to private property. We cannot fish outside the borders of our community. We have to ask permission. Everything has an owner.”

The rest is familiar history for indigenous peoples from Alaska to Australia. The village was recently connected to an electrical grid. Kids watch TV. Food comes from Lago Agrio—rice and beans and chicken. Asked whether any of the youths know how to hunt, Criollo shrugged. “Once in a while they go into the rainforest,” he said.

As the sins of the past are weighed in Judge Novillo's chambers, another drama is unfolding a few hundred miles south, in Ecuador's last remaining swath of untouched Amazon jungle.

When I left Criollo, I drove south, as far as the frontier town of Puyo; as in the Oriente of a generation ago, there are no roads into this vast basin, a homeland of the Shuar and Achuar tribes. Consortiums of oil companies—Argentinian, Brazilian, Chinese—are lobbying to drill here. They promise that the rainforest and the Indians who live in it will prosper, gaining money and schools and hospitals while retaining their cultural identity, drinking their pure waters, and hunting in jungles that, thanks to newer, cleaner technologies, won't be polluted.

It escapes no one's notice that a generation ago these same promises were made when drilling began in the Oriente.

The post Slick appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

I do not know the value of life. In every war zone that I find myself in, I routinely fail to establish a sensible line beyond which I will not take risks, just as I struggle to pass judgment on war itself. When is killing justified? When is risking my life to report on killing justified? Most of what I have seen is unacceptable, but some of it is not—a nation defending itself against genocide, or a nation liberating itself from tyranny. The parameters of war are liquid, like blood.

The first wave: Kuni Takahashi (in hat) and Laurent Van Der Stockt document the marine assault on the Diyala Bridge.

In the days leading up to the invasion of Iraq, I saw a well-traveled friend writing in his diary. He had been keeping it for nine years, writing in it every day. “When I look back on the early passages,” he told me, “I realize that I have learned nothing.” I don't keep a diary, but his words made me wonder how much—and what—I have learned about war. I was asking these questions as I drove into Iraq on the first day of the invasion, and by the time I arrived in Baghdad, three weeks later, I had found some answers.

IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A WALKOVER. American troops would cross into Iraq and meet surrendering soldiers and grateful civilians, and I would write a story about the happy liberation of the southern city of Basra.

The invasion began on the night of March 19. I'd been staying with some other journalists in a house in the northern Kuwaiti desert, a few miles from the Iraqi border. Packing up that night, we could hear everything—the 2,000-pound smart bombs landing on Iraqi trenches and the waves of Apache gunships flying 50 feet overhead, eerily invisible, moving without lights.

I was on assignment for The New York Times Magazine with French photographer Laurent Van der Stockt. We made our last preparations for the 40-mile drive to Basra, bolting luggage racks onto our two rented SUVs and strapping down jerry cans filled with gasoline. We figured it would be a short trip, but in case light skirmishing delayed the city's liberation, we packed a few other prudent items: sleeping bags, cans of tuna, chocolate bars, gallons of drinking water, body armor, Kevlar helmets, biochemical suits, U.S. military uniforms, two spare tires, a stove, satellite phones, shortwave radios, and, in Laurent's Mitsubishi Pajero, a box of Cuban cigars.

We headed out at 4 a.m., hoping the thousands of fighting vehicles storming across the desert would create enough havoc to let us slip across the border. Laurent led the way, because his vehicle had an onboard compass and GPS system; at the wheel of my Hyundai, I followed him along one back road and then another, neither of us sure where they led, except toward the war. Shortly before dawn, we passed through a gap in the line of sand berms the Kuwaitis had created on their side of the demilitarized zone; I could see flashes of artillery and tank fire a mile or two ahead. We were close. Then I heard the shouting. “Turn off your fucking lights! Turn them off now!”

We stopped and turned off our lights. The American soldiers who appeared out of the darkness had a Special Forces look, with black caps and assault rifles outfitted with high-tech accessories. They were not happy to see us.

“We almost lit you up,” one of them said. “What the fuck are you doing here?” They ordered us to turn around.

By daybreak we were back in Kuwait. After several more hours of driving along the desert border, trying to sneak through the breaches that U.S. and British troops had made in the defensive berms, we found an unguarded stretch and raced across it, into an empty no-man's-land, hoping that no Apache helicopters or Abrams tanks would spot us and treat our unmarked vehicles as hostile targets.

This was madness, and I was aware of it. But I was also aware that the only way to get into Iraq was to take chances. That, or return to Kuwait City and wait for the U.S. military to give a green light to “unilateral” journalists, as those of us who were not embedded were called. We suspected the go-ahead the Pentagon had promised might be weeks away; Laurent and I hadn't come to the Middle East to sit in hotel rooms and watch the invasion on CNN.

We made it across the no-man's-land and reached Safwan, an Iraqi border town that had been secured by a unit of U.S. Marines. We arrived just in time to see the troops starting to pull down billboards and posters of Saddam Hussein.
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WARS ARE LIKE PEOPLE: Each is different, each is unpredictable in ways that are not predictable. Laurent and I assumed, once we were in Iraq, that we had reached a happy war zone, that Iraqi soldiers would give up like they had in 1991 and Iraqi civilians would celebrate. I don't know where this assumption might register on the stupidity scale, but my only comfort is that we did not have a monopoly on idiocy.

It wasn't surprising, in Safwan, to find only a handful of SUVs containing unilateral journalists. Hundreds had tried to cross into Iraq on the first day, and most had failed; in subsequent days, they would try and fail again, because after the invasion's chaotic first hours, U.S. and British forces clamped down on the border.

We were not only unembedded; we were unwanted.

After an hour in Safwan, 11 of us decided to continue up the open road to Basra, deeper into Iraq. We asked the troops in Safwan about the situation ahead, and several assured us that coalition forces had seized advance positions on the outskirts and if we journeyed up the road we would find them.

Those of us who headed toward Basra in our six SUVs did not constitute a convoy of fools. We had decades of experience in war zones. Laurent, who is 39, had covered the war in Croatia, where he had nearly been killed by a mortar (his left shoulder is scarred and bent unnaturally), and two years ago an Israeli sniper shot him in the knee. He now has trouble running, yet remains one of the most able companions you could hope for in dire circumstances. The second vehicle was driven by a 38-year-old Brit, Gary Knight, an award-winning photographer for Newsweek who has gone into, and survived, the worst conflict zones of the past 15 years. There were no rookies among us.

We drove for about four miles, through a dusty area that had a smattering of mud houses and palm trees. It was peaceful—but too peaceful. Where were the American military vehicles? Where were the telltale signs of battle? Laurent's SUV slowed down. A few hundred yards to his left was an Iraqi tank. To his right, about 50 yards from the road, several dozen Iraqi soldiers timidly waved a white flag. About a thousand yards ahead, through a heat mirage that distorted our vision, a line of people stretched across the road.
Laurent swerved around and headed back at full speed, and the rest of the convoy followed suit. There were, we realized, no Americans or Brits ahead; we had been driving toward an Iraqi checkpoint. The soldiers who wanted to surrender were doing so because no troops had arrived. Presumably some of them were the tank's crew, and had they changed their minds, they could have easily turned our caravan into smoldering steel and flesh. Just as easily, the American and British tanks in Safwan could have vaporized us as we raced back toward them. Fortunately, someone recognized our returning convoy; they did not fire.

It would be nice to say that I quickly realized this war was not the walkover I expected and that it was far too dangerous to cover without being embedded in an American military unit. But I failed to come to that conclusion even the next day, when we learned that a four-man team from ITN, the British television network, had ventured up an open road not far from where we had ventured, encountered Iraqi soldiers, as we had done, and turned back, as we had done. But an Iraqi pickup truck followed the two ITN vehicles, and as they neared the checkpoint, an American tank opened fire. One journalist survived; another was killed; the third journalist and the team's translator are still missing.
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CONTROL, OR THE PORTION of control that we truly possess, is not lost; it is surrendered, bit by bit, from one hour to the next, from one decision or nondecision to the next. I'm not saying that war is a drug—that's too easy, a cliché—but I am saying that I cannot identify a moment when the control I had, or thought I had, was taken away from me. In fact, it was given up.

We spent our first night in Iraq under an overpass outside Safwan, with the sounds of artillery and small-arms fire in the distance, and the mosquito-like whine of Predator drones high above. Basra was not falling. Soldiers on both sides were fighting and dying.

At dawn, there was only one direction to go. The road to Umm Qasr was closed off by barbed wire. We had already tried the road to Basra. And the road back to Kuwait was a professional dead end. I told myself I would stay with this war for now, see what happened, and pull out if that became the wise thing to do. Oddly, going deeper into the war was the easy way. Deciding that the risks were too high and living with the second-guessing and feelings of cowardice that might afflict me if I retreated and my colleagues continued on—that would have required real courage.

We drove north, circling up toward Zubayr, a suburb of Basra, past a line of several hundred military vehicles going nowhere. We followed a column of about 30 Marine armored vehicles as they took a northern side road, and when they stopped at a plateau, they allowed us to park inside their perimeter. Now there was no way I could turn back: Even if I remembered the zigzagging route, I would be traveling without military cover, in a war zone of amorphous front lines surrounded by free-fire zones.

Within a few hours the Marines began moving out, heading north again.
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THE TERM “WAR CORRESPONDENT” is used liberally these days, pasted upon anyone who has been in a conflict zone and lived to tell about it back home. Geraldo Rivera is a war correspondent, or so the teasers on Fox News tell us. So is any reporter with an exotic dateline and a flak jacket. The term has been applied to me on occasion, because I've covered wars in Bosnia, Somalia, Sudan, and Afghanistan. I've never felt comfortable with the label; it implies a psychological profile that I don't believe I have. I don't enjoy the risks you have to take in war zones. If I must go forward, I try to follow others whom I trust.

The pool of real war correspondents is very small, probably around 40 in the world, and most of them are photographers. They run terribly high risks, but the truth is that it is safer to take high risks in the company of James Nachtwey (a Time photographer) or John Burns (a New York Times reporter) than moderate risks in the company of someone with less experience. Perhaps the most important reason I went forward to Baghdad was that I was following Gary Knight and Laurent Van der Stockt.

The supporting cast was eclectic. Gary's traveling partner was Enrico Dagnino, a 43-year-old Italian photographer who'd spent his youth being thrown out of private schools and stealing cars; along the way he'd gotten a tattoo on his forearm of a skull with a mohawk. Enrico had had the foresight to smuggle a supply of hash into the country, and when most of it had been smoked—a dark day for several members of the convoy—he probed local markets during occasional stops in small towns. While some of us waded through groups of Iraqis asking, “Cigarettes? Cigarettes?” Enrico was saying, “Hashish? Hashish?”

At 46, Laurent Rebours, a French photographer for the Associated Press, was the oldest in the group. He could be jovial one moment and furious the next. I once overheard him talking to one of his editors in New York. He was, as usual, shouting. “The good news is that my computer is now working,” he bellowed. “In a rage, I hit it and said, 'Fuck this machine,' and now it's working.”

The three other Frenchmen in our group were all freelance photographers, traveling together in a Honda SUV. My fellow Americans were Ellen Knickmeyer, 40, a reporter for the AP; Kit Roane, 34, a reporter for U.S. News & World Report; and Wesley Bocxe, 42, a madcap freelance photographer who reminded me of the actor Steve Buscemi. Several days into the journey, Kuni Takahashi, a 37-year-old Japanese photographer for the Boston Herald, abandoned the Marine unit he'd been embedded in and embedded himself in my Hyundai.

Driving north, making sure that the open road had Americans ahead of us, we soon reached the tail end of a Marine convoy. The sentries at the rear aimed their weapons at us, but we slowed to a crawl and stopped 150 yards from them. Gary got out and walked up, and one of their officers agreed to let us follow them for the rest of the day.

We stopped at dusk. As helicopter gunships circled overhead, scouring the desert for enemy soldiers, military culture met journalist culture.

“You're not carrying any frigging weapons?” one incredulous Marine asked me.

Those are the rules, I explained.

“What kind of frigging rules is that?” he replied. “Not even a nine-millimeter?”

