LITERARY | Crisis Zone Soundtrack
Global | Daniel J. Gerstle | August 2009
Republished November 2024
Welcome back! This story was published in our original first issue of Humanitarian Bazaar Magazine (originally called HELO Magazine) in August 2009. (Hours away from the road, Sanaag, Somalia. Img: Daniel J. Gerstle.)
Late at night that spring in Khartoum, Sudan, I blasted The Who through earphones into my head. Pete Townsend’s thundering guitar story, A Quick One While He’s Away (Live at Leeds), with its crashing chords and bleeding vocals powered me through the stress of working half way around the world from my girl. Like rolling down a mountainside in a barrel I could think of nothing but rock. Then came something even louder: Mppp…mppp…
I tore my headphones off and looked out the window at the oddly vacant airport road. Mppp… There it was again. It was April 2008. The Darfur rebels had finally launched their attack.
We have to look back, sometimes. See what we did right, why we almost got killed. And the music, the music, is Gericault’s Raft of Medusa. Sometimes the music is what we did right, why we survived.
After growing up ‘none-of-the-above’ raised on classic rock, heavy metal, and grunge in Cincinnati, Ohio, I climbed into a career of humanitarian aid work in war zones overseas. I journeyed across the Balkans, Eurasia, and Africa packing one of those $15 drug store CD player headsets. And music saved my life.
For many aid workers, rights advocates, journalists, and soldiers who work on the frontlines of crisis, music is a crash helmet, an airbag, a medicine, and a massage all in one. You listen to get psyched up, to enhance the drama, to escape hardship, to deny sorrow, and to recuperate on the way home.
When you finally have the ticket in hand, you may at first deny its significance. But in the night, lying in bed with all that anticipation, you see the razor-sharp mountains, the scorched desert, the maelstrom of culture, the ruptured towns, the blood, the starvation, and the shadows.
Your pulse quickens. Your cardiac muscles throb. Your pupils dilate. Your abdomen sours. Perhaps it is adrenalin, the rock and roll of a new adventure. Maybe it is your desire to get in and do something. But somewhere inside of you there is the knowledge that you might just get your head blown off. Your diaphragm expands. Capillaries fill your limbs with oxygenated blood. Your auditory nerves become extremely sensitive.
Back in the day, my old friend Bob and I drove through Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia visiting American civil war battlefields and reenactments, imagining one day we might play a role in history. We’d crank up Guns ‘n’ Roses’ Civil War and Metallica’s To Live is to Die and revel in all the power chords, the fake cannon fire, and the bloody dissonance. There on the healed battlefield the living museum offered only glory, no sorrow. At 18, Bob and I joined the military together anticipating a life full of intensity and sacrifice. Bob flew Air Force missions through fire over Afghanistan and Iraq while I left the Marines to take on aid work and journalism in failed states across Asia and Africa.
To get psyched, neophytes embrace the cacophony of war. In the Marines, I recall the bad-asses, the jerk-offs, and the patriots all blasting their stereos with raucous madness. White Zombie, Primus, Rage Against the Machine (ironically), Ice T, NWA, or the Beasty Boys. The Stooges’ Search and Destroy. We imagined ourselves head-banging and playing air guitar all the way into Somalia, Haiti, or Bosnia. But when we finally came to face war and lost friends, we could no longer revel in crisis, we memorialized it, and our soundtracks changed.
Aid workers, rights advocates, and journalists are a different breed. We get psyched rolling classic travel soundtracks: Canned Heat’s On the Road Again, Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit, Johnny Cash singing “I’ve been everywhere, man, I’ve been everywhere…”
Russians love their drunken version of Bob Dylan, a crazy insomniac named Vladimir Visotsky who sang alone over a poorly-tuned acoustic guitar about soldiers going to the front or what it’s like to be trapped in an insane asylum. Still others actually brought with them a touch of Rakhmaninov or Chopin on piano—that was escapism at its most acute—or the heroes of world music: Brenda (South Africa), Gigi (Ethiopia), Ofra Haza (Israel), and so on.
