In the Hot Zone: One Man, One Year, Twenty Wars [ペーパーバック]

This is a great book, and an excellent companion to my friend Robert Young Pelton's Robert Young Pelton's The World's Most Dangerous Places: 5th Edition (Robert Young Pelton the World's Most Dangerous Places).

I have copious notes that I provide below, but up front want to mention that the books comes with a DVD that is SENSATIONAL. The author is not just a gifted writer and observer of the human condition, but also a gifted photographer and cinematographer and his work is shown off to great advantage by Peripetela Pictures in "A World of Conflict: a play." In 24 chapters, one gets a mix of superb video on each of about 20 "hot zones" and also two "mellow" zones: Kurdistan at peace, and Iran with a huge middle class that disagrees with its government's radical posture. The video helps make clear the author's point that broadcast television is not doing the greatest job in showing complex situations. The film ends with a dedication to the tens of millions of innocent victims.

This book, which is vastly more detailed than the video, but best enjoyed AFTER watching the video, is completely different from Pelton's encyclopedic work, and ends with a tour of "Third WOrld America."

I warmed to the author and his work very quickly as I read his superb and consistently ethical discussion and illustration of complex ethical challenges that we all too often avoid through self-censorship, not trusting the US public to "get it." The author is clearly committed to telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and I for one consider him vastly more honorable and trustworthy than anyone now running for President, other than Ron Paul, the only common sense person in the lot.

He became a celebrity by accident, with a clip of a cold-blooded killing by a Marine of a wounded man who has surrendered to other Marines, but like Steve Emerson, whose famous 1994 PBS video exposed the immams on US soil calling for the murder of Americans--a film that got him exiled from broadcast journalism and ignored by the FBI--this author ended up finding himself within a Yahoo Internet opportunity.

The bottom line on this book is that there are grave (no pun intended) consequences of ignoring any and all failed states.

A couple of notes:

US and Belgium set stage for the Congo genocide of millions by putting a mad dictator in charge;

Darfur is technically not a genocide because there are a multiplicity of actors killing indiscriminantly;

In tribal conflicts, having a bodyguard and translator team of one from each clan disarms the varied roadblocks by alternating clans (US Government does not appear ready to fund this option yet, they tend to go with the best English speaker, teachers with no warlord stature).

Economics of scarcity, not race or tribes, are at the root of conflict. I will take this opportunity to note that corruption and predatory immoral capitalism, as well as unilateral US militarism and virtual colonialism, are an absolute foundation for our loss of peace and prosperity that is eminently achievable for ALL seven billion souls.

I have a number of short "impressions" that stay with me:
+ Cambodian skulls, tens of thousands of them
+ Tsunami bodies with flesh falling off bones
+ Hatred of America everywhere
+ Poverty, POVERTY, PoVeRtY, poverty, ytrevop (#1 high-level threat)
+ Poverty porn (over the top worst-case pandering coverage)
+ Al Qaeda is FOREIGN to virtually all Muslim tribes and NOT supported
+ Rape worse than death across Africa
+ "There is laughter too" (author is consistently blown away by resilience of people under the most terrible of conditions)
+ Corruption and epidemics on top of poverty are the scourge
+ Night commutes to cities for safety
+ Arab versus African
+ Amount of work it takes to grind corn
+ Jungle rash and respiratory failures as cost of doing this
+ Kevlar DOES get penetrated
+ Hezbollah media relations better than US or Israeli capabilities
+ Amazing stories of grace and perseverence, "indominatable spirits"
+ 5 hours sleep day after day to both do the coverage and convert it into multi-media stories and upload it via satellite to remote stations
+ How obvious it is to the world that US labels anyone who is anti-Israel as a terrorist, and is so quick to support dictators
+ Ugliness of Israeli air strikes on Lebanese roads and bridges
+ Russian carpet bombing of Chechnya, carrying 70 liters a day of water to top story of a shot up apartment building
+ US is blamed for every Israeli atrocity
+ Israeli strategy in Lebanon is failing--Hezbollah grows stronger and more legitimate every day
+ Indiscriminate Israeli war crimes, including helicopter attack on a man on a motorbike who just got food for his family
+ Depth of public anger at US and Israel
+ Results of 18M whatevers of herbicide on Viet-Nam, generations of deformed children growing into deformed adults--girl brushing her hair using her foot to hold the brush as she had no arms....
+ US victims get compenstated, foreign victims do not
+ Colombian mines
+ US supported genocide of millions in Cambodia--mass graves, 17,000 at a time here and there

This is an important and thoughtful book. It should be used as an essential academic, business, government, and religious reference, along with other books I recommend below and of course Pelton's work and the work of Ralph Peters.