Our supplies of food and water were running low, but we soon learned to barter. The Marines had no way to contact their wives and families back home, so we swapped sat-phone access for supplies. As the Marines began surprising their loved ones by calling from the middle of the Iraqi desert, two cases of combat rations—MREs, or meals ready to eat—were speedily loaded into my SUV.

The conversations were often heartbreaking. “Don't cry, babe, please don't cry,” they'd say. “I love you, I love you, I can't tell you how much I love you.” The endearments were repeated endlessly, carried away by the desert breeze.

I needed to call home, too. The incident with the ITN crew had been followed by the deaths, injuries, and capture of several other reporters. My editors instructed me to forget Basra and do whatever I thought wisest. They were worried about my safety. So was my family.

I suppose that one of the hints that you're losing control of your life is when you start shamelessly lying about it. The alcoholic lies about how much he's drinking; the journalist lies to his family about the risks he's taking. I called one of my brothers and told him everything was fine. “I'm with the Marines,” I said. “Tell Mom and Dad and everyone else that I'm surrounded by Marines and I'm as safe as can be.”

Of course, I didn't say that Marines were being ambushed up and down the road and that, in truth, I wasn't traveling with them but behind them. I didn't say I was scared.
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LATE IN THE AFTERNOON on the war's fourth day, 140 miles north of Safwan, we neared a small bridge over the Euphrates River. Nasiriyah was just east of us, and we could see a battle going on. From the BBC shortwave service we learned that a U.S. Marine and a unit of Army soldiers had been captured there. As the sun set, flares shot high over the city and tracer fire filled the air. We were within easy range of Iraqi mortar and artillery crews.

There was a tremendous traffic jam at the bridgehead. Hundreds of military vehicles—from tanks and armored fighting vehicles to Humvees and trucks carrying mobile pontoon bridges and boats and fuel and food and troops and howitzers—were backed up and waiting to cross. Understandably, the commander of the checkpoint at the bridge refused to let us pass, because he wanted to give priority to military vehicles. We waited, swallowing dust and diesel fumes, our eyes burning.

Chuck Stevenson, a producer for the CBS program 48 Hours Investigates who was embedded with one of the units preparing to cross the bridge, saw us parked at the side of the road. “These guys are not embedded,” I heard him say to an officer. “They're not supposed to be here.” Stevenson then headed up toward the checkpoint commander and, on his way back, got into a heated discussion with my colleagues.

This was beyond annoying; it could be dangerous. The military had clarified its position on unilateral journalists, and we were allowed to stay. But the situation was fluid, and individual commanders had a lot of leeway. If we had to go back, we'd be traveling alone—there were no convoys heading all the way back to Kuwait. We huddled and agreed that Stevenson was a snitch.

Enrico was furious. “This guy is fucking us,” he said. “Let's take care of him now.”
In view of Enrico's previous hobbies, this was a credible threat. Wes was equally outraged.

“Let's fuck him up right now,” Wes urged. “He's going to get us killed.”

Enrico and Wes moved in Stevenson's direction. Gary stepped in their way.

“Enrico, I'm getting mad,” Gary said. “And you don't want me to get mad, because when I hit you, you stay down.”

“But this guy is an asshole,” Enrico pleaded. “He puts our lives at risk. You are too polite, Gary.”

“We have a situation that we have to deal with,” Gary replied. “Let's not make it worse. We need to get across the bridge, and that will never happen if we deck the guy.”

Wes came around. “We'll get him in Baghdad,” he said.

“Absolutely,” Gary said. “After you get him, I'll finish him off.” (Later, Stevenson acknowledged that “a hostile moment” took place, but denied that it happened at the bridgehead, or that he told any officer that our presence was unauthorized.)

Stevenson's convoy was waved forward. We were finally allowed to move forward in darkness, without our lights, at 3 a.m.
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ONE OF THE UNHERALDED SKILLS of working in a war zone is being a good driver. You have to be able to navigate Third World roads that are in Fourth World shape, and you might be behind the wheel of a Fifth World vehicle. Driving at night raised the dangers exponentially. The Marines had night-vision goggles; we had only two pairs, which belonged to the AP team, Ellen and Laurent. The Marines didn't even use brake lights. We had to tape ours, leaving only a small sliver a half-inch wide to help prevent rear-end collisions. Visibility was ridiculously limited. Let more than 20 yards get between you and the car in front and you'd be lost. Less than 20 yards and if the car stopped, which was often, you'd hit them. We drove along nearly blind. One 67-ton Abrams tank after another would roar up alongside us and pass with just a foot or so between my eyes and their treads. There was no margin for error. It was terrifying.

Sunrise was a relief, but it brought a new nightmare: The paved road we had been traveling on had petered out, and we were driving into roadless desert, on sand, in rented SUVs, behind military vehicles heading to an unknown destination. Into Baghdad, into battle? We had no idea. We were low on gasoline, and because military vehicles use diesel, begging or bartering for fuel didn't seem to be in the cards. The convoy stopped for a bit, and as we stood debating the options, the Marines suddenly rushed out of their vehicles and dropped, spread-eagle, on the ground, their weapons pointed beyond our heads. Piles of sand for highway construction lined our eastern flank, and the Marines feared an Iraqi ambush. We quickly moved out of the line of fire.

This was unlike any war any of us had covered. There were no front lines behind which we were safe or bases where we could shelter. The Marines were rushing north to Baghdad in unconnected convoys, not bothering to secure their flanks or even the rear. Their defensive tactic was simple: Treat anything that moves as hostile. The desert, the Marines, the Iraqis, land mines, night driving, chemical weapons—any of them could be our undoing.

“I've been doing this for 15 years, and I'll tell you guys, this is one of the most fucked-up situations I've been in,” Gary said. “No joking. It's time to go home or go forward. Everybody has to make important decisions. I'm not going to make them for you. Right now I'm only thinking of myself, what's right for me. You have to make your own decisions.”

“This is a real war,” Enrico said. “Let's cover it. Or try to cover it.”

Everyone wanted to go forward. I followed.
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THERE WERE NO HOUSES and no landmarks; we were surrounded by flatness and sand and, above us, the sun. Every mile or so we passed Iraqi men or women who were doing one of three things: rubbing their stomachs, because they wanted food; tilting back their heads, because they were thirsty; or waving Iraqi bank notes that bore the image of Saddam Hussein. If pity was not enough to persuade us to part with our riches of food and water, perhaps a war souvenir would seal the deal.

We drove about 25 miles that day and stopped at a plateau where the Third Battalion, Fourth Marines, had pulled up for the evening. The battalion, which is based in Twentynine Palms, California, had deployed more than a thousand Marines and more than 75 armored fighting vehicles, including tanks. One of the reporters embedded with the unit told us that the commander, Lieutenant Colonel Bryan McCoy, was a friendly guy, and when we asked an officer if we could spend the night inside their perimeter, he agreed.
As dusk fell, McCoy came out of his command tent to meet us. A 40-year-old Oklahoman, he is linebacker-tall, with an authoritative bearing that suggests leadership without a word or gesture. McCoy is a combat veteran, having served as a company commander in the Gulf War. Kit was surfing the Web and let the colonel read the latest stories about the soldiers captured in Nasiriyah. McCoy clicked his way through the stories, saying nothing. Then he told us how he was going to make sure the same thing didn't happen to his boys.

“There are two kinds of people on this battlefield,” he said. “Predators and prey. Don't be prey. Don't be an easy target. We'll do the ambushing; we'll do the killing; we'll take the fight to the enemy and not be passive about it. The best medicine is aggression and violent supremacy. After contact, they will fear us more than they hate us.” McCoy was blunt as a howitzer.

McCoy mentioned that his men had spearheaded the attack on Basra's airport a few days earlier, and showed us an Iraqi flag he had taken as a souvenir. When Laurent offered him a cigar, his eyes sparkled. McCoy lit the Cohiba and invited us to join his march on Baghdad. The Third Battalion was the foothold we needed to survive.
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THE NEXT MORNING, MARCH 25, a strong wind was blowing, but the skies were clear. Soon, however, the wind grew fiercer and picked up the sand. It became a gale that lashed the car; we used the windshield wipers to clear the bone-dry wash of dusty grains.

My Hyundai, rented from Hertz in Kuwait City, had not been made for a military march through the trackless desert. It began making a throbbing noise from the engine, as if it were in pain. The spasms began to come quicker, but there was nothing to be done. We drove on.

Kuni, the photographer for the Boston Herald, took over driving, and I dozed off. I was jolted awake by a crash. Kuni had rear-ended Laurent's Pajero.

“Sorry, I lost attention,” Kuni said sheepishly. We jumped out to inspect the damage. Laurent's SUV was fine. Our hood was crumpled and the fender was dented, but the engine continued to run. And the throbbing noise was gone, never to return.

At noon the sky turned hepatitis yellow, as though it were sick. It seemed that entire deserts of sand were being scooped up and blown around us. By 2 p.m. the sky had turned Martian red. Heavy, isolated raindrops began to fall, followed abruptly by a frenetic downpour. The rain stopped as quickly as it had started. The wind and sand were worse than ever.
At three o'clock the Marine Corps surrendered to reality. The convoy halted. A Marine stumbled over to us with the sort of drunken walk that you see in news footage of people trying to move through hurricane winds. He knocked on the window. I rolled it down.

I hadn't realized how deafening the wind was. “We can't go forward,” he shouted. “Do not use sat phones. We can't see our flanks, and the Iraqis can use com signals to pinpoint our position.”

The convoy was like a submarine sitting silent at the bottom of the ocean. The sand seemed alive, hitting the car furiously, trying to get at us. Even with the doors and windows shut, the air was filled with the stuff, and though I put a bandanna across my face, I was still breathing it. When I ground my teeth, I felt and heard the crackling of sand. The temperature rose inside the car, and kept rising. Or maybe I had a fever. I asked Kuni how he felt. Feverish, he said.

I drank liters of water and then had to relieve myself—a new problem. I put on my desert goggles and shoved the door open—the wind, pressing against it, fought back hard—and the sandstorm entered the vehicle, like atom-size bees swarming to a hive. The scarf I had wrapped around my face was torn off and blown away. I leaned against the car, held on to the buckled hood with one hand, and took care of business, rocked by the wind. When I got back inside, absolutely every part of me was covered in sand.

After midnight the storm finally blew itself out, and the lightless convoy moved out.
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THE CLICHÉ ABOUT A BATTLE PLAN not surviving its first contact with the enemy happens to be true. Improvisation is required in warfare, though improvising is a way of acknowledging that the chaos is stronger than your ability to master it. The battles that the battalion would fight on its way to Baghdad, the resistance they would meet, how they would defeat that resistance—these things were, for the most part, figured out on the fly. I got a taste of this one night after I rode with the battalion's intelligence officer, Captain Bryan Mangan, to a briefing at regimental headquarters, five miles south of the battalion's camp. Mangan was supposed to lead a psychological operations team from HQ back to camp, but as we got ready to drive back, he saw that the psy-ops Humvees were already leaving.

“Where are those idiots going?” he asked his driver.

“They're following you.”

“But I'm here,” Mangan said.

“They think they're following you.”

“Why?”

“Because you're driving in a Humvee, and that's a Humvee they're following.”

“There are 4,000 motherfucking Humvees in this fucking country.”

Pause.

“Do they have a radio?” Mangan asked.

“Yes,” the driver replied.

“Can we call them on it and tell them to get their asses back here?”

“Let me check.”

The driver ran to the com tent. He returned in a minute.

“No, sir,” he said.

The unlikeliness of all this was heightened by the fact that Mangan was a yuppie. About 30 years old, he'd grown up in New York City's wealthy Westchester County suburbs and graduated from Fordham Prep, the kind of private school that sends its graduates to Harvard and Yale and on to banking and politics. He enlisted in the Marine Corps instead. He'd considered leaving the military shortly before the war began but decided to stay with it. Iraq would be his way of doing something about 9/11.

This was Mangan's first war. Like many Marines, he had mixed feelings about the sort of killing that occurs in the sort of war he was fighting, where enemy soldiers were dressing as civilians, and where many Iraqi combatants were being forced to fight. “We're going to have to do things that are potentially ugly,” he told me. “We are killing. There's no other way around it. In order for us to do what we have to do, we kill people.”