Once you enter the crisis zone—Sarajevo, Kabul, Grozny, Bossaso, Khartoum—you start with a huge release. You see you’re in a land where children kick soccer balls, where women cluster in the market, where men debate politics at tea houses. So you put on your headphones and push play. To enhance the scene, many play tunes that match.
Bosnia’s formerly broken skyscrapers posed against snow-capped mountains deserved a local sound. Classic rock idol Kemal Monteno sang Sarajevo Ljubavi Moja. Zabranjeno Pusenje and Hari Mata Hari offered ballads to commemorate the war. Goran Bregovic mixed 70’s rock with gypsy romps.
But no Balkan journey could be complete without the Belgrade unifier, the great Djordje Balasevic. His songs were not simply singles. Everyone in the West Balkans, regardless of which side of the wars they were on, could sing melancholy torch tracks like Prica o Vasi Ladackom or Svirajte mi Jesen Stize Dunjo Moja. At some concerts Balasevic could actually set the microphone down and the crowd would croon for him. And this unified chorus was the only thing holding neutral survivors of the Balkan wars together through all that killing…
My friend Azra, a Bosnian Muslim, who had survived the Serb bombardment of Sarajevo in the 1990s, told me she loved Balasevic but could no longer listen to some songs, and even became angry when a Sarajevo café put on Belgrade pop idols because they came to represent Yugoslavia’s destroyed, un-retrievable past. Even for me, after I spent grueling weeks in the immediate post-war streets, drums became bombs, symbols were smashed windows, and for a long time I could not listen to Balasevic without reliving a harrowing night I spent in a bombed out warehouse in Sarajevo.
Afghanistan was so far beyond what many Western crisis workers knew that it hardly needed enhancement. Soaring up the desert highways, one passed ancient and contemporary ruins so atrophied that one was driving backwards through time. Here, it was, Life on Mars. David Bowie’s Space Oddity was perfectly dissonant, abstract:
“Though I’ve passed one hundred thousand miles I’m feeling very still; and I think my spaceship knows which way to go; tell my wife I love her very much she knows…”
But yet others wanted to embrace the Afghan diorama. That meant Led Zeppelin’s No Quarter “The dogs of doom are howling more…” or if you could get your hands on post-Taliban cassette tapes, an Afghan classic pop hymn from assassinated-legend Ahmad Zahir or Dari hip-hop from younger artists like “Awesome Qasim”.
Late one night in the desert town of Mazar-e-Sharif, an American aid worker named James and I lied on a deck outside his home trading gossip and studying the glittering canopy of stars. The songs we listened to that night helped our short-attention-span minds bounce quickly from the blistering heat, to the Milky Way galaxy, the rice pilaf we ate, the war, the hunger, the misery, and the names of the five Doctors Without Borders staff who were shot to death up the road a month earlier:
Helene, Egil, Pim, Besmillah, and Fasil. The soundtrack we heard somehow held it all together, as if the drummer brought the risk, the bass player fed us fear, the guitarist jammed the passion, and the singer wrote the story.
But the music was not only for embracing and enhancing the journey. Many listened to songs to escape the stress or to deny the sorrow of life on the frontlines. My Dutch manager Geert used to wake me up at night in Azerbaijan with his screams. Having helped to bury the dead in Burundi and Somalia, he still recalled the night outside Bujumbura a dog showed up at the door with someone’s detached hand which it dug out of a mass grave.
Geert liked to drink, that was his medicine, but the music was his life raft. Driving through burned villages on the frontline between Azerbaijan and Armenia, he would crank up Van Morrison singing, “You can’t stop us on the road to freedom…She’s as sweet as Tupelo honey…” Or he’d let our driver slip in an Azeri pop track like the cosmopolitan Aygun Kazimova’s Sevgi Gullari. Our other local partner Heydar loved to replay Turkish pop star Tarkan’s Simarik, savoring the part of the song where the singer pauses in the middle of the track to send two kisses to the girls listening.
Just before Geert retired from Azerbaijan, he brought a couple of bottles of vodka and his Oasis CD to the village house. We drank and sang all night. He bellowed Live Forever over and over again until his cheeks were red and his mind was too foggy to admit we were mortal. Our voices singing out that night must have reverberated all the way from the village where we were to the Armenian trench on the other side of the frontline. “Maybe I just want to fly, want to live, I don’t want to die…”
There was our Chechen driver Bashir, who powered us through southern Russia’s Islamic guerrilla war from the forests of Ingushetia into devastated Chechnya blasting raunchy 50 Cent hip-hop: “Lil’ mama show me how you move it; go ahead put yo back into it; do ya thang like there aint nothing to it; shake, sh, sh, shake that ass girl…”
There was Aden in Somalia who reveled in Tupac’s Dear Momma as we rumbled across the desert in search of camel-herding nomads. Benyam, an Ethiopian doctor, who crossed the same desert with me, played Shania Twain’s Still the One on a loop. Jen, an American aid worker, rocked to Radiohead, the sound of the future clashing with her emotionally-wrought journeys through Rwanda. The band’s meditative tune Airbag has become an anthem for global crisis workers: “In the next world war, in the one you left behind, I am born again…in an interstellar burst I am back to save the universe…”
Crisis workers sometimes got killed; others lost a limb or a friend. And the music was a means to cope, to process. There was my Somali driver Dhegjar who turned his car over in the desert so far out it took three hours for a UN plane and three cars to find him and his passengers. When we heard that three of our team drove out that day and one had been killed, we spent hours trying to figure out who it had been. When we found out, there was a terrible, awful silence.
There was Bettina Goislard, a young Swiss woman aiding refugees in Afghanistan, who was shot to death through her car window. There were the twenty-two diplomats and aid staff crushed when a bomb blew beside the UN’s headquarters in Iraq. Journalists were targeted around the world. And thousands of soldiers had died in the terror decade.
Many frontline workers relied on cushions beyond the music, of course. Soldiers blew shit up, got in fights, wacked off, studied photos of their girls, read magazines, ran laps, lifted weights, drank, smoked, and some even went whoring. Aid workers, rights advocates, and journalists threw parties with DJs and bars, got laid, brought in liquor even when it was illegal, got drunk, smoked weed, chewed khat, got manicure-pedicures, took a massage, shiatsu, jiu jitsu, tai chi, yoga, a conga line, a cha-cha, or a long-planned swim in the ocean.
When it finally happened to me, the attack—a Somali gunman backed by a mob actually cornered me in a building and said he would kill me—I ran dry. My brain emptied of everything except logistics. Armed guards who I had not wanted to bring overwhelmed the attacker and prevented loss of life. But that gunshot rang out, echoing for days. Back in bed that night, I rocked out. The power chords cleansed me. That was how it worked.
Ultimately for me, nothing beat The Who. Before I took off for Sudan to research solutions to hunger, I packed my computer media player full of my favorites. And they really charged me. With the writing I had to do, I needed to get psyched up, deny the stress, and get shit done.
Flying around the country, I had looked forward to the dull, lethargy of Sudan’s capitol, Khartoum. Then the Darfur rebels launched their first attack on the city. We had seen it coming. The warning was circling around the diplomatic corps for two days. But when three thousand desert boys arrived with rocket launchers and we began to hear the low woofers of grenades detonating across town, my colleagues and I pulled our headphones off.
For a little while, we scrambled to the roof to check out the rising column of smoke, the government recon jets taking off from Khartoum International, the tanks rolling up Africa Road. We all chatted about what it could mean, whether the rebels would achieve anything other than redistributing the Darfur War and its trail of fighting and injury.
We frontline workers had already been spending our years thinking about the bitter truths of war, that we crisis workers and the elite of the country had the capacity to cushion ourselves, listen to music, cope. Meanwhile, many of the city’s less fortunate, like in Darfur and so many other places, were in harm’s way.
After learning what I could through the UN and diplomatic chains, calling my Sudanese host family where I had been living on the frontline until the night before, and scouting the horizon, I reached a point where I could do nothing but wait and see. Would the bombs reach us? How many people would the fighting kill, injure or displace? Then I jogged back down to my laptop to get some work done. I poured myself some sherry.
Now what should I play? A) Get psyched (The Who, Baba O’Riley), b) enhance the drama (Sudanese country music), c) escape (Crystal Method, Dubiliscious Groove (Fly Spanish Version)), d) deny (a little ragtime jazz with Sydney Bechet), or e) recuperate and think of my girl (PJ Harvey’s A Place Called Home).
Then I found it, the song which encapsulated everything: working through crisis, embracing the tension, escaping the trauma, denying the blood spilled only streets away, and picturing home.
It was a futuristic, dolce track with a slow, persistent strum by Radiohead called Bullet Proof. “Limb by limb and tooth by tooth, crawling up inside of me; every day every hour, I wish that I was bullet proof…”
Ride the alpha wave, the long, patient wave through the bittersweet, the trail home.
Your HBM / HELO Soundtrack:
- UK. The Who, A Quick One While He’s Away (Live at Leeds)
- USA. Guns ‘n’ Roses, Civil War (Wait for it after the solo. However, I must admit that Axel Rose’s outfit almost got this song yanked.)
- USA. Metallica, To Live is to Die
- USA. The Stooges, Search and Destroy
- USA. Canned Heat, On the Road Again
- USA. Jefferson Airplane, White Rabbit (includes Somebody to Love)
- South Africa. Brenda Fassie, Nomakhanjani (also try Vulindlela, one of the sweetest voices on the planet, she passed away two yrs back)
- Ethiopia. Gigi (listen to a sample of several songs)
- Israel. Ofra Haza, Im Nin ‘Alu (undoubtedly one of the most beautiful voices ever recorded; try also Elo Hi from the Yugoslav film Time of the Gypsies (Dom za vesanje)
- Yugoslavia/ Bosnia. Kemal Monteno, Sarajevo ljubavi moja (Unfortunately it’s difficult for some of us not to associate this song and the next one, Fildzan viska, with the 1992-5 Siege of Sarajevo)
- Bosnia. Zabranjeno Pusenje, Fildzan viska
- Bosnia. Hari Matahari, Ja nemam snage da te ne volim
- Yugoslavia/ Serbia. Goran Bregovic, Kalashnikov
- Yugoslavia/ Serbia. Djordje Balasevic, Prica o vasi ladackom
- Yugoslavia/ Serbia. Svirajte mi jesen stize dunjo moja
- UK. David Bowie, Life on Mars
- UK. David Bowie, Space Oddity (Mind the hair!)
- UK. Led Zeppelin, No Quarter
- Afghanistan. Ahmad Zahir, Dostet Darom… (Try this Doc)
- Afghanistan. Awesome Qasim (Still isn’t online but we’re hoping)
- UK/N. Ireland. Van Morrison, Tupelo Honey
- Azerbaijan. Aygun Kazimova, Sevgi Gullari (not up, try Bu sevgi)
- Turkey. Tarkan, Simarik (Ah, yeah)
- UK. Oasis, Live Forever
- USA. 50 Cent, Disco Inferno (Seriously, on the Chechen highway)
- USA. Tupac, Dear Momma
- USA. Shania Twain, Still the One
- UK. Radiohead, Airbag
- UK. The Who, Baba O’Riley
- USA. Crystal Method, Dubeliscious Groove (Fly Spanish Version) (The best trip-hop song, but can’t find free version, try High Roller)
- USA. Sydney Bechet, St Louis Blues (Travel back in time)
- USA. PJ Harvey, A Place Called Home
- USA. Radiohead, Bullet Proof (Our theme)
- We maxed out the great potential of YouTube with this. Enjoy!