LITERARY | Somalia: War Scars
May 2010 | Written by Daniel J. Gerstle
Photo also by Daniel J. Gerstle; a similar accident nearby which happened two years later.
Republished November 2024. Originally published in Humanitarian Bazaar (aka HELO Magazine) in 2010.
Dhegjar lost the top of his ear in Mogadishu. A stocky soldier from the Warsengeli clan, he had grey and black marbled hair and a mustache curving over the corners of his mouth. Dhegjar had joined the aid agency as a driver and security man. He wore a tan patterned button-up over a blue t-shirt and drove everywhere with two loaded Chinese Kalashnikovs.
As we rumbled across the vast and vacant Somali coastal desert, sucking in clouds of dust which seeped through cracks in the windows, our crew of aid workers had all asked him about his scar. Each time he piloted us down through one of those rocky, dry waddi valleys our heads knocked together. Young and pretty Iman brought up the scar just to antagonize him. The way Somalis did.
“How’d you lose your ear, Dhegjar?” she’d yell to him. Dhegjar was Somali for ‘cut-ear.’ He’d snort, trying to ignore her. He’d wave his arm by that ear as if to ward away a fly. The other women in the Landcruiser with us, Z and R, laughed.
It was a beautiful scar on the end of a thousand other war wounds I had seen and I was dying to hear his story. We all were, even Abdirizak who sat in the passenger seat beside him and kept quiet most of the time except to holler at the girls to quiet down. Poor dust-covered Matan wanted to know, but he was clinging white-knuckled to the roll bar outside on the cargo bed. He had his turban wrapped over his face and his rifle raised at the ready in case someone ambushed us.
We would each ask Dhegjar in Somali or through an interpreter to tell us about what had happened that day in the war in Mogadishu when he lost his ear. But he kept the story in his wallet, like a ring he had found. He was waiting for the right moment when its value had peaked and he would turn it over to someone else and let them wear it for a while.
Soaring in an air ambulance over the African Horn desert a few days later, I peered out the window at the tan nothingness below. It was the summer of 2005. I had traveled here to consult for a Somali aid agency on how to improve projects meant to help survivors of war, drought, and other disasters.
Through the window my eyes traced dry brown lines across the surface of the earth which between droughts carried water to the Red Sea. The heart monitor attached to Abel, the Kenyan aid worker lying next to me, kept beeping and beeping. Finally, I glanced back at Abel just long enough to see the swollen scab over his cheek without him catching my eyes. For a tense moment I thought again about our security guard and driver, Dhegjar.
On that air ambulance out of Somalia I had a transparent black pen with an inch of ink left and I desperately wanted to spill that ink all over the blank pages of my little red notebook. I wanted to write about why Dhegjar would never tell us the story of how he lost his ear in Mogadishu, why Abel was scarred and hooked up to a heart monitor, and why I was the one riding there with him back to Nairobi.
Dhegjar’s scar, like so many others I had seen unveils a tale that cannot be told through words or images, at least not very easily. But I must try for it is the story of the local aid worker, the crazy fools who instead of running with everyone else away from the shooting or quaking or flooding in their hometown, they stay there or run inbound to take a closer look. They were very different from the international aid workers one heard about in the news. Dhegjar, like the other scarred people I met, was mainly trying to feed his kids.
Dhegjar ran with another soldier turned aid agency guard called Habadlakh, who was there the day Dhegjar would no longer tell us how he lost his ear in Mogadishu. Habadlakh knew all about Dhegjar’s scar because he had also been in the Mogadishu fight. Everyone knew it because he had been shot right through the jaw and the scar was the first thing you knew about him. His nickname, Habadlakh, meant ‘the guy who swallowed a bullet.’
Somalis were collectors of scars. They were nomads whose ancestors had depended on camels, cattle, goats, and lobsters; until socialism their only possessions had been agal shelters and two thousand years of stories about the scars their families earned fighting each other, the Arabs, the Oromo, the British, the Italians, and then the Americans.
Dhegjar had driven us along the jagged coast where the 2004 tsunami ravaged the shoreline. Each village there had its one-legged man, blind woman, and village fool. Even when I found Somalis in other countries, the scars were there, not always visible but evident like the auras of war medals.
One Somali woman in California bore silk mahogany skin, cool but arresting eyes, and a long, perfect knife line diagonally across one cheek. A Somali man who had somehow found himself in Bosnia when that country fell into civil conflict had it in his eyes. It was all there, the terror of escaping one war and landing in another, the horrific trials his family had told him about over a scratchy line from Nairobi to Sarajevo. Like with the scars, he need not say a word and it was all clear.