I was surprised at how much the Marines would reveal to us. Since the Vietnam War, there has been a chilliness between the military and the press, but there was none with the Third Battalion. By embedding hundreds of journalists, the brass had sent the unstated message that it was OK to be honest.

“Why do you think you're here?” I asked Mangan's driver.

“We're here to liberate these fucking Eye-rackis,” he replied.

The psychology of killing is driven not just by a sense of mission or hatred, but by fear. Despite their bravado, these guys were scared—scared of being killed, scared of being captured. This is one of the reasons why traveling with them was almost as dangerous as not traveling with them. Anytime you weren't right next to a Marine, you became a potential target. Marines were even scared of other Marines. “There are a lot of trigger-happy guys out here,” one told me.

One morning I walked 25 yards from the spot where we had stationed our cars and found a discreet place to serve as a desert latrine. Gary happened to be 200 yards away, standing next to a command vehicle and listening to its military radio. Suddenly the routine chatter turned urgent: “Potential unfriendly in the perimeter. We've got him sighted. He's got a black shirt on; he's crouching down. Looks like a fedayeen.”

Because lots of Iraqi soldiers and fedayeen irregulars wore dark civilian clothes—the better to fade into the shadows—a black T-shirt was potential enemy garb. At least one Marine, perhaps more, had lined me up in his crosshairs. Colonel McCoy happened to be listening and gave an order that the guy in the black shirt might be one of the media guys, so nobody should fire.

I wore light-colored shirts until the war was over.
Ěý

BY NOW WE'D BEEN TRAVELING with McCoy for more than a week, but despite frequent Third Battalion skirmishes, we hadn't seen any fighting. Now, halfway to Baghdad, more battles were in the offing. We realized that the colonel, who already had three journalists embedded in his unit—two from Time magazine and one from the San Francisco Chronicle—was not about to allow our six vehicles to drive into combat.

The convoy's tanks and armored vehicles peeled off for two days and moved northeast, attacking Afak and two smaller towns. A day after we arrived at the outskirts of the town of Diwaniya, the combat team left on another incursion—or, as McCoy called it, a “tune-up” for Baghdad. Again we were left behind. Finally, before the division attacked the city of Al Kut, McCoy agreed to start taking a few unilaterals, but we'd have to choose who.

Gary proposed drawing lots. It seemed fair to everyone except Laurent Rebours.

“Non, non,” he said. “I am the Associated Press. Non.”

There was a roar of disapproval. Gary picked up a stick and drew AP in the dust. He then erased it with his foot, angrily.
“Fuck the companies,” he said. “It's not about them.”

He then wrote Rebours's name in the dust, and did not erase it.

“The AP, I don't give a shit about. But you, Laurent, I care about. It's about us. Twelve people who have risked their lives to get here. Nothing else.”

“Non,” Rebours said. “I go on all missions. I work for the AP.”

Albert, one of the quiet French photographers, was ready to punch him.

“Ne me fait pas chier,” he said. “Tu as une attitude de merde.” He added, in English, “You will never borrow my sleeping bag again.”

Rebours backed down. In the end, when McCoy called for two vehicles to accompany him into battle at Al Kut, we simply threw everything out of the two largest SUVs, and six of us piled into each, like flak-jacketed clowns in a circus act.

At Al Kut, we stayed at the rear of the combat train, about a mile and a half from the front line. Sporadic fire was directed at our location, but most of it came from us: The Marines shot at anything they thought had moved. Meanwhile, a sniper hit by Iraqi fire was rushed back to the medic station; shortly after he was carried into a Chinook helicopter, he died of shock. Corporal Mark Evnin was the battalion's first Marine killed in action.

A few nights later, we were, unbelievably, nine miles from the center of Baghdad, at a factory near a bridge that led into the city. Earlier in the day, we had passed through an abandoned military base. Along with the usual assortment of portraits of Saddam Hussein and outdated computers, Ellen discovered a shower with running water. I grabbed a bar of soap, raced inside, and stripped. Just then a Marine shouted down the hallway, “The building is rigged with C4! Get out!”

I got out.
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THE FACTORY WAS A MILE and a half down the road from the Diyala Bridge, which crosses a tributary that flows into the Tigris. It was the Third Battalion's mission to seize the bridge and march into the Iraqi capital. The battalion was on edge; the previous day, a tank from a sister battalion had been destroyed by a suicide bomber. Everyone was exhausted.

On the first morning of the two-day battle, April 6, I stayed back at the factory, sitting in the passenger seat of my car, writing. After a few hours I heard the sounds of battle and saw huge plumes of smoke ahead. I put on my flak jacket and helmet and walked up the road, which was jammed with tanks and armored fighting vehicles waiting to cross the bridge. A Marine commanding a six-man mortar crew in an open-backed Humvee stopped and asked me if I wanted a lift.

“You're not going all the way, are you?” I asked.

“No, we'll be a few hundred meters back.”

I hopped into the back and the driver continued on. Less than a minute later the Humvee came under fire. I dived to the floor, attempting to become one with it as the Marines around me opened up with their M-16s.

“I shot him!” one of them shouted. “I shot him!”

The driver went nuts. He veered over the center median, knocking everyone from whatever position they happened to be firing from. Then he veered back, jolting us again.

“Who the fuck is driving?” someone yelled.

I knew who was driving: a Marine trying to dodge bullets.

“You're never going to drive this fucking Humvee again,” a Marine next to me shouted, between shots.

The Humvee made a hard right and jerked to a halt. The Marines jumped out, and so did I.

“How'd you like the ride?” one of them asked me.

“Where are we?” I replied.

“The bridge,” he said.

The colonel's Humvee was a few yards away.

“How are you doing, Peter?” McCoy asked as I scrambled over.

“Fine, colonel.”

His Marines were firing every kind of ordnance they had across the river, and shots were coming back, and there we were, in it.

A few yards away, a terrified Iraqi woman came running out of a building in a black cloak with a white scarf across her forehead. “Is that a frigging nun?” McCoy said.

I listened as he talked on the radio with his commanders and his other officers. In between radio squawks, McCoy chatted as though we were hanging out in a park, watching the neighborhood kids play in a sandbox.

“They're doing a poor job of Chechen tactics,” he explained, referring to the hit-and-run guerrilla tactics the Iraqis were using. “We trained on that. We're getting them with snipers. Coughlin's already got six to eight kills today.”

His attention returned to the radio phone. He listened, then he gave an order.

“We just got a SIGINT hit that the enemy has requested arty,” he said. In other words, the signals intelligence unit had intercepted a radio conversation in which the Republican Guard unit on the other side of the bridge was calling in artillery fire on our positions.

“We've got to get our guys down,” McCoy continued. “We've got guys in the open here.”

I was one of those guys.
Ěý

I USED TO SMOKE WHEN I WAS in college, then quit, but in the past two weeks I had started again. I was nearing a pack a day.

The battalion's combat troops dug themselves in to the south side of the bridge for the night. I went back to the factory and tried to sleep; the heat was oppressive, the mosquitoes worse.

The Marines planned to take the bridge the next day. Because a pylon was damaged, no vehicles could move over it; the assault would be on foot, World War II style.

At about 10 a.m., word reached the rear that one of the battalion's armored vehicles had been hit by an artillery shell; two Marines were killed, several injured. The first wave of troops crossed the bridge, and soon the air on the far side was thick with ordnance—artillery shells, mortars, bullets. Two more columns of Marines ran forward, toward the bridge and over it.

I fell into one of the lines, telling myself, I am a journalist. This is a war. I must cover it. We passed the armored fighting vehicle that had been shelled; it was a smoking mess of twisted metal.

“Holy shit,” one of the Marines said.

“Don't look, don't look,” said another.

We ran over the bridge, jumping over a bullet-riddled Iraqi corpse, and as soon as I got over, I noticed Colonel McCoy, standing by a house with his radioman.

“How are you doing, Peter?” he asked, again.

“Just fine, colonel.” It was fucking Groundhog Day. I lit a cigarette.

What happened that day was the subject of a story I wrote for The New York Times Magazine. The battle raged around us. Marines were fanning out in all directions, firing their weapons at unseen enemy troops that retreated from building to building as the troops advanced. Fearful of suicide bombers, the Marines fired warning shots at approaching vehicles, and then opened fire. Most of the vehicles, as it turned out, carried confused civilians trying to get out of Baghdad. The day after the battle was over, I counted nearly a dozen bodies; all of them appeared to have been civilians. When I asked one of the Marines what he thought, he said, “That's war.”

Just as things that should have disturbed the Marines didn't, things that should have disturbed me didn't. After the fight, I sat in my car, writing, not 20 yards away from a partly crushed corpse sprawled in the road. I'd gotten used to it.

It was April 8. On the BBC, we heard that Baghdad was beginning to fall; the Americans had taken the main presidential palace. With the other journalists, I drove farther into the city. There were Marines everywhere. We parked next to two of their fighting vehicles at an abandoned house, but when a U.S. fighter jet swooped in and dropped an errant bomb 400 yards away, we got out fast.

Not long after, we encountered a group of Marines who had just shot a young boy and girl. They were jittery and didn't know what to do; they asked us to take the injured children to a medic station in the rear. Laurent Van der Stockt bundled them into his car, and Enrico held the girl in his arms as the father held his son, who had been shot in the chest and was losing consciousness. “Why? Why?” the father asked as we raced back toward the bridge.
Ěý

THE CITY CAME UNGLUED. On the road there was only theft, looters carrying and pushing or pulling whatever they could: air conditioners, water fountains, carpets, lightbulbs. “It's like Wal-Mart out there,” a Marine told me. şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř a technical college, a group of Iraqis pleaded with Marine sentries for permission to come inside and take what they could. “I am working on my Ph.D.,” one of them said, in excellent English. “I need a computer.”

The next day, April 9, the Third Battalion met no further resistance, though others did. Laurent and I crept ahead once we realized that the final miles would be the easy ones. We were standing at a square in the heart of Baghdad, marveling at it all, when Colonel McCoy roared up in his Humvee. “I'm going to the Palestine Hotel!” he shouted, so we jumped into our vehicles and followed him.

Within a few minutes, we pulled up in front of the Palestine, which housed most of the international press corps in Baghdad and which, the day before, had been shelled by U.S. Army soldiers who believed they were being fired upon, killing two cameramen, one Spanish and one Ukrainian. As we watched, McCoy's Marines rolled their largest armored vehicle up to the statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square, put a metal chain around it, and began pulling it down. The symbolic liberation of Baghdad was being carried out by Colonel McCoy and his men, live on CNN.

“How do you feel?” I asked McCoy.

“Speechless,” he replied, though he soon found the politically appropriate words about liberation.

I asked him about the Marines I knew his battalion had lost—Evnin, the two men at the bridge, another killed in a Humvee accident at night. What did McCoy think, now that his mission had been accomplished, about the men who had lost their lives?

This time, McCoy truly was speechless. He looked at the ground, held back tears, and finally said, very quietly, “God bless them.”
Ěý

I HAD THOUGHT I had little interest in reporting on wars again. After I covered Bosnia and wrote a book about it, I was satisfied with what I had written and wanted to move on to other subjects. Still, I continued to venture into zones of conflict, though I did so with caution. The circumstances in Iraq did not allow for caution. I like to be in control of my life, and I learned that in war, the notion of control reveals itself as a hoax.

I saw, again, the killing of civilians and soldiers. I experienced, again, the strange mix of humor and friendship that is created when stress and absurdity and terror come together. On the first day I met Colonel McCoy, he'd said that at the start of his march on Baghdad, he told his men that they would undergo a great experience they would hope to never have again. He was right; he studied and knew war. It has been going on for quite some time, after all. The tools of warfare have changed over the millennia, but its nature has not. Terms like “surgical strikes” and “collateral damage” distort a vital truth. War is killing.
Ěý

The post The Rough Guide to Iraq appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

MY CHAKRAS ARE SHOT. I know because Tomaz Humar has just checked them.