The author is elegantly angry at the simplistic almost moronic television commentators and the venal politicians. On page 285 he really gets my attention when he says that he has "a growing self-righteous contempt for the almost wilful ignorance that American citizens have about the rest of the planet." He concludes that we are NOT the good guys, that we have LOST OUR HUMANITY. I agree.

He observes that rendition and torture and summary executions are the tactical manifestation of a strategic vacuum. The US is a rogue nation. I agree.

This is one of the best personal histories I have ever had in my hands, and I consider this author to be one of the most talented, ethical, sincere, intelligent, and patriotic individuals I have ever known of or read work by. The combination of the book and DVD is a good one and should be repeated. I will follow his work in the future, and hope that one day we have a Secretary of State smart enough to bring honest observers of the human condition into their office every single day of the year.

One man, one year, twenty wars. Wow. Simply a moving wonderful piece of work that puts the poverty, grief, and dishonor in stark perspective, not as a "downer" but rather as a call to responsibility by We the People.

See also:
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions
Wars of Blood and Faith: The Conflicts That Will Shape the 21st Century
Deliver Us from Evil: Peacekeepers, Warlords and a World of Endless Conflict
War Is a Racket: The Anti-War Classic by America's Most Decorated General, Two Other Anti=Interventionist Tracts, and Photographs from the Horror of It
The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World
The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency

I was immediately sucked into "In the Hot Zone" when Sites recounts his personal drama after reporting on the 2004 Iraq mosque shooting, which ultimately sent him hurtling away from mainstream network news to his Yahoo! project.

And then Sites begins his journey, and although we get personal anecdotes along the way, he focuses mainly on his subject: each and every war zone on the planet, its victims and its perpetrators.

I began to really ask myself whether I liked this approach or not. I was thinking, there are two ways to go with this kind of travelogue material: the bestselling, highly personal, "Eat, Pray Love" approach by Elizabeth Gilbert. Or the more dispassionate "The Places In Between" treatment by Rory Stewart.

Ultimately, Kevin adopted neither, as he tried to grasp the magnitude of all the material he had produced in a year's worth of war zones. And what emerges, so profoundly, is his own style. Short chapters, scenes from a tragedy, punctuated with occasional stories of courage, hope and humanity.

What comes across clearly is a journalist's isolation, frustration, honesty and devotion to his craft -- almost like a monk pushing himself beyond his breaking point in the name of some indescribable mission. As you get deeper into the book, Sites' writing becomes more philosophical, often poetic. And at some point, you have to throw up your hands and ask yourself: how? How do we do this to each other? How does one man do this to himself?

I would have liked to have heard more personal anecdotes from the author about the challenge of the task he had assumed, and how he felt after he returned to Iraq for the first time after the mosque shooting incident. Also, I would have happily endured a book twice as long just to linger a little while longer in a few locations that we never hear about otherwise.

Still, this is required reading for anyone who takes journalism seriously. And the bonus DVD is a great addition, but almost not necessary, given how vividly Sites expresses himself in writing.

Sites' book is just fantastic. He chronicles his experience as an online journalist, giving background information that goes beyond the stories and features on his website.

The most striking thing about the book is its structure: Each chapter is divided up into smaller sections, each quickly digestible and ideal for stopping. This book is great for reading on the bus or at work (you know who you are!)

Sites makes a real effort not to give us "misery porn," and this book self-consciously details this effort. Sites obviously gets emotionally bogged down by the constant scenes of depression and poverty; going back to the structure of the book, each story, or anecdote, can strike you in a different way. While he writes about an amputee's miserable life in one snippet, another snippet describes the joy that same amputee experiences while singing. I think Sites really tries to balance every tear with a smile.

This book also deals -- both implicitly and explicitly -- with issues in journalism and media/communications: ethics, professionalism, the role of media, new teachnologies, etc.

An all-around good read, I don't rate many books this highly.