In international aid work one encounters the most brilliant, the most treacherous, evil, and vile, and the loveliest of wordless tales, each absorbed during the brief sighting of a war wound scar. Sometimes the scar image shocks you when you first meet a widow or a child and you are not sure whether to flinch, cringe, or force a natural expression to your face.
Other times, the scars peak out from the survivor’s collar or shirt sleeve, and more times than you expected, the veteran or refugee readily pulled down their belt or rolled up their sleeve and showed it right to you, just eating up your nude curiosity and waiting either to quench it with a spine-tingling recollection or serve it right back to you in a bag full of shame.
There was proud A. who had been shot twenty-six times in Afghanistan. His wife and four sons gathered around to watch as he pulled up his pant leg and dragged away his shirt from his chest to show me the entrance wounds, then turned around on his chair to show the exit wounds.
Each puncture point was now glossy and free of hair, as if wax from a candle had dripped there. Proud and defiant, A. stood up and from that position revealed the whites of his eyes and explained how those who had tried to kill him, later took a shot at him through a window and killed the mother of his four sons. His new wife nodded with solemnity.
There was T. the boy who bore a hole through his skull so perfect it was beautiful. A small boy in Abkhazia, he had taken a bullet in his forehead which blew out the back but miraculously missed his wits. His parents with shattered souls had rushed him to the surgeons left in Sukhumi and made sure to get him over the mountains to Russia as soon as he was conscious. Now the tunnel remains, covered thinly with skin and only partially by hair and you know that no matter how much respect you award him for surviving that he hates himself for it.
There was Samvel, the stoic Armenian veteran of the Karabakh war with a bullet still trapped in the skin over his knuckle and a scalp still scarred by shrapnel. When he presented his fist, the motion of his hand with the little ball dancing under the cartilage was almost comical.
A smile would creep across his face as he saw you frown. But the cut on his head came down just far enough that it left a subtle yet permanent dent in his brow, adding seriousness to his scowl when he squinted in the sunlight or was reminded of his enemies, the Azerbaijanis.
Even more clearly I can remember T, the Croatian Serb, who had some of his teeth knocked out when he got picked up by police returning home from Belgrade. It was enough for him to consent when the paramilitaries drafted him to fight. Then he got shot up in a surprise attack.
Years later, he was so proud racing his daughter up the stairs, then with virile eagerness showing me the hole in his kneecap and the exit wound in his thigh which he demonstrated had healed quite nicely. Then he showed on his heaving chest, still breathing hard from the run, the second wound right over his heart.
Even more disturbing had been the Bosnian man who was arrested in Kalinovik for being Muslim and locked up in the Foca prison. He showed the scar on his neck from when guards had choked him with a chain. They had also force-fed him salt until he passed out several times.
But in Tajikistan the wounds were the most surprising I had seen, not wounds from shrapnel or lead, but rather the damage of war isolation and corruption. There was the lady whose husband had gone to Russia for work after the war and never managed to send word or rubles back home. She eventually came down the mountain from her village to an aid agency feeding center carrying her one-year-old baby girl who weighed as much as a cantaloupe, her head visibly soft and her chest concave.
There were dozens of kids like that in the Kulab hospital, some hooked up to tubes, their mothers still angry and baffled how everywhere around them bloomed a gorgeous crop of cotton revitalized since the war yet they could hardly afford wheat. Some of them were the working starved, having survived the blockade of the city only to return to the cotton fields for literally US $10 a month.
The invisible wounds, the emotional stress scars of the mind, were, like in all the other conflict zones, in the eyes of most people you met. Some had it worse then others and became unable to withhold their fury and their newfound incompatibility with a society that produced mass killing. For the guy who drove me out to Gharm it manifested as a continual squinting shrug, as if all he could say about it was, ‘Goddammit, I just don’t know anymore.’
Then there was the woman in Khojand who burst into a truck stop restaurant, where locals and I paid less than half a dollar for borscht, and pulled her dress up over her head to reveal her filthy nude everything, shrieked like a harpy and clawed at a pile of bread loaves. The woman behind the counter blinked then pushed her out of the place while the men just laughed.
And so in Somalia, they had all of these kinds of scars, the visible ones were like badges of honor and experience. In some places it was probably a pre-requisite for becoming a clan elder. Dhegjar surely would have made it. I can imagine him back in his home village of Dhahar on the Sool Plateau, sitting on the hot white stoop in front of the village market, leaning against a carved wooden cane and glaring at kids to scare them. Yet it’s hard to see him there without his rifle or to see him sitting passively like so many of those guys do.