Humar through a frosted window in the Julian Alps, December 2001

Map by Equator Graphics

The climber back home in Slovenia

Solo Faces: Humar sans rope outside Chamonix

Sledding with his kids in the Julian Alps

Meditating under the Pericnik Waterfalls

Plunging into springs along the Kamniska Bistrica River

Physical therapy, Humar-style: retreating from the springs along the Kamniska Bistrica River

Chakra steady: Humar above Chamonix

We're getting ready for a hike in Slovenia's Kamnik-Savinja Alps, sitting in Tomaz's Volkswagen Golf in a patch of forest below the limestone face of 6,014-foot Mount Rzenik, where Tomaz first learned to climb. He pulls a tear-shaped pendant from his pocket and swings it over a small, colorful chart shaped like a dartboard and overlaid with numbers. When he checks my chakras, the pendant hovers at the low thirties. Tomaz checks his own: sixties. He considers the results.

“We don't have much time,” he says, “but I'll cleanse you.”

Before embarking on any venture with Tomaz Humar, your chakras should be in overdrive. With more than 1,200 ascents to his credit and 60 solos of new routes, the 33-year-old Slovenian has earned a reputation as the best—or maybe just the craziest—high-altitude climber in the world. Tomaz takes risks no other climber would consider; he endures suffering best classified as biblical. At mountaineering conferences where he gives his slide show and lecture, you can hear the collective gasp of the world's top alpinists when they look at what he's done in the planet's toughest ranges, particularly the Himalayas.

Here's Tomaz on 26,504-foot Annapurna I in Nepal in 1995, summiting alone in a blizzard as his expedition leader yells over the radio for him to turn back. Here he is in 1997, downclimbing the west face of another Nepalese peak, 25,770-foot Nuptse, in the dark, after his partner was blown off the summit (and before Tomaz accidentally set his own tent on fire). Here he is on his American vacation in 1998, scaling Reticent Wall, one of El Capitan's hardest routes, on his first big-wall climb. Here is the suicidal route he took up Dhaulagiri's south face in 1999—equipped with just three camming devices, four ice screws, five pitons, and a single 148-foot rope. Here he is midclimb on Dhaulagiri, prying the filling out of an infected tooth with his Swiss Army knife.

The south face of Nepal's 26,810-foot Dhaulagiri is among the longest and highest faces in the world, a concave nightmare of loose granite and overhanging seracs that starts at 13,123 feet and rises another 13,000 terrifying feet to the summit. Two Eastern European teams had made ascents of the face: a Yugoslavian group in 1981 and a Polish expedition in 1986. Tomaz soloed it, on a new route, climbing long stretches without any protection at all. The mountaineering world was stunned. A Slovenian kid on his eighth Himalayan expedition had pulled off the most audacious achievement in a decade.

In Slovenia, a tiny Eastern European nation whose two million citizens love adventure sports, Tomaz became a god. He wrote a popular coffee-table memoir, No Impossible Ways; was named 1999 athlete of the year; and received the Honorary Emblem of Freedom from President Milan Kucan. Today, if you send a postcard to “Tomaz Humar, Slovenia,” he'll receive it.
Nearly a year after Dhaulagiri, however, Tomaz suffered an accident that almost killed him. On the evening of October 30, 2000, less than two weeks before he was due to give the keynote address at the annual meeting of the American Alpine Club in Denver, the man who'd just established climbing's new benchmark stumbled into a ten-foot construction pit.

Tomaz was building a house in Kamnik for his family—his wife, Sergeja, their ten-year-old daughter, Ursa, and six-year-old son, Tomaz. In the early-evening darkness, Tomaz was taking care of last-minute chores with the construction foreman and didn't notice his future basement until he fell into it. When he came to, at the bottom of the pit, he felt something heavy lying on him. It was his own right leg. His left heel and right femur were shattered. He almost died from blood loss. The surgeons who operated on him thought he might never walk again. As for climbing—forget it.

Now, a year and six operations later, Tomaz stands at the base of Rzenik, his shattered bones fused by titanium rods and plates, looking not at all like a great climber. His face is not weatherbeaten; he is neither lanky nor muscular. What he mostly looks like is a Wal-Mart assistant manager. Still, there's no mistaking his drive. He only recently traded his wheelchair for crutches, but their rubber tips are already worn down from manic and punishing use; Humar's crutches need crutches. It is with these that he intends to hobble up the rockfall below Reznik's face.

But first there's my chakra problem.

“Don't move,” Tomaz says.

He traces his right hand over my body, an inch or two above my flesh. He flicks his hand, as though shaking water from it. Then he repeats the routine with his left hand—without the flicking, because this time he's putting good mojo in. His mojo.

He measures me again: My chakras are in the forties. “That's better,” he says. “If we had more time I could do more, but it takes a lot of energy from me, and we should get going.”

We head through the forest, Tomaz leading. His lurching gait is painful to watch, a cross between Frankenstein and a penguin. This is his first walk in the mountains since his fall. He has not told his doctors or his wife, because if he slips he goes straight back into the wheelchair.

“Look,” Tomaz says. “Look at that rock!”

He points a crutch at a chunk of quartz jutting out of the ground. He bends down and places a hand on the stone.

“It has a lot of energy,” he says. “I can feel it.”

EVEN AMONG RISK-LOVING mountaineers, there are insane levels of danger that 99.9 percent of climbers won't accept. The other 0.1 percent tend to come from Eastern Europe. They have names like Kukuczka, Wielicki, Groselj, Jeglic, or Belak. They share a fanatical and almost comical embrace of suffering.

“A huge chunk of the sickest climbers in the Himalayas are Polish, Russian, Czech, or Slovenian,” says American big-wall climber Mark Synnott, 32. “They're hard-core. Everyone knows that. You can tell when you meet them.”

This toughness is rooted in history, of course. Eighty years of Lenin, Stalin, World Wars I and II, the Cold War, regional conflicts, and ethnic cleansing have produced durable people. For the survivors who emerged from the rubble of communism, a long and happy life is not an entitlement, but an exception. The prospect of getting killed in the mountains is simply not as tragic for a climber from Minsk as it is for a climber from Boulder.

“In the West, the art of rock climbing is growing because it has to do with less risk, good muscles,” says Reinhold Messner, 57, the first man to climb (and then to solo) 29,028-foot Mount Everest without oxygen and to summit the world's fourteen 8,000-meter peaks. “But the people seeking high goals in high places are in Eastern Europe, and they reach their goals because they are willing to suffer more.”
And willing to do more to escape. During the Cold War, Eastern Bloc climbers were on the same short leash as everybody else. They couldn't travel without government permission, and so, when state-sponsored clubs mounted expeditions to the Himalayas, competition was fierce. “If you're in a club and your ticket to an annual trip to Tian Shan is by staying on that team, you're going to do far more to stay on that team,” notes American alpinist Carlos Buhler, 47. “In our system, anybody can go to Tian Shan who wants to bang nails for a month to earn enough money to go there.”

Some of the greatest modern climbers have come from the former Soviet Union and Poland—Russian Anatoli Boukreev and Pole Jerzy Kukuczka, both killed in the Himalayas—but starting in 1991, when Slovenia won its independence from Yugoslavia, Slovenian mountaineers came on strong, with fast-and-light ascents up dangerous faces that have astonished even the Great One himself. “The Slovenians are the very best climbers in the world,” Messner says matter-of-factly. “They are young, and they are hungry for difficult things. I like them.”

Slovenian achievements in Nepal alone include new routes up the west ridge of Everest and the south face of 27,824-foot Makalu, solo ascents of the south face of 27,923-foot Lhotse and the west face of Annapurna, and the first complete ski descents of both Annapurna and Mount Everest. Slovenian casualties have piled up as well. Among those who've died in the past seven years are Slavc Sveticic, who soloed Annapurna's west face; Stane Belak, Tomaz's first mentor; Vanja Furlan, who climbed Nepal's Ama Dablam with Tomaz; and Janez Jeglic, Tomaz's partner on Nuptse—until he was blown off the summit.

Tomaz, however, has managed to live through some of the riskiest climbs ever attempted. “At the moment, Humar is the greatest high-altitude climber of the world,” Messner says. “His power is in surviving in very difficult situations on huge walls. What he has done is special. I know these walls, and they are very difficult, especially Dhaulagiri.” When Tomaz flew home from Dhaulagiri, Messner was among the throng of admirers at the Ljubljana airport. He'd come to Slovenia to congratulate the young man who was leading climbing back to its essence.

“The climbs Tomaz has done in the Himalayas in the last five years have set an entirely new standard for danger combined with difficulty—and probably danger before the difficulty,” echoes Ed Webster, 46, whose 1988 four-man ascent of Everest's east face was as audacious in its day as Dhaulagiri.

“It's almost a shame when one person alone raises the bar so high, because people might classify him in the freaky, sci-fi category,” says American climber Mark Twight, 40, who specializes in extreme alpine ascents. “Dhaulagiri—I don't think anyone considered going up it by himself. Climbers are not prepared for that kind of difficulty, in that length of time, in those conditions. The great evolutionary steps in climbing take place because of people expanding their psychological capacity. We can improve our gear and our training, but it doesn't matter unless you can see with enough clarity what is possible. The rest of us just aren't seeing what he is.”

So what exactly does Tomaz see? That's a mystery to everyone. “I've climbed Dhaulagiri,” says Buhler. “I know the energy it takes to go up the northeast ridge. The south face—I've never been on it. I've looked down on it. I've climbed with people who have attempted it. My reaction is—OK, you're standing at the bottom, and you launch yourself up that route. Where did that energy come from? Where did he get that push?”

THE ANSWER STARTS IN KAMNIK. One day Tomaz and I drive into the countryside in his Golf, a gift from a local car dealership. The car's sides are plastered with his name and likeness, which would be like Madonna tooling around Beverly Hills with her naked body painted on a Porsche. People stare in shock as we pass.

We pull up to a house under construction. An old couple, dressed in neat, well-worn clothes, are puttering around the site—Tomaz's mother and father, Rozalija and Max.

His father shakes my hand with an unusually strong grip for a short, wiry man in his seventies. I already know the feeling: When Tomaz shakes your hand, your knuckles crack.

The house is being built for one of Tomaz's younger brothers (he has two, Marjan and Mataj), and the construction crew stands before us: their parents. Trained as a shoemaker, Max Humar has worked construction his entire life, and though he is retired, you wouldn't know it. I ask him if he has trouble hoisting the 60-pound cinder blocks that the house is being built with.

“No, why would I?” the old man replies. “I get more pleasure from working than lying on a beach. I never sit around the house. That's for people who are sick.”

Max Humar knew hunger and misery during World War II. In 1967, before he was married, he escaped the Iron Curtain by fleeing over the rugged Kamnik Alps to Austria, but changed his mind once he arrived, turned himself in to the Austrian police, and was sent home. Humar has always expected his children to work hard. When houses were built for family or friends, the boys pitched in, lugging 100-pound sacks of cement.

I'm shown photos of a boy on a scaffold.

“I was seven years old,” Tomaz says.

“You were six,” his father replies, sternly.

“Was he a good worker?” I ask.

“He never complained,” his father says.

I ask if it was odd for six-year-olds to work construction.

“It was normal,” Max says. “We didn't have much money. We couldn't pay for workers. That's what children are for.”

He turns to Tomaz. “What kind of question was that?”

Tomaz shrugs.

Tomaz and his brothers slept in an unheated attic room, sharing a pull-out sofa. Their mother tells me that her sons could sleep in the living room only if the outside temperature fell below 14 degrees. “So what if they were cold?” his dad says.

These days Tomaz admires his father, but they used to be at war. “He wanted me to be a normal guy, and I wanted to be free,” Tomaz tells me later. “We didn't talk. He would work, and when he wasn't working we would fight. So better not to talk.”

Fury has its uses. Tomaz blew off steam in the Kamnik Alps. The angry young man joined the Kamnik Alpine Club in 1987, climbing under Bojan Pollak, a legendary instructor and a stickler for detail. In his first year, Tomaz was not permitted to wear climbing shoes; he graduated from sneakers to clunky boots weighing several pounds apiece. Pollak sent him on overnight climbs without a sleeping bag, without enough water or food, and insisted he bivouac on the most exposed ledge.

