July 2009 Archives
ARGHANDAB -- The Afghan National Army has small bases in Arghandab, just outside Kandahar, and a handful of armored vehicles have assembled outside the gates of one. In the distance to the north is a modest range of mountains, and in the south is a dry, flat empty plain. We are planning an early-morning departure for Kharkiz, but in the meantime the soldiers have promised me an afternoon of the hottest and most unpleasant down-time I can imagine.
Read MoreARGHANDAB - The Royal 22e Régiment, based in Quebec City, provides the bulk of the force to the Canadian Battle Group in Kandahar province. Known as the "Van Doos," for the Quebecois pronunciation of "22nd" or vingt-deux, they are Canada's premiere Francophone fighting force and, for this year's fighting season in southern Afghanistan, the sharp edge of the Canadian military sword. For the next week, I will be on a joint US/Afghan/Canadian operation with the Canadian Battle Group in Khakriz, a district of Kandahar province where the Taliban have operated with impunity for years now.
Read MoreHOHENAU -- Paraguay's national addiction is yerba mate, a holly bush that when ground to a coarse powder and steeped in scalding water creates a bitter, astringent tea. It would be mildest exaggeration to say that by noon every day, most Paraguayans have drunk more yerba mate by volume than most Americans drink of coffee in a week. The slavish devotion to the drink extends to all classes and ethnicities, including Europeans. Indeed, I have heard of only two Paraguayans who scorned the stuff. One was Bernhard Foerster, the Jew-mauling founder of New Germany, and the other was Josef Mengele.
Read MoreITA -- Paraguayan soil is a dark, rich red, the same ferrous color that stained my white socks when I visited Mississippi as a boy. Since I have never dug up a human body here before -- much less one belonging to a fugitive Nazi -- I can only guess how red a corpse's bones should be. According to Hugh Thomas, one of the most serious proponents of the theory that Reichsleiter Martin Bormann died in Paraguay in 1959 and was secretly disinterred and brought to Berlin, the Bormann bones found in Berlin in 1972 had a distinct red sheen, the telltale tattoo of their brief stay here in the municipal cemetery of Ita.
Read MoreASUNCION -- In his last day in the Bunker, to ensure that his beloved Alsatian Blondi would never walk at the end of a Soviet leash, Hitler ordered her poisoned. About the fates of his closest human companions the Fuehrer was not so careful. Many (Goebbels, Eva Braun) killed themselves, but in the chaos of the last days, at least one emerged and made a run for safety. Whether that run ended in Paraguay is the subject of the second document I examined at the terror archive in Asuncion.
Read MoreASUNCION -- Mengele grew up in Guenzburg, Bavaria. Guenzburg is the present-day site of Legoland Deutschland and is just a couple hundred miles from the ancestral hometown of Alfredo Stroessner. Stroessner, a year younger than Mengele, was born to a Bavarian immigrant father in Paraguay, and by the time Mengele arrived to settle in Paraguay permanent, he had ruled the country for nearly five years. Mengele thought a fellow fascist Teuton might see his flight from justice sympathetically. He was right.
Read MoreASUNCION -- Like many before them, the Nazis came to Paraguay as a last resort. In those years, crossing the equator for an unknown southern land meant forsaking not only the comforting clockwise flush of the toilet, but also a way of life. It was an epic and arduous journey, and indeed in the case of Australia's convicts nothing short of the gallows convinced them to undertake it. Paraguay was, in a way, an anti-Australia: if Australia's magic was to take bonded criminal dross and transmute it into civilization, Paraguay's was to take freely-settled cultural and religious aristocrats and reduce them to beggary and ruin. It is where pretenses to civilization came to die.
Read MoreASUNCION -- Dr. Josef Mengele, Auschwitz's Angel of Death, first traveled to Paraguay in 1951, at the age of 40. He represented his father's Bavarian ironworks in its South American affairs, and he thought he could sell the company's new manure-spreader to the German and German-descended farmers in the Paraguayan hinterlands. Many of those Germans sympathized with the defeated Reich, so Mengele found refuge and immigrated to Paraguay permanently in 1959. Across the next week of posts I will visit where he and other Nazis are known to have lived, and where some say the most wanted of them, Martin Bormann, was buried secretly in 1959.
Read MoreKANDAHAR AIRFIELD -- The man in the photo below spent nearly three decades in the Canadian military, and then, working for the private military company Skylink, three years as de facto commander of the African Union's air force. When I met him at dawn in Kandahar, his current place of business, he had already nearly finished sending his fleet of helicopters out on their daily appointed rounds. He had also already lit up his first Cohiba of the day, and smoked it nearly down to the butt.
Read MoreHELMAND - The blackened crater on the road from Goreshk to Lashkar Gah is enough to give anyone pause. Some pause to ogle -- the British MP in my armored vehicle was downright excited to be passing a strike site so large -- but others pause to shudder. The pit was big enough to swallow half a Volkswagen (or a whole Tata Nano), and it had claimed the lives of ISAF soldiers less than a week before.
Read MoreThis post is by Anup Kaphle
HELMAND - I am not used to my appearance working in my favor. But one of the most frequent compliments I've bagged in Afghanistan is that I look like an Afghan, talk like an Afghan, and without my heavy load of body armor could possibly pass as one. (Graeme has this affliction, too, and is often taken for a freakishly tall Hazara.)
Read MoreHELMAND - Residents of Helmand, the southern Afghanistan province that the US Marines are currently storming in their biggest operation since Fallujah 2004, knew this was coming. I just returned with Anup Kaphle from a short trip there and observed not only a highly fragile, Taliban-friendly land, but also one being steadily and conspicuously stocked with men and materiel, and prepared for an invasion like the one now underway.
Read MoreKANDAHAR -- Afghanistan, where I have just landed, is filled with illusions of space and of time. A distance that looks on a map like a short afternoon drive can take eight hours to traverse, and a face lined with a century of wrinkles often turns out to have earned them in just forty years.
Read MoreAN AIR BASE IN KUWAIT - When I flew out of Baghdad, leaving Iraq this most recent of dozens of times, something felt different. Usually when we reach cruising altitude, higher than any stray round or MANPAD system can reach, the relief is distinct and exquisite. This time the feeling was more melancholy: not because I was leaving a country soon to be rendered back to its own people, but because for once I felt like I was leaving Iraq to go somewhere less attractive.
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