How to Avoid Being Killed in a War Zone Read online

  How to gut a fish

  Any fish over 5 cm long will need preparation before eating. Cut its throat and let it bleed until it stops. Then make a cut from the top of the throat to the bottom of itsbelly and pull out everything inside (you can save it to use as bait).

  Clean the fish with water. Provided it is fresh, you can eat it raw. If you prefer to cook it, see below.

  How to cook a fish

  Once your fire is going, pop the fish in a pan (if you have one) or on a stick and balance it above the fire with rocks. If you have some foil, you can wrap the fish in that and put it straight on the fire as long as you have a safe way of retrieving it. When fully cooked, fish should lose any jellylike consistency and become opaque. Poke a knife into the centre and check that the flesh is cooked all the way through. Beware of bones when eating it.

  How to collect and cook shellfish

  Shellfish are found all around the ocean. If you are lucky, you might find a lobster in a rock pool. More likely, you will find clams and mussels clustered around the bottom of rocks under water level. Gathering them is easier and safer after the tide has gone out. And don’t get trapped plucking shellfish when the tide comes back in. Being thrown against rocks by a wave could cause a nasty infected cut if there is any coral element. Oysters are found near river mouths, mainly in shallow waters. They are also found on the seabed, sometimes buried in sand, which makes them much harder to find.

  If cooking clams, mussels or oysters, put them in boiling water or a hot pan with the lid on for a minute or so until the shells open and the flesh is opaque. Throw away any that are still shut when you are done with the cooking.

  /HUNTING

  There are a hundred different ways of catching your dinner, be it bird or animal. By far the easiest is shooting. But if you don’t have a gun or much ammunition, use a bow and arrow. Alternatively, use one of the methods below to capture your quarry without weapons.

  Note: Even if you start out as a vegetarian, when it comes to survival, your killer instincts will kick into action.

  Making a snare

  A snare can be as big or small as you need it to be. For example, use rope for a deer, wire for a rabbit, and string for a rat or bird. In your kit you will need:

  • Wire

  • String or ripped-up lengths of clothes or rope

  • Collection of strong and springy wood

  Make a small loop at one end of the wire by twisting it back on itself. Feed the other end of the wire through the loop, then make another small loop at the straight end. Tie a length of string to that final loop.

  Hammer a stake of wood into the ground using a shoe or some other heavy object and tie the string to it.

  Put the snare in a place where the animal is likely to put a limb or its head, and then drag the snare with it, pulling the lasso tight and trapping it. The snare can be either on the ground or propped up, baited or unbaited (either might work). See illustrations below for ideas.

  WHERE AND HOW TO SET TRAPS

  To avoid the animal pulling your stake out of the ground, or chewing itself out, or other game getting hold of it before you do, try using a spring snare. Tie your snare to a sapling, which is being held to the ground by an easily nudged notch in a stake. When the animal runs through, it will be flung up into the air and away from escape.

  The more traps you set, the greater your chance of success. Using bait in them may waste a bit of your own food, but it could win you a bigger prize. If the first bait doesn’t work, try another. You will need to be patient. Animals will be suspicious at first about the new addition to their landscape, but they will eventually forget and run into the trap.

  How to make a deadfall trap

  If you don’t like the idea of using a snare, where an animal could be trapped for hours before you find it, you could make something more humane, like the deadfall trap overleaf. This way the animal should be killed immediately.

  A deadfall trap can be made without any sort of kit at all – just the rocks and materials you have around you. Animal sees bait, eats bait, knocks over stick propping up rock or large log; animal is knocked on head and killed or trapped until you can find it. You will need help setting this up, and be careful not to get yourself trapped in it by setting off the trip wire or twig – whatever method you’re using.

  First, cut a square notch in the upright stick and balance two other sticks on it in the shape of a figure ‘4’. You’ll need to make simple V-shaped notches in the balancing sticks to achieve this. Next, carefully balance a flat rock or a ‘cage’ made of twigs against your arrangement of sticks. Once perfected, this trap can be made to any size.

  If these arrangements don’t work for you, there are otherways to make deadfall traps, as shown below.

  How to catch flying birds

  Large birds will go for bait thrown in the air. Tie a stone to the end of a string, wrap some bait around it and throw it up. One of the birds will go for it and then drop to the ground with the weight. Grab the bird while it is still stunned and break its neck by pulling hard.

  /HOW TO PREPARE ANIMALS AND BIRDS FOR EATING

  Before you do anything else, check the animal for signs of disease, such as a misshapen or discoloured head. If you see anything odd, do not eat it. Also, be careful not to expose any of your own open wounds to the animal’s body fluids, whether it is diseased or healthy.

  The next step is to bleed the animal. Hang it up by its feet, cut the main arteries running through the throat and leave to hang until the bleeding stops. This applies to animals large and small, and to birds.

  Skinning furry animals

  • Remove the testicles and scent glands. These are around the bum on cats and dogs and most small wild animals. Deer have them on their rear legs.

  • With the animal on its back, cut along the lines illustrated in the picture below, being careful not to cut into the gut. You’ll need to be extra careful if working on a small animal.

