By P.J. O’Rourke
To me the saddest part of living a security-and-surveillance life is that we’re never far, far away anymore. We’re always in view. We’re always connected. We’re never in an unknown place. There is no Middle-of-Nowhere left, no “it’s not the end of the world but you can see it from here,” no “To-Hell-and-Gone.” A contemporary person on a solitary ski trek to the South Pole is blogging about it.
But the most romantic part of being to-hell- and-gone was an actual romance. At the end of November 1992, I was sitting at a bar in Washington, D.C., and a beautiful woman approached. She said, “Are you P.J. O’Rourke?” I said, “Yes!” My heart leapt. She said, “You covered the Gulf War for Rolling Stone ?” I said, “Yes!” She said, “I’m here with an Army officer who fought in the Gulf War. He’d really like to meet you.” I said, “Ummm... yes...” My heart sank. But, as it turned out, the Army officer, Mike, an infantry captain, (now a retired colonel and my good friend) was also with his girlfriend (now his wife) who was the beautiful woman’s good friend. Capt. Mike had IDed me. He had a copy of my book about the Kuwait liberation, Give
The romance of being lost is... lost. The romance of being remote, isolated, and incommunicado used to be my career. I was a foreign correspondent from 1984, during the civil war in Lebanon, until the Iraq War in 2003. (When I decided I was too old to be scared stiff and too stiff to sleep on the ground). During those two decades I spent a lot of time in “to hell and gone” – the deserts of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt, and Iraq... the jungles of Mindanao, El Salvador, Honduras, and Peru... the mountains of Chiapas, Kyrgyzstan, and Himachal Pradesh... the chaos of Bosnia, Kosovo, and Albania... Peshawar, the Swat Valley, the tribal areas of North-West Frontier Pakistan... Apartheid-era Soweto, Transkei, and KwaZulu... with Palestinians in locked- down West Bank refugee camps, with Israeli troops on West Bank patrols, on the Trans- Siberian Railroad, at the barbed wire fence around Chernobyl, in East Berlin during The Spy Who Came in From the Cold era, and again when the Wall was coming down. There was no way for the outside world to get in touch with me and almost no way for me to get in touch with it. This was very romantic. (When I wasn’t wetting myself.)
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American Consequences 59
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