In 1989, when Tomaz was 20, his apprenticeship was interrupted by the Yugoslav National Army, which sent him to Kosovo. At the time, the province was under Serb control, though 90 percent of its inhabitants were ethnic Albanians who despised Serb rule. Tomaz served a brutal and rotten enterprise that he knew was brutal and rotten, and he tried to desert many times.

His description of those thwarted escapes is convoluted, because Tomaz is not a linear individual; he jumps back and forth from one idea to another, one time to another. He spoke of hiding in a ditch and being found out, of hiding in a latrine, of being stuck in a trench with a chronic masturbator, of threatening an officer, of his commander telling him, “You're never going home, coward, you're mine for the rest of your life.”

But after a year, Tomaz was given permission to go. He walked to a Kosovo train station in moldy, maggot-ridden combat gear and begged a ticket out. “When I came home I was a real animal,” he told me. “OK, I was not normal before, but after Kosovo I was a total fool.”

“What do you mean?”

“Before army, I was an unusual guy,” he said. “The army made me more unusual.”

This time, when Tomaz escaped to the hills, he climbed alone, at a blistering pace, opening new routes, stealing his father's hammer to pound pitons. He climbed beyond the supervising gaze of wiser alpinists like Pollak.

“I did some crazy things in those times,” Tomaz says. “Crazier than Dhaulagiri.”

TOMAZ GOT HIS FIRST SHOT at the Himalayas in 1994. He was 25, and had been married since 1991 to Sergeja Jersin, whom he'd met after Kosovo. Their daughter, Ursa, was two years old.

The expedition was to Ganesh V, a technically difficult 22,920-foot peak in Nepal, and was led by Slovenian legend Stane Belak. Only two climbers summited: Belak and Tomaz. Belak became Tomaz's first Himalayan mentor—until the next year, when he died in an avalanche in Slovenia's Julian Alps.

It was Tomaz's next expedition, to Annapurna I in 1995, that made his name. He reached Camp 3, at 21,325 feet, with Mexican climber Carlos Carsolio and Davo and Drejc Karnicar, Slovenian brothers making a first descent on skis. But there wasn't enough food for everyone, and the Karnicars, with greater seniority, preferred to summit with Carsolio. Tomaz was disgusted but followed orders and went down.

At base camp he fumed and gained permission from the expedition leader, Slovenian Tone Skarja, to make another summit bid. His climbing partner fell ill and turned around, but just before nightfall, in whiteout conditions, Tomaz and Arjun Sherpa found Camp 4 at 24,000 feet. Then a storm nearly swept the tent away. Forget about the summit, Skarja ordered. Get down.

Tomaz switched off the radio. The next morning he headed for the top. After 100 yards, Arjun turned back—another storm was bearing down. Tomaz continued, alone, plowing through waist-high snowdrifts, to the 26,504-foot summit.
The Slovenian climbing world realized a prodigy was born—a kid who could keep up with Belak on Ganesh and who could summit Annapurna on his own. But the kid had a problem. You don't disobey Tone Skarja. Bolting for the top was like a rookie quarterback telling Vince Lombardi to go to hell.

Tomaz knew he wasn't a team player, and he wasn't especially worried about it. The next year, 1996, he and another Slovenian upstart, Vanja Furlan, decided to try a first ascent of the 5,400-foot northwest face of 22,493-foot Ama Dablam. Their ascent, says Ed Webster, was “outlandish.” At one point Furlan fell, but after 15 feet was saved by Tomaz's belay. The next day the bag that held their ice gear fell away—gone. Now the only way was up. The radio didn't work well enough for them to understand directions from base camp, so they climbed blind. Tomaz climbed without gloves; the holds were too fine to do otherwise. The two climbed much of the way unroped, because roping would have slowed them down. They made it in five days.

Tomaz had joined the elite of a very elite world, and both the risks and potential costs had escalated. While Tomaz was climbing Ama Dablam, Sergeja gave birth to a boy, on April 26. When Tomaz junior was just a few months old, Tomaz received word that Vanja Furlan had fallen to his death in the Julian Alps.

TOMAZ'S CLIMBS are so stunning that it's hard to find a logical explanation for them. He says it's simple—his spirituality makes the difference. “Every rock face breathes life with its lungs and emanates an energy that is proper only to itself,” he writes in No Impossible Ways. “You feel this energy in particular when you climb the face.” On Dhaulagiri, he says, he talked to the mountain and the mountain talked to him. When he put his hand on its flank he felt a pulse, and he knew, even before a serac fell, that it was going to fall. The mountain warned him.

Tomaz's first true spiritual test came on the Nepalese peak Nuptse. After Ama Dablam, Tomaz soloed the northwest face of Nepal's 22,336-foot Bobaye and then climbed two more Nepalese peaks: 20,075-foot Lobuche East with Carlos Carsolio, by now his favorite partner, and 23,494-foot Pumori, with Carsolio and Slovenians Marjan Kovac and Janez Jeglic. Jeglic was considered the country's best climber, and he and Tomaz cooked up an ambitious plan to establish a new route up 25,770-foot Nuptse, straight up the 8,200-foot west face.

They left base camp on October 27, 1997, and after two days were within 3,200 feet of the summit. They hacked out a tiny ledge and pitched their tent in a storm. That night, Tomaz woke up with a headache that felt like an anvil had landed on his forehead, which was strange. He never got altitude headaches. He turned on his headlamp and discovered that the tent had collapsed under avalanched snow; his head was being crushed.

Tomaz and Jeglic also made the unfortunate discovery that their stove had a gas leak. With that vital piece of equipment falling apart, they decided to make a lunge for the summit—3,200 feet up the wall, 3,200 feet down, in one quick push. They began their assault at four in the morning, climbing unroped on separate paths—simultaneous solos. By mid-morning, at 24,600 feet, they were together again. Base camp radioed that storm clouds were approaching from Everest in the west; a strong gale was already flailing the ridge.

“Let's climb until two,” Tomaz told Jeglic. “If we make it to the top, we take pictures and then step on it and get down.”

Jeglic reached the summit first and waved his ice ax. Thirty minutes later, Tomaz arrived. The winds were huge, and Jeglic (whom Humar often referred to by his nickname, Johan) was nowhere in sight.

“I'm met by the gale and footprints leading toward the south side of the ridge,” Tomaz recalled, “but no Johan. Maybe he's gone to have a look around. I follow his tracks, cursing and grumbling: Where does he think he's going in this weather? The gale is blowing in gusts when I reach the last footprints. I collapse on the ground. No trace of him anywhere. He just disappeared. I start bellowing into the hurricane force wind: Johan! Johan!”

There was no answer: Jeglic had been blown off the top.

Tomaz was distraught and disoriented. His mates in base camp pleaded with him to get off the summit. But he'd lost his goggles. The cold had destroyed the batteries in his headlamp. He was alone, in the dark, without his partner, lost in a maze of ice and rocks. His throat filled with phlegm and blood.

Base camp blared music over the radio—anything to keep Tomaz awake as he hacked blindly down the 3,000 vertical feet with ice ax and crampons, craning into the void for the tiny spot that might be his tent. Eleven hours later, he found it and collapsed. He tried to light the stove, but couldn't. He dozed off, and woke surrounded by flames—the stove had worked after all. His tent and sleeping bag were half gone.

Two days later, Tomaz struggled off the face. But the ordeal wasn't over. In Slovenia, he was seen as a villain in the eyes of many climbers, who blamed him for Jeglic's death. The beloved hero had died; the dangerous upstart had lived.

Tomaz is still controversial among many of Slovenia's climbing elite, who regard him as too interested in publicity and not as skilled as he would have people believe. He does not attend meetings at the Kamnik Alpine Club, nor does he sit on its governing board.

“Tomaz presents himself like a kind of god, or a person who has personal contact with some spirits who are preserving him,” says Marko Prezelj, 36, a top Slovenian climber who heads the club. “If you think like that and climb like that, either you really have contact with ghosts or you have a lot of luck.”

Beyond a curt hello, Tomaz is not on speaking terms with Prezelj. He thinks the falling-out he's had with other Slovenian climbers began the moment Jeglic was swept off Nuptse.

“His death was like cutting off my arm,” Tomaz told me. “We talked a lot about our climb. We knew how dangerous it was. I said, 'Janez, if I die on Nuptse don't think about being guilty for me, and I will do the same.'”

Tomaz pauses.

“Janez was the god of climbing.”

Another pause.

“They think the wrong man came back from Nuptse.”

I'VE BEEN HANGING OUT with Tomaz for nearly two weeks, and he has not stopped talking. He talks about his father, Kamnik, George Bush, environmentalism, abortion, Dhaulagiri, meditation, war, food, wine, Yosemite, hang-gliding, paragliding, Slobodan Milosevic, country music, the Internet, pitons, and prosciutto. If we are in the car and I happen to fall asleep, he nudges me awake to tell me more.

I've come to realize that being with Tomaz is not unlike hanging out with a hyperactive child. One day we watch an unemployed electrician demonstrate a new sport he has created—”stone skiing”—on a slope of cast-off pebbles from a cement factory. Another afternoon we set off on a bike ride and end up at the home of Tomaz's reflexologist, Jana Prezelj, a plump and jolly woman he calls his “spiritual mother.” The evening that ensues involves prodigious quantities of wine and schnapps, a guy singing and playing a tuba, the reflexologist standing on her head and clapping with her feet, and her husband playing a didgeridoo, the wooden horn used by the Australian aborigines, as Tomaz throws open his arms, tilts his head back, and lets the vibes seep into his heart chakra.
But there are times when the solitary Tomaz emerges. One afternoon he leads me to a lookout tower in the Kamnik Alps. It's a rickety wooden thing, but it soars above the trees and gives us a clear, 360-degree view of the rock faces around us. Wind shakes the tower, but Tomaz stands with his hands on his hips, like a commander in a barrage.

“The higher I am, the more comfortable I feel,” he says, his voice echoing. “I don't really start breathing until 5,000 meters. I need the air. I'm an Aquarius—a man who needs to be free.”

On the way home, Tomaz and I stop off at a nearby pub, where we find two of his climbing buddies, Robert Policnik and Damjan Kochar, both in their midtwenties. Beers are ordered, and after a few rounds Tomaz and Damjan drift off to the men's room and I hear loud voices. Damjan is one of the best sport climbers in Kamnik—better than Tomaz, though he doesn't have Tomaz's intensity or his spirituality. Apparently that's what they're discussing in the men's room—more precisely, it's what Tomaz is lecturing loudly about while Damjan listens.

Damjan's flaw, if it can be described that way, is that he prefers to be attached to a rope and to climb with a partner. Policnik—Poli, as he's known—has the long arms of a spider, and it's easy to imagine him scaling a Himalayan face. I ask why Tomaz climbed Dhaulagiri and he didn't.

Poli stares at his beer for a long time.

“Tomaz is…” He stares deeper at his beer.

“I can't find the word.” He smiles. “Tomaz is vicious.”

“Aren't you vicious?” I ask.

“Small vicious,” he replies.

“Would you like to be vicious like Tomaz?”

The beer stare again. “It's suicide, almost.”

When Tomaz decided to solo the south face of Dhaulagiri, even Bojan Pollak worried. One afternoon, Tomaz and I idle away a few hours with his old instructor, drinking homemade blueberry schnapps outside a mountaintop cabin. A bee has just dive-bombed into Tomaz's glass, and he downs the contents in a single gulp, leaving the drunken bee. It's classic Tomaz—pulling off something only he could do, and finishing with a loud laugh, as if to say, “And you doubted me?”

Tomaz reveres Pollak's judgment, because Pollak, now 58, is steady and thoughtful. “Tomaz knows himself better than we do,” Pollak says. “We can't tell him not to go. If we told him not to go, he might lose confidence, and that could be dangerous.”

He looks at Tomaz and smiles.

“But Tomaz did not ask if we thought he should go. He said he would go. We gave him only a 50-50 chance to survive Dhaulagiri. We trusted him, but not nature.”

Later, I ask Tomaz if he was surprised by Pollak's odds.

“I think it was less,” he replies. “Maybe 20 percent.”

And once more, the laugh.

THE CALL FROM DHAULAGIRI came in spring 1999. Tomaz was hanging around Kamnik, enjoying his life, and then it hit him.

“I could not believe it at first, but the call grew stronger with every passing day,” he recalls in No Impossible Ways. “It was at the same time the most terrifying and the most blissful moment of my mountaineering career, a moment I had been waiting for these last five years. Dhaula had finally called, and I knew I had to mount the expedition that same fall.”

For Tomaz, it would be a one-way ticket: He'd either make it to the top and down an easier route, or perish. It would be impossible to downclimb over the face's ice seracs. Three doctors refused to join his support team; they didn't want to watch a suicide by climbing. Tomaz himself cried as he left his kids.

The trip seemed more farce than expedition. A feud with the Alpine Association of Slovenia had frozen Tomaz out of funding, so his main sponsor, the Slovenian cell-phone company Mobitel, picked up the tab. Most of his gear got stuck in the Vienna airport; when he got to Dhaulagiri to begin his acclimatization on September 26, he realized he had not brought enough food. The weather was atrocious; storm after storm hit the area, costing two of the world's best climbers their lives—Alex Lowe, on 26,291-foot Shishapangma on October 5, and Briton Ginette Harrison on Dhaulagiri itself on October 24.

Tomaz started climbing on October 25. He went to a shrine to pray, then walked to the bottom of the south face with his old friend Stipe Bozic, 51, Croatia's top climber, who would stay at base camp to film the ascent. As the two parted ways, an avalanche roared down the main couloir of the face.
His pack weighed more than 110 pounds—food, stove, fuel, pitons, carabiners, sleeping bag, slings, and a five-millimeter rope, just 148 feet long, which would be used not for self-belay but to move his gear. The only luxury he allowed himself was one of his son's sneakers, clipped with a carabiner to his pack.

Progress was slow the first 24 hours, despite a full moon. Icicles broke from seracs, pummeling him; cold water flowed down cracks, soaking him; avalanches forced him to squeeze against the face. He named the seracs that hung like daggers above him—Guillotine, Praying Mantis. On the second day he heard Guillotine crack and flattened himself on the wall as niagaras of ice, rock, and snow hurtled past.

“How are you? Are you OK?” Bozic yelled over the radio.

“You need some adrenaline?” Tomaz replied. “I've got a serious surplus here.”

Tomaz's back and arms became covered in welts and bruises. An ice block crashed into his leg, and he thought it was broken. Blood soaked through his gloves, staining the snow.

On the fifth night, after covering two vertical miles, Tomaz got a toothache. He lay awake most of the night. In the morning, he went to work with his Swiss Army knife, prying a filling from the infected tooth—this, after some minutes spent laboring on the wrong one.

Things became, if possible, worse. A shelf at 23,000 feet forced him to traverse 3,200 feet to the Japanese Ridge (the southeast ridge); he spent a night there at 24,000 feet and in the morning left most of his gear behind and traversed back. At 25,400 feet he actually dry-tooled, unroped, up 600 feet of loose granite, using his ice-ax and crampons to climb the bare rock. He was now within a few hundred meters of the summit. He bivouacked in the open, exposed, at 25,600 feet, on a ledge cut from the ice. For the second night his stove didn't work; he had no water, little food. He had been on the face for eight days.

Try to imagine that bivouac. You are alone, breathing air so thin that it's slowly killing you; you're without tent or stove; your body is a frostbitten and dehydrated bruise; you're beyond rescue. How do you survive, not just physically, but mentally?

Tomaz's answer: “We can control our heartbeat, which in cold, drawn-out bivouacs is preferably as slow as possible,” he writes in his book. “It is necessary to disconnect the arms and the legs and draw most of one's blood into the core of the body and the head. We switch to other dimensions. We become insensitive to pain, cold, wind, homesickness, thirst, hunger. Instead of having dinner we separate from the physical world. But the further you go into the world where there are no reasons or consequences, points of the compass, time points like yesterday or today, where you only are—the harder it is to return. The reentry into the body is usually accompanied by pain.”

On the ninth day, November 2, waking up at 25,600 feet, he struggled toward the summit. He took off his pack and filled his pockets with essentials—radio, camera, energy bars, one ice screw, one sling, the map of his descent route, family photos, a picture of the Virgin Mary, and his son's little shoe.

The weather worsened. Over the radio, base camp read messages of encouragement that Slovenians were sending to his Web site, , which was getting nearly two million hits a day. But then Bozic, who knew that even Tomaz has limits, got on the radio. “No one has ever done that before,” he said, referring to Tomaz's solo route. “It's time to start thinking about descending.”

Tomaz looked up at the summit, where a gale was gathering force. He took out a photograph of his son and, in his exhausted, depleted state, clearly saw young Tomaz crooking his finger out of the picture, saying, “Come home, Daddy.”

“At that moment,” he writes, “I realize in a flash: You're going to die! If you go on, you're going to die.” He turned around.

“For the first time in my life, I realize that if I'm pig-headed, the end is waiting for me at the top,” Tomaz recalls in his book. “Dhaula had let me have the face but not the summit.”

TOMAZ'S ASCENT OF DHAULAGIRI WAS, as mountaineers say, not a climb for a married man. One day I sat with Tomaz and Sergeja in the family living room, surrounded by the spiritual tokens of their lives—crystals, Buddhist sculptures, figurines of the Virgin Mary, a picture of Indian guru Sai Baba. Tomaz interpreted when Sergeja had trouble finding the right word in English, and, being Tomaz, he jumped in with questions of his own.

Sergeja is, if anything, more spiritual than Tomaz. She has walked on burning coals, which Tomaz won't do. She speaks in a dreamy, Sissy Spacek way, and when I asked what seemed a natural question—isn't it rather difficult to be married to Tomaz?—she replied that it was hard in the first few years but now it's different.

“I need this,” she said. “He's my therapy. Hard therapy. I chose him as Jesus chose the cross. By carrying this cross, I grow spiritually. I can't grow without it.”

Surely life would be easier with a normal guy?

“I would die,” she replied. “I would rather not be married.”

Sergeja sees things before Tomaz does. She knew, after Dhaulagiri, that a disaster was in the offing. Tomaz was a hero: The phone rang constantly, and Tomaz, who sees life as a big candy store, could never say no. Everyone wanted to know what he would climb next. Sergeja feared for his life, knowing he would push harder on the next climb. There is a law of nature in the climbing world—no individual or nation can remain the best forever, because the more you try to accomplish, the more likely it is that you will die. Sergeja knows this. The man she lived with before Tomaz, Danilo Golob, was killed climbing.

When Tomaz fell into the construction pit, he didn't imagine any good would come of it. Sergeja knew better. It forced him to stop and think. Among the surprising things that have happened, his bond with his father has changed from spite to admiration, because Tomaz realized that the salt-of-the-earth stubbornness he despised in his father is the same thing that gets him up a mountain face.

“The fall was a gift for Tomaz,” Sergeja said. “On the third day when he was in the hospital, I told him that it was a gift. He didn't understand. But we both knew it would happen. He had to fall into darkness to see the light again.”

“Yes, yes,” Tomaz said.

He turned to her.

“What do you think? Will I climb again?”

“Certainly,” Sergeja replied.

She looked at me.

“He must go. He must live for this. If you really love something, you must be ready to die for it.”

WE ARE A FEW HUNDRED YARDS from the base of Rzenik. Tomaz turns left, off the rockfall, and crutches up a small hill. The last 50 yards is steep and covered with loose grass, and the crutches are useless, so Tomaz throws them aside. He pulls himself forward, crawling now.

He is grunting like an angry bull. As clods of earth dislodge in his hands, he throws them away, wildly; one hits me in the face. I don't know what's fueling him, whether it's the pain in his legs or the frustration of being reduced to crawling up a little hill, but the mental switch has been flipped.
We reach the top, which offers a clear view of Rzenik. It is not a classically beautiful mountain, with a well-defined peak, but it has a multitude of cracks and crevasses and ledges, a lifetime of problems for a young climber.

Tomaz is quiet. The silence lasts ten minutes, an eternity.

“This is my starting point, my meditation place,” he finally says. “Here I get all the answers. Here the Himalayan voices called me. Here I taught myself everything. And when I come back here after the Himalayas, I see nothing has changed. I am still like this”—he places his forefinger next to his thumb—”small. And this place is still huge. When you ask where I get my power, that's it.” He points at the mountain.

He talks a bit more, but the day is ending and the wind is picking up. It is time to head down. Tomaz grimaces as he stands, and he is unsteady. Everyone wants to know if he will climb again. At the moment, he is learning to walk.

The lure of the Himalayas is still with Tomaz Humar. There are so many faces out there, and who knows which one will call out to him at night. Two months after our Rzenik climb, Tomaz headlined at the Banff Mountain Film Festival, North America's premiere showcase of adventure documentaries. He'd thrown away his crutches, defying doctor's orders, and was hobbling around with his old friend Carlos Carsolio. Ed Webster was there, too; it was the first time he'd met Tomaz, and so he showed him his Everest memoir, Snow in the Kingdom, which included pictures of the north face of Lhotse, a 10,000-foot vertical that's never been climbed, never even been attempted. Tomaz called Carsolio over. “Carlos, look at this,” he said. “I told you this would go, I told you this could be climbed.”

Webster was amazed. “Tomaz immediately began picking out the weaknesses of the route and the exact time of day that you'd need to go through each area,” Webster says. “He was ecstatic that here was one of the great walls that hadn't been climbed and that he could do it. I was just shaking my head that here was a climber who had a scary combination of the vision and the technical ability to pull it off. That was when he looked over at me and gave me one of those piercing looks and said, 'This is a one-way-ticket climb.'”

For now, one-way-tickets are a long way off. This spring I caught up with Tomaz on the phone, and he was with his best childhood friend, Tomo Drolec. They had just finished a climb and were laughing about it, and Tomaz said that it was time for a beer or two. He had started ice climbing a few months earlier, he explained, and now he was rock climbing, too. He said that he would climb a 1,000-foot wall in a few days.

“It's great,” he said. “Nobody expected that I would recover so quickly…and I am surprised, honestly I am. I was really scared, especially with ice, about what would happen. The first few times when I tried climbing it was quite painful for me, in the bones and tendons. But after a few times the progress was really quick. Now it's perfect.”

So Tomaz is back. Not back where he was after Dhaulagiri, but back where he started—climbing outside Kamnik with his best friend, having fun, drinking beer, the future unknown. Will he become strong enough to climb in the Himalayas? Will he want to? Should he want to? Should we want him to?

“Actually,” Tomaz says, “I am preparing for something, but even my wife, she doesn't know. Right now I am in very good shape. On ice I feel great, and once again on rock.” Soon he and Bozic would be heading to Mexico to visit Carsolio.

“That will be a new beginning,” he says. “We'll drink tequila and wear sombreros. We will take some shots for a movie and climb, and we will talk about the future. I'm alive again.”

The post Climbing Lessons from the School of Tomaz Humar appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

BAIDOA, SOMALIA

“SALAT! SALAT!”

The call to prayer came at 4:30 a.m.

“Pray! Pray! It's better to pray than to sleep!”

I was staying in a house across the street from one of Baidoa's mosques, so there was no chance of dozing. As the echoes from the loudspeaker faded into the darkness, I could hear the neighborhood stirring as people rose to wash their hands and feet and kneel in prayer toward Mecca.

There was a knock at the bedroom door. “You awake?” John Miskell called out.

Miskell and I were leaving Baidoa before dawn on a journey to a town named Tieglo, deep in the Somali hinterland a few miles south of nowhere. Miskell, who oversees CARE International's relief programs in southern Somalia, was planning to rendezvous there with a convoy of 12 trucks bringing 254 tons of food from Mogadishu. Between Baidoa and Tieglo lay 13 hours of Somali bush, dirt-and-boulder roads offering little more than lungfuls of dust and lobe-deadening headaches and the bleak scenery of a country pounded by civil war and famine. It was Miskell's job to make sure the food got to Tieglo safely.

It's been nearly a decade since jeering mobs dragged the body of U.S. Army Ranger Bill Cleveland through the streets of Mogadishu, and in that time little has improved. When the United Nations armed forces departed in 1995, the implicit message was simple: You people want to kill? Go ahead, kill yourselves. Call us when you get tired of it. Since then, northern Somalia has stabilized somewhat, but southern Somalia, with Mogadishu at its heart, remains a nightmarish, Hobbesian realm that once again hovers on the cusp of famine.

Our Toyota Land Cruiser was parked in the house's courtyard behind a steel gate topped with barbed wire and guarded by a couple of teenagers toting AK-47s. Loaded in the rear were 80 liters of gas in plastic containers. We would be traveling in a four-wheel drive, all-terrain bomb. Miskell would have liked to put the gas on the rooftop luggage rack, but that space was reserved for two other militiamen bearing AK-47s, who were to keep an eye out for trouble—of which, unlike food or water or peace or schools or law and order, there is plenty in Somalia.

“Where's the driver?” I asked when we got to the courtyard.

Miskell nodded at a prostrate form on the ground.

“Apparently our driver is praying,” he said.

The prayers seemed unusually devout. When he finished, we drove into the center of town and met up with several more Somalis who worked for CARE. They would travel with us in two other Land Cruisers—one in front of our vehicle, the other behind— equipped with the requisite duos of rooftop gunslingers. As dawn broke, our convoy headed into the bush, only to stop after a few miles. We were surrounded by stunted trees covered in dust. Camels plodded past, herders in tow. Finally Cobra, one of the Somalis—everybody has a nickname in Somalia, and his was Cobra—walked back from the lead vehicle to tell us what was happening.

“There is an ambush ahead,” he said.

MANGAR ANGUI, SUDAN

JUST AS SUDAN has the unfortunate distinction of possessing Africa's longest-running civil war, the food drops Loftus helps oversee are part of Africa's longest-running, and most controversial, aid project. The war itself began in 1956, when Sudan gained independence from British rule; went into remission in 1972; and returned worse than ever in 1983, after the Muslim government in Khartoum imposed Islamic law on the country, including the largely Christian and animist southern half. (The U.S. government supports the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army.)In the last 17 years the war has cost some two million lives—many from war-induced famines—and turned several million more people into refugees.

Loftus's work is part of Operation Lifeline Sudan, an 11-year-old joint project of the United Nations and some 40 NGOs, including CARE. The operation has run up an estimated $2 billion tab so far through its food and medicine drops, and critics have charged that such projects allow bloody conflicts to continue indefinitely since aid groups strike devil's bargains with warring factions, which inevitably get a cut of the food in exchange for safe passage of their convoys. Refugees get fed, but so do murderers.

Out in the field, Loftus has more important things to worry about than lofty policy debates—things like not dying. Born the year John Miskell joined the Peace Corps, she is relatively new to the game. She came to Sudan via Great Falls, Montana, a place, she says in a mock serious voice, “where a handshake is still the law.” Always athletic, she became an expert rock climber in her teens, and after high school moved to Boston and worked as a nanny, an emergency medical technician, a vegetarian chef, and an orderly in a mental institution before getting an anthropology degree from the University of Massachusetts. After college she drifted to Kenya and worked as a guide for luxury safaris, but there was an emptiness to the work—baby-sitting rich white people in Africa is not terribly meaningful. So two years ago she applied for a job with the World Food Program in Sudan and, thanks to some persistence, got it.

Every six weeks Loftus boards a bush plane at the UN base in Lokichokio, Kenya, and is dropped off several hours later in rebel-held territory in southern Sudan. This is assuming the UN plane does not nose-dive into the landing strip and flip over (as one did while I was in Sudan) or that its passengers are not taken hostage by gunmen (as happened to another UN plane shortly after I left). If all goes well Loftus and a partner stay at each drop-off point for a few days to a week. Then another plane takes them to another site. Loftus sleeps in a Kelty tent, cooks over a kerosene burner, and does her best to avoid snakes, scorpions, hyenas, soldiers, and wild dogs. The WFP requires its field-workers to keep a survival bag handy with food, water, first-aid supplies, flashlight, and compass in case they have to flee. In Mangar Angui, I asked Loftus's field partner, John Kamemia, where he keeps his “fast-run kit.” He laughed and pointed to his ample belly. “This is my fast-run kit,” he said.

If Loftus needs to investigate food conditions in a village ten miles from her camp, she must walk. Paved roads do not, for the most part, exist in southern Sudan, nor do vehicles to drive on them—just the occasional NGO Land Rover or military truck being pounded to death by the baked earth in the dry season or swallowed up by that same earth in the rainy season. Some monitors are sent out with bicycles (one-speed bikes made in China have proven more durable here than American-made mountain bikes), but the terrain tends to be too rutted or too swampy for travel on anything but your own two feet, which will be cracked or infected, depending on the season.

Mosquitoes can be so dense that you inhale them. Sudan also boasts 80 percent of the world's cases of infestation by guinea worm, whose larva enters the human body via unclean drinking water and grows in the bloodstream into a three-foot-long white worm before chewing its way through the skin, usually at the foot, and emerging in its entirety in an agonizing and horribly disgusting process that takes weeks at a minimum, and usually months.

“Sudan,” said one WFP field worker, a woman who'd endured cerebral malaria and a mysterious grapefruit-size growth on her neck, “tries to destroy people.”

TIEGLO, SOMALIA

DESPITE WHITE HAIR and a white beard, John Miskell looks absurdly vigorous for a man who has spent his adult life in the punishing bush. The mystery of his youthful appearance deepened as we drove to Tieglo. In places the road wasn't even dirt, just rocks, and the Land Cruiser jolted up and down as though perched atop a giant jackhammer. Red dust invaded the cabin in clumps; the 100-degree air tasted of gasoline. I placed a bandanna over my mouth; our driver jammed the end of his scarf into his mouth and gnawed on it. Occasionally we passed small towns nearly wiped out in the last decade of war, a Dresden-like vista of ruin. Small groups of underfed people sat in what shade they could find beside mud huts. They stared as we passed, our Land Cruisers strange apparitions from the land of plenty.

Miskell sat up front, seemingly unfazed. Nothing covered his nose or mouth. He patiently scanned the bush for birds; when he saw one, he would jot its name in his notebook. I tried to stump him, asking the names of birds that flew past in a millisecond, but he was miles ahead of me. “Red-billed hornbill,” he said as one zoomed by, and then he delivered an ornithological trump card: “Female.” On occasion he would tell the driver to stop, and he would leave the car, binoculars in hand, and shuffle toward a creature perched in a tree. The rooftop guards seemed baffled by this white guy chasing after birds.

Long-term exposure to other people's suffering can harm aid workers in a process known euphemistically as “vicarious traumatization.” The mind and body have ways of coping: alcohol abuse, withdrawal. This has not happened to Miskell. His defense mechanism is unique—he retreats into an alternative universe of wildlife. For him, the bush isn't full of misery, but of mysteries unsolved. He has coauthored a book on Somali birds and is updating it for a second edition. He has discovered three new species of beetles, and two admiring colleagues named beetles they discovered after him. “Every time a botanist comes to this country, they find a new species of plant,” he enthused. “It's just amazing.”

Miskell has become a man of Africa rather than a visitor to Africa. He drinks camel milk by the gallon, and almost everywhere he goes, he carries a six-by-eight-inch picture of his family, a posed studio shot where he stands proudly with his Somali wife and his half-Somali, half-American children. It is, in a way, a passport that tells everyone Miskell is African, that he is not just another white guy with the power to provide free food, that he is more at home in the chaos of Somalia than in the comfort of America.

Well after sunset, and nearly 14 hours after leaving Baidoa, we pulled into Tieglo reeking of gasoline and sweat and dust. The food trucks, which had set out from Mogadishu, were scheduled to arrive the next day. But as we were to find out, things had not gone according to plan. Miskell was about to get another dose of chaos.
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MANGAR ANGUI, SUDAN

AT SIX IN THE evening, Loftus fired up her WFP solar-powered radio and shouted out, “Lima Two, Mike Golf India!” No response. She shouted again, and this time summoned a voice from the ether.

“Sienna?”

“Yes!” she yelled back. “John? How are you doing?”

John Burns, another WFP field-worker, is Loftus's boyfriend. Like lovers meeting on the same bench in a park, they talk on the radio at the same time every evening.

“Great,” Burns replied.

“Are you still smoking?” Loftus asked.

“No, but I really crave it.”

“That's a good copy. When will you get to the field?”Burns, who was at the UN base in northern Kenya, was waiting to be sent into southern Sudan.

“I don't know. There's nothing for me to do there yet.”

“OK,” Loftus yelled. “Well, keep on not smoking.”

“Right, talk to you tomorrow.”

Loftus turned to me. “Now everyone in the SPLA, SRAA, and WFP knows John is trying to quit smoking,” she said, laughing. “You'd like to say, 'I love you, I love you, I miss you, I miss you,' but you can't.”

Two-way radios are the Internet of the aid world. Virtually every aid worker in southern Sudan—there are hundreds in the field at any time—uses a shortwave radio to stay in touch with headquarters and, if the need arises, as it frequently does, to arrange emergency evacuations for medical or security reasons. At night the airwaves become a vast chat room in which people swap gossip like teenagers burning the phone lines after lights-out. If you flip between channels—and aside from talking with your colleagues, the best form of entertainment is eavesdropping on them—you will hear WFP staffers talking about sports, bitching about the weather, trying to sell each other used cars.

The foreigners work alongside Sudanese whose grasp of English seems to derive, in part, from radio chatter. In Mangar Angui, one of Loftus's colleagues was a 26-year-old local named John Garang (not to be confused with the head of the SPLA, who has the same name). If Garang wanted to know whether Loftus understood something, he would ask, with a hint of BBC in his accent, “Do you copy?” If he wanted to indicate that things were fine, he might say “Oscar Kilo,” radio-ese for “OK.”

One day, after a grueling six-hour walkabout to check food conditions, Garang hung around our tents, which we had set up inside mud huts, and leafed through a copy of Yachting that Loftus had brought into the field along with a recent copy of Newsweek and one of Shape, its cover advertising “8 New Moves for a Knockout Tush.” Putting his finger on a color picture of a 45-foot sloop, Garang—a man who had likely never seen open water in his life, nor a vessel larger than a canoe—announced enthusiastically, “I want this boat.”

Loftus and I were slumped in the shade of a tree, swallowing oral-rehydration salts.

“Aren't you tired?” I asked.

“Negative,” Garang said. “Small walk.”

The Dinka are known for being exceptionally tall and long-legged. The most famous Dinka in the world is seven-foot, seven-inch retired NBA center Manute Bol.

“How long can you walk?”

“Twenty-four hours,” Garang said.

“Twenty-four hours?”

“Affirmative.”

TIEGLO, SOMALIA

THE TOWN HAS several hundred mud huts, but no hotels, so Miskell and I stayed in a local merchant's home that had a roof made of tin rather than plastic sheeting, making it deluxe accommodations. In the morning, the CARE team gathered for a breakfast of sweet tea, camel milk, goat meat, and anjera, the local bread. Miskell didn't bother saying good morning.

“You haven't heard yet,” he told me. “The convoy was attacked.”

The news had come over the two-way radio. No one was sure where the convoy was or whether anyone had been injured. After breakfast Miskell visited the local radio operator, in a lean-to crammed with Somalis waiting in line to talk with friends in other towns, and got through to someone in CARE's office in Merca.

“When do you expect him to reach this location?” Miskell shouted.

“I don't know,” came the reply. “There was fighting. Over.” The connection broke off abruptly.

“Can you use channel 8044?” Miskell shouted. “Channel 8044! Over.” They briefly re-established contact. Miskell left the hut in disgust. Four guards had been killed, three wounded, and a technical destroyed in the ambush, at a checkpoint about 100 miles from Tieglo. “Why are they doing it?” Miskell fumed. “It's insane.”

The rest of the day consisted of quick updates with CARE employees in Merca and Mogadishu. On one occasion, Ahmed Abdulle, the CARE convoy leader, was patched through. Because anyone could listen to the shortwave conversation, including the gunmen who attacked the convoy, little was said about where the convoy was holed up or how it was going to get here intact.

“Are you safe where you are?”

“Yes,” Ahmed replied. “I am safe. The convoy is intact and safe.”

“Will you be able to leave?”

Static.

Before dinner we listened to the BBC World Service, which reported that the office of a British aid group, ACCORD, had been attacked in a town near Merca. Two people were dead. A militia tracked the gunmen down and killed their leader, but two bystanders were wounded in that shootout. There was silence in the compound.

The next morning, when I wandered into the courtyard for breakfast, Miskell again skipped the pleasantries. “You haven't heard?” he asked.

“What now?” I said.

“A civilian truck that was on the road the convoy was on hit a land mine. We don't know how many were killed.” The mine, he explained, was meant for our food convoy.

The ambush appeared to be a business dispute. The trucking firm that CARE hired to transport the food was being attacked by a rival company that wanted CARE's business, we learned. Allies of the victimized firm had already struck back by kidnapping one of the owners of the firm that launched the ambush.

There was more. We soon heard that the CARE convoy had been attacked a second time the previous evening, as many as ten more guards killed and another technical destroyed by rocket-propelled grenades. On top of that, militias linked to the warring trucking firms had begun fighting in Beledweyn, a town near the ambush sites; shops in the town had been looted.

“Food is dangerous,” Miskell remarked. “If we're not careful, this convoy is going to start a war, a big war.”

There was nothing he could do except return to Merca the next day and instruct Ahmed to give the food to local charities and go back to Mogadishu. When he returned from the radio shack, Miskell sat in the courtyard, ignoring dozens of children who stared at him through the wooden fence, and began reading a novel by Tony Hillerman. I drew his attention to a beetle climbing a wall behind him.

“Longhorned wood bore,” he said.

MANGAR ANGUI, SUDAN

BEFORE THE SUN had risen much above the horizon, Loftus and I put on running shoes and headed for the dirt airstrip. We jogged back and forth for a half-hour, past women lugging jugs of water on their heads, past thin hunters with spears, past naked, giggling children.

“They think it's the most bizarre thing,” Loftus said. And it is. But in Sudan, where serious illness is a scratch or a sneeze or a dirty fork away, staying fit (or at least unsick) is important. Loftus travels with an arsenal of health- and sanity-preserving weapons. She eschews the beans-and-rice strategy of bush survival, opting instead for jars of garlic and olives, packets of cumin and coriander, powdered coconut milk, cans of tikka marsala, and bags of bulgar and lentils. She carries $60 tubes of LancĂ´me skin cleanser, toenail polish, and a solar-powered cassette player. “I have one week off for every six weeks in the field,” she explains. “If I didn't feel at home, I couldn't work here.”

Sadly, these self-protective strategies can widen the gulf between aid workers and the people they help. It's not a white-versus-black issue; Kamemia was almost as much of an alien in Mangar Angui as Loftus, although his knowledge of Arabic, which some educated southern Sudanese speak, brought him closer to a few. Aid workers learn to be insular: The hands extended toward you—and everyone wants to shake your hand—can transmit any number of gastrointestinal diseases. Loftus has already perfected a method of waving in such a friendly way that people don't realize she hasn't shaken their hands.

for another village, we were watched closely by two women who had been employed, during our visit, to wash our dishes and bring water from a well a half-mile away, carrying the 20-liter containers on their heads. They had been paid with a sack of maize, which would fulfill perhaps a quarter of a family's needs for a month, after the women pounded it into powder and cooked it into a sludgy porridge. But they wanted more, and they held out their hands to Loftus as she stowed her food in her trunk. The women wore torn, soiled bits of clothing and, like all but the luckiest of local villagers, had no shoes.

“Don't beg,” Loftus said sharply to one, in English. “It doesn't make you look good.”

It sounded harsh, and it was. But her words reflected the sort of hard-heartedness aid workers must adopt to keep from being driven into utter depression by the insurmountable misery around them. It also reflected an effort to stay sane by following the rules even when doing so seems callous or futile. You can't save everyone, nor can you protect them from vultures in their midst. Sometimes you have little choice but to walk away. During the food distribution, as women left with entire 50-kilo bags, Loftus spoke with local officials who told her the food would be kept nearby and redistributed the next day. By that time, as they well knew, she would be gone. And the chiefs would divide the food however they wished.
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TIEGLO, SOMALIA

THE ELDERS OF Tieglo gathered in the village's television hut, where you pay the equivalent of five cents for an evening of satellite TV, and listened to Miskell explain that the convoy had been attacked twice and dozens killed. Their people—a scattered 10,000 in all—would not be getting any food, not now. The quartet of elders, carrying finely carved wooden staffs and wearing elegant sarongs, sat in plastic lawn chairs and stroked their beards.

“Hunger is increasing,” one of them said, as a Somali translated for me. “We didn't get any food in December or January. People are selling their livestock for food.” This is true. The WFP was about to appeal for a massive infusion of food aid for countries in the Horn of Africa: According to the UN, roughly eight million people are at risk of starvation in Ethiopia alone, as well as in parts of Kenya and Sudan. Pockets of malnutrition were already developing around Tieglo—indicators of big trouble ahead.

“We have to go,” Miskell replied. “We'll come back as soon as we can.”

The elder shrugged in the resigned manner of men who have come to expect the worst in a country that has experienced the worst. “It is Allah's will,” he said.

It was hard to keep track of all the thievery and corruption. There was the provincial official seeking free food for his orphanage, an empty house filled with kids only when aid workers visited. There was the Baidoa warehouse set on fire to cover up the pilfering of UN supplies by its managers. There was the 370-ton food convoy stolen by a provincial governor's gunmen and used, the rumor goes, to acquire new Land Cruisers. And the WFP official who was so corrupt that, according to a joke making the rounds, WFP stood for “Warlord Food Program.”

When the meeting ended, everyone filed away quietly, as though leaving a funeral. Miskell returned to our tin-roofed room, which was stiflingly hot. şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř, a stiff breeze stirred up clouds of dust.

“Most people in this country would like to see the warlords evaporate,” he told me. “If you cut the food out, who is going to starve? Not the gunmen. They have guns and they will find ways to get food. The other people will starve. If we pulled out there might be some sort of conclusion reached faster than otherwise, but the number of people who would die would be pretty incredible.”

This dilemma is at the heart of the debate over food aid. Perhaps pulling out would be, in the long run, the right thing to do, but doing so would take the ruthlessness of a Machiavellian and the heartlessness of a Malthusian. “Sometimes you feel like packing it in,” Miskell admitted. “Some people would tell you I'm crazy, and maybe they're right.” But he stays.

“My family keeps telling me to come back to America, that I can find a job, I don't need to do this,” he said. “But every time I go to the States I go for about four weeks, and after about a month I know it's time to leave again. Maybe it's because everything is too perfect. I find it boring.”

Miskell is no adrenaline junkie. He may be an unpredictability junkie, however—a guy who wants to be surprised by what unfolds in front of him or what flies over his head. And he wants to feel that he is really doing something. As I discovered, he is pathetically out of touch with the rest of the media-saturated First World, out of touch with IPO fever and the latest box-office sensation. He still cares about starvation, the poor bastard, even after 30 years in the field.

We returned to Baidoa the next day and then flew to Merca. After a 30-minute stopover to load some fuel, the plane headed to Nairobi, with me on it. I watched as Miskell climbed into his Land Cruiser and started home with his quartet of bodyguards. His first order of business was to find a trucking company that could get a convoy of food to Tieglo. He will likely be doing that sort of thing for the rest of his working life. He does not plan to return to live in America, ever. When he retires, he wants to build a house on a plot of land that he owns with his wife. The land is in Mogadishu..

LOKICHOKIO, KENYA

IT HAPPENED QUICKLY, the switch from blighted war zone to bush-camp luxury. Loftus, Kamemia, and I waited at Mangar Angui's airstrip with our gear for the single-engine plane that would take us to the next village. The nine-seater landed with a bump, and the pilot stepped out and told us we wouldn't be going to the other village after all, because the dirt airstrip there, which the villagers had just scratched out of the bush, and over which he had just flown, was too short. We radioed Lokichokio for instructions and were told to return to Kenya.

Loki is a cross between a military camp and a summer camp. The roar of cargo planes is constant, and an army of four-wheel-drive vehicles shuttles between the airstrip and the aid workers' residential compounds a few miles away. The jeeps pass through town, a parched collection of dilapidated storefronts and dome-shaped huts of branches and plastic sheeting inhabited mostly by members of the Turkana tribe.

The main compound has some incongruous Club Med touches: Attractive thatch roofs cover outdoor picnic tables; a disco ball hangs in an open-air bar offering everything from Russian vodka to American cigarettes. There is a volleyball court a few paces away. At night, aid workers unwind over beers kept ice-cold in a refrigerator hooked up to a generator. Later still they might head off in pairs to each others' tents and huts.

Early one evening, Loftus and I sat down for a quiet beer. The bar was crowded with Afrikaner UN pilots bossing around the Kenyan bartender. Friends of Loftus's said hello. A few yards away a swimming pool was surrounded by bougainvilleas in bloom. şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř the perimeter, delineated by a barbed-wire fence patrolled by men with rifles, sat the baked red desolation of northern Kenya.

I asked Loftus to tell me what she was learning, living this life.

“When you see war,” she told me, “when you see a culture that has changed into a war culture, you become grateful. People in the States do not know what it's like to not be free. They have no clue. All the issues that I would scream and march and yell about in college—I didn't know shit. You don't know what loss of freedom is until you see people who have no freedom, until you see people whose children are stolen into slavery.”

On my last day at Loki, the security guards went on strike and held a protest outside the main gate. The local police were called in, and they fired at the crowd, and after the crowd dove for cover, shots were fired at the police and into the compound. Loftus and her colleagues hardly flinched. They finally retreated into a courtyard after several volleys were fired and after the head of security began yelling, “I suggest you get somewhere safe! Anything can happen!” As sporadic gunfire continued for an hour or two, the aid workers slouched on the ground, so casual they could have fallen asleep.

Earlier, when we talked at the bar, Loftus said, “You know you can be shot, you know it, but you really feel like you're not gonna. Somehow, because you're here trying to help, somehow you've got this protective armor. Which is bullshit. You almost have to feel that way to go into it, because if you're constantly thinking, 'Oh, God, I could get shot,' then it doesn't work.” She laughed. “I think it's not going to happen to me, which is crap.”

Loftus has already been evacuated from the field twice—once for malaria, once because her village was about to be attacked by militiamen. One night in Mangar Angui, when the BBC World Service reported the deaths of the eight aid workers near the Ugandan border only about two hundred miles from us, I went to Loftus's hut and told her; she was less interested than I expected. She didn't know them. I told Kamemia. “Oh, yeah?” he said, and returned to his book.

Loftus did know Richard Powell, a WFP worker from Australia who died last year in a plane crash. Powell's ashes were buried in January at a Sudanese village where he had worked, and Loftus cried at his funeral. The African ceremony involved the slaughter of a half-dozen cows, the burial of a live sheep, and at the end of it all, the playing, on a portable stereo, of Pink Floyd's “The Wall.”

It is a form of cognitive dissonance: I could be killed; I can't be killed. John Miskell has this capacity, too. He doesn't scare easily, and he doesn't have a death wish, but he has paid for extra insurance that will provide his family, in the event of his death in the field, with a year of his salary in addition to the three years' salary CARE would chip in. Like Loftus, he knows the risks, and he carries on. There is a difference between risking your life and thinking you will lose it. All aid workers do the former; few do the latter.

Loftus's insurance is a four-leaf clover worn on a pendant around her neck. She doesn't know how much longer she will last in Sudan. A year, maybe two. After that, she's not sure. She wants to sail around the world with her boyfriend and return to aid work, somewhere, somehow. Perhaps not in a war zone, but in a country with development work, the sunnier side of the humanitarian world. I asked whether she might return to America and live a life that would fit within the parameters of “normalcy.” If she wanted to help people, she could work in a soup kitchen; for thrills, she could go climbing, the sort of thing she used to do before heading to Africa. But Loftus told me that when she visits home and sees her old climbing buddies, her attention fades as they talk about mountains they have summited; theirs fades as she talks about Sudan.

My question lingered in the air. Finally, Loftus shook her head from side to side. Ěý

Peter Maass is the author of Love Thy Neighbor, a memoir of covering the war in Bosnia.
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