  • Insert your knife under the central cut between the fur and the skin, then use your fingers to pull the skin away, lifting outwards from the stomach. Do the same along the legs.

  • Turn the animal onto its stomach and cut around the tail and throat. Push your hand up from the tail along the spine and pull away the hide as a whole. Cut through any areas that are stuck.

  Note: There is no need to skin a pig. Gut it first (see below), then burn the hairs off and wash with warm water. Check that you have removed all ticks and parasites attached to the skin before cooking.

  Preparing birds

  While it’s possible to skin a bird, they will keep for longer if simply plucked, and you will not lose the calorie value of the skin. Chop off the head and feet. Start plucking at the stomach and move outwards.

  Gutting

  • Suspend the animal by its front feet. Pinch and lift some skin away from the stomach near the ribs and make an incision about 5 cm long. (You pinch it to ensure you don’t pierce the organs by mistake and cause a spill.)

  • Cut carefully down towards the rear of the animal and up to the breastbone. The guts will spill out. Cut out the kidneys and liver. If any of the guts or organs look discoloured or mottled, do not keep them.

  • Cut through the membrane over the chest cavity to get to the heart and lungs, then pull them out too. Ensure the bum is clear by pushing through the hole, then wash it with water.

  /FIRE

  It’s hard to think where we’d be without fire. It is a mark of civilization. A sign of warmth and often welcome. It makes your water safe and your food more interesting and edible. So let me tell you about fire.

  It needs a spark and some highly flammable fuel and oxygen to keep going. If you want a big fire, you need to give it lots of oxygen and lots of fuel. If you want a small fire, don’t fan the flames and you will have a sort of barbecue effect that requires less fuel. Smouldering is good, smoking is bad. Smoking means you are wasting fuel. Chemistry lesson over, let’s move on to how you actually get
that spark.

  How to make fire

  Take a box of matches or a lighter…now wouldn’t that be nice? For this exercise you are going to make your own spark, so you will need lots of dry fuel in various sizes:

  Tinder – such as wood shavings, pages ripped from books (I have left you a couple spare at the end of this one), newspaper, pine needles, feathers or cotton.

  Kindling – dry sticks and small logs.

  Your main fuel – whether it be wood and coal, or a mix of sand with oil or petrol in a deep hole, dried animal droppings, or peat logs dried out over a fire.

  Pick a spot. It needs to be on dry ground, or on a raised area made of rocks or wood above wet ground if that is all you can find. Clear away all the leaves and general muck around the area where you want the fire. You will need ventilation, or at least a chimney, but not too much wind. If it is very windy, dig a little hole for the fire.

  Put dry rocks around the fire. This will stop it from spreading if it is very windy. The rocks can also be used as stands for pots, and later can be wrapped in clothing and used to warm your sleeping bag.

  Warning: Do not use wet or flaky rocks as the change in temperature and pressure could lead them to explode.

  KNOW YOUR WOODS

  There are many ways to produce a spark. I will start with the easiest method and head back to cave-man times.

  Battery method: Take a car battery or a large torch battery and attach two wires or jump-leads to the positive and negative outlets. Be very careful not to let them touch while you do this. Bring the opposite ends almost together close to your tinder and a spark will fly across. Catch it on your tinder, blow the flame and you have the beginnings of a fire.

  Lens method: Take a strong pair of glasses or a magnifying glass, or use a broken light bulb or the end of a bottle – many things work, so experiment. Fiddle with the angle from the sun till you create a laser of light and direct it at your tinder. Blow gently as the spark takes and you have the makings of a fire.

  Flint method: Flint is a stone found everywhere around the world. If you strike it with a steel knife (most pocket knives are made of stainless steel), it will spark very effectively.

  Magnesium method: If you are very efficient, you might have a tinderbox complete with fluff, steel and flint. It may even have a block of magnesium as part of the kit. This is to be shaved off onto your tinder before you begin trying to make the spark.

  Wooden drill method: Otherwise known as the hard-work method, this is used only by those caught totally unprepared. For this you need to add muscle and perseverance to the standard ingredients above – tinder, kindling, oxygen, fuel – plus a piece of flattish softwood and a hardwood stick.

  Cut the hardwood stick into a point at one end.

  Cut a v-shaped chunk out of one side of your softwood. Put your tinder in that nook or cranny and gouge a hole next to it with your knife.

  Stand the stick in the hole and start turning it vigorously, rolling it between your hands, until the heat produced lights the hole and you can blow that gently onto the tinder.

  Bow and wooden drill method: This makes the previous process faster, but you must have some string handy. Put a rock on top of your hardwood stick and you can add pressure to make the whole thing work better (see below).

  Plough method: This uses the same implements as the drill method. Create a furrow in your softwood base (as shown below) and keep ‘ploughing’ the furrow with your hardwood stick until the smoking pieces of softwood fall down into a tiny fire and you can work it up to something larger.

  For safety, eat local. Do not eat crudités or salads in the Sahara. Mary O’Shea

  8/ Avoiding Trouble in Sex, Love and War

  Joking and laughing is very important. Don’t take your work too seriously. It doesn’t pay to panic. Zeina Khodr

  I don’t know what it is about danger, but it seems to make everyone horny. Beautiful sunsets, oysters and booze are an aphrodisiac for some. But put someone’s life on the line, surround them with others under the same pressure and bang – you have a recipe for a sexual explosion.

  It might be 55° Celsius and the air con’s not working. You might not have washed for a week. You ran out of toothpaste a month ago. But none of that matters. And just like that, you are suddenly in a lot more trouble than you were before the cravings kicked in.

  Sometimes, of course, craving has nothing to do with it – at least for female journalists. Jane Dutton told me: ‘It is amazing how many men will try to make a move on you – even politicians and bigwigs. When I first started out, people I grew up watching on television, 40 years older than me, were suddenly groping my leg. It made their colleagues resent me. It is hard learning how to put these men in their place and retain relationships on a professional level.’

  HOMOSEXUALITY

  In Baghdad after the war people were hopping from bed to bed like rabbits in springtime. There were no rules, and even less judgement at play. The place was lawless, and for a small but hardcore minority, so was the bedroom. One neighbour of mine was managing to juggle two girls on the same floor of our (very small) hotel. I thought that was quite impressive until we went to a party at a nearby hotel and another girl sat on his lap while he talked about his girlfriend back home. I met good wives and husbands who kept their wedding rings hidden away. And men and women who threw long-held sexual identities out of the nearest hotel window. They were gay for a day or a month… Offers you wouldn’t give a thought to at home can seem suddenly sexy when dressed in danger.

  The obvious reasons for having sex in the wider world are amplified in a dangerous place. Popular science might explain it as your adrenalin-pumped body wanting a last chance to procreate. But having carried out a highly unscientific study amongst my friends, I would say that comfort and boredom are the principal factors motivating sex. Life anywhere away from home can be lonely, and the desire to be included, to be a part of something, draws many into bed. You might be under a lot of stress, finding it hard to sleep. Sex, and just plain human touch, will help some people deal with those pressures. Then there are the sexual scoundrels who look forward to time away from home to add a little something extra to their otherwise faithful relationships.

  Monique Nagelkerke advises: ‘Don’t screw with the crew. Flirt with the same gender; it’s exciting and there’s no risk of anyone getting pregnant. And don’t worry about being embarrassed: when you leave the country you most likely will never meet up again.’

  When time is precious and you are surrounded by danger, disaster and death, very little thought is given to the consequences of having sex. It’s awful to think of asking your devout Muslim translator to buy you some condoms, but how much worse would it be to ask him to buy you a pregnancy test? Unfortunately, all too often, casual sex in war zones leads to broken hearts and broken marriages.

  My friend Shadi Alkasim has a simple solution: ‘It’s very hard to have sex in conflict areas, especially in Arab and Islamic countries. Customs and traditions there may put your life at risk if you have sex. My advice is to masturbate.’

  /BOOZE AND DRUGS

  Alcohol and drugs are often freely available – even encouraged – in a war zone. However, too much of either will lead to trouble. I have seen many a girl and boy ruined by one vodka too many. I have been amongst them. At one point my best friend even boycotted looking after me at parties. A killer shot would tip me over into monster mode. I learnt my lesson the hard way – via a few panicky morning-after pills, lost friendships and lost boyfriends – so I am now hyper-cautious about overdoing the booze in professional or dangerous situations.

  Where there is danger, though, bravado follows. War zone junkies with years of experience writ on their faces will tell you to have another drink and ‘forget the curfew’, the underlying message being that you should join in the naughtiness in order to be part of the gang. Me and my gang at the Baghdad Bulletin did exactly that one night and were shot at twice on our screaming rush home in the early hou
rs of the morning. We were breaking the law and no one would have been too sympathetic if we’d been killed. ‘I would never have done that,’ people would say. But the thing is, they would, and do.

  Drinking competitions when you’re knackered, just returned from the field, see you pitted against burly cameramen and security guards. The competition? To prove you’re able to live on the edge and survive to tell the tale. People don’t just drink, they inhale. Individuals spend thousands of dollars on illicit alcohol and other mind-enhancing substances ‘to help them sleep’. It doesn’t work. And no one remembers why you had 30 shots before you collapsed in the hotel lobby – they’ll just remember the humiliating sight of you in a puddle of your own vomit.

  So, at the risk of sounding like your mother, you have two choices if you want to remain sane and safe and out of the wrong people’s beds. Say no or find a way to minimize the impact of the booze:

  • Eat a mouthful of food for every unit of alcohol.

  • Drink a glass of water between each drink.

  • Make sure the regular barman knows to make every third vodka and tonic without any vodka when the orders go up to the bar.

  /SEXUAL HEALTH

  Of course, this is often a taboo subject, or maybe just overlooked. Sexual health is probably the last thing on your mind as you head off to a dangerous place. But if you’re there for a while and find yourself running out of contraceptive pills or landing in some sort of sexually related trouble, it will be the only thing on your mind. Finding someone to help you will be more difficult out there than anywhere else in the world. Asking advice from the wrong doctor could put you in front of a judge, facing the harsh local laws before you’ve had time to say ‘condom’.