Impossible Odds

was alone or was part of a family, that kidnapper’s share of the ransom would be gone in days.
    Now against the African desert backdrop I watched mirror images of the lost souls who had first called to me years before, when I first learned about child soldiers. I had strained to make myself believe such a thing truly existed—artificially created juvenile psychotics, “soldiers” turned into killing machines by enforced drug addiction and the resignation of those with bridges burned beyond repair. Right there in front of me was the grotesque irony of my own good intentions turned back upon themselves. I watchedmy vision of coming to Africa to combat this dreadful phenomenon morph into a badly told joke.
    I saw it, then: the piece missing from my original inspiration to come and work with such young people. My mistake had been to picture myself working with a human presence who hears you, one who sees you, one who—at the very least—has a functional consciousness you can engage.
    None of that was present here. The damage done to these dead-eyed souls was now physically affecting them, exposed by their attempts at close-order drill; they all seemed to have bad motor skills. Whether it was their drug use or just the effect of long-term malnutrition, something had seriously reduced their level of physical control.
    The impression was that their bloodstreams, flooded with khat, had reacted to a head full of memories of crimes committed against their families, and that the power of the mixture converted each one into a living zombie. Now they stumbled along glassy-eyed in their stained underpants. I saw nothing to connect with in their eyes. Nobody was home. It was as if the termites from the colonies out there had mystic powers, and now occupied these bodies, wearing them like giant meat sweaters while they shuffled around fingering their high-powered weapons.
    By this time we’d come to call the youngest boy, Abdilahi—the one who used his mine awareness class bracelet to fasten a bipod to a gun barrel—“Crack Baby.” Jabreel had kindly made sure we knew that “Crack Baby” was said to have killed three people already in his young life. His unpredictable behavior was a frequent source of menace. The dead eyes told a story so compelling I felt the impact in my bones. Upon an order by the Chairman, or by Abdi, perhaps even by Jabreel, any one of these parading kids would kill us. They could do that as easily as asking about the weather.
    But so far they had held back. Why? Something had stayed their hands from us, at least up to that point. After all, they onlyneeded us “alive” to assure the ransom, and there are a lot of degrees of “alive” that fall far below “alive and well.” Why were they not more physically abusive? Poul got slugged around, but he hadn’t been seriously injured by anyone, at least not yet. And while I’d been roughed up somewhat, we could have easily been in much worse condition. Past abductions of Westerners in this region included routine beatings during which victims were pulverized for nothing more than their captors’ amusement. Some were tortured with thirst in more extreme versions of what was done to us; others had seen their families contacted directly by the kidnappers and emotionally tortured, thus raising the stakes for negotiators.
    And yet something was preventing them from doing that degree of harm to us, even though they clearly had the capacity for it. Moreover, they acted amused by the prospect and had displayed their humor in fake-shooting us and continually pointing loaded weapons at us. Their abuse took the form of passive aggression instead of overt torture, denying us nearly everything we needed to survive and then grudgingly giving out little bits of it—but always only a little, nothing you could store up for a breakout.
    Anyone keeping a score card of the ironies piling up would have made another entry, noting that the kidnappers’ determination to make certain we never had more than we needed to survive that day was, in fact, the same strategy they lived under with the khat supply. We were all just prisoners there, not of our own device, as the Eagles song goes, but rather the devices of the Chairman, and perhaps someone else, if the Chairman was using an investor’s money.
    Irony functions poorly in the absence of an appreciative audience. The men didn’t show any signs to indicate that anything about our common captivity humanized me in