When Dhegjar got us all the way to the sea cliff village of Kulule with its houses made of cut up oil barrels and painted dark blue and green, we let him go about his cut ear and got on with our mission. Abdirizack jumped out of the car before we had even stopped and disappeared in search of the elders who lived there with their own brand of canes, stoic glares, and scars.
Eventually, one man sought us out as the kids crowded around to stare at us. The wind which rippled through the straw mat shelters and had visibly dented many of the sheet metal homes had blown his whole house off the cliff a few nights before, he claimed, leaving him lying there on the ground with his wife, naked to the sky.
Now they had moved into a shelter made of oil barrels held fast with rocks and a piece of sheet metal over it giving them about a meter high crawl space. The local boys just couldn’t stop laughing about it and it was hard to tell whether the man was on the verge of tears or a punch-line.
We brought out our stacks of questionnaires and pens and started to set up our interview operation at a set of tea tables under a straw roof, but the chief elder dressed in a nice button up shirt, with a Kenyan cloth wrap around his legs and gold framed sunglasses on his nose, called a town hall meeting.
Behind a cement barrier out on the cliff some one hundred meters above the Indian Ocean beach, we hid from the crushing gusts, gripping the plastic chairs they brought out for us. The chief started out in the usual way. We are glad to welcome you here to Kulule and all that jazz. But he finally got to the point.
“We have had no government. We have drought which killed our animals. The tsunami happened six months ago, destroying our boats and taking our fishing nets. Your people, the foreigners, have already come here, but you don’t give anything. If you will not help us than you should go back to wherever it is you came from.”
A man with only one leg approached and insisted on standing, and he stood there squinting hard at me right in my line of vision as everyone waited for me to answer the chief’s challenge. I looked over at Abdirizack, who knew the people better than I did, to see if he had an answer. He innocently looked back at me. “Daniel, they are waiting for you to say something.”
I looked at the one-legged man, wondering if he too had fought in some far away battle, or if maybe it had been something less dramatic, if amputations could be anything but dramatic, like a birth defect or car accident. It felt as though I had just come out of a long indulgent shower to find a line of people who hadn’t had a drop of water in years.
Even when Somalia had a government Kulule has been forgotten. The only thing keeping it going, and by this I mean the absolute of its absolutes, was the bounty of snappers and sometimes lobster the fishermen caught down below the cliff.
They obtained all else in trade for this one crop. As if post-war anarchy, a drought which killed most of their camels and goats, and the tsunami which sunk some of their boats was not enough, now Kulule’s fishermen had been facing off in their little vessels against large foreign trawlers who stole their lobster pots and broke the reef breeding grounds open with dynamite.
So Kulule was, well, there’s just no better word for it, fucked. And all we had to offer these people, other than the temporary employment project our agency had provided to several dozen of them resurfacing the dirt road with better dirt, was a crumby survey questionnaire. I couldn’t get the one-legged man out of my eyesight. I elbowed Z, the tall Somali girl with full lips and baleful eyes, who grew up in Toronto and thought she was invisible here, and asked her to translate.
“We are glad to meet you here and we thank you for helping us to learn more about you,” I started. “We know that the foreigners have come and not given you much help, but our agency hired some of your men to work on the road.”
“Daniel,” I., the other young lady, stopped me. She was the one who grew up in Sweden and the UK, who had been bugging Dhegjar about his ear for the last three hours. She thought I had avoided the chief’s challenge.
“As far as your indication that we are not welcome without providing you assistance,” I said, now with not only I., but also Z., Abdirizack, and the quietest on our team, R., a government Minister’s daughter, glaring at me. “Let me explain how it works. The world gives Somalia a million dollars for tsunami assistance, but there are a million people who need help.
We have to go around to learn which people to give assistance to. Rather than give everyone one dollar, we find the hardest hit places with the poorest people and try to give those people twenty or more dollars per person worth of assistance. We can try to tell the world about you. Maybe if they learn, they will give more.”
“Inshallah,” someone called out. Others seconded the utterance, which was Arabic for “if, as we hope, God wills it.”
“So if you ask us to leave,” I said. “We’ll leave right now.”
Abdirizak and the ladies all looked back at the chief. The wind rippled past us, kicking up pebbles and dust. It was customary, I was learning, for Somali leaders to play both good cop and bad cop at the same time. You are always welcome with us but by the way fuck you, was how it felt some times.
Kulule’s chief did not disappoint in that regard. He had to satisfy the people who were glad to get the temporary employment from our agency, the people glad to get that dirt path re-surfaced, the people who thought we were interesting, and the people who hated us, all at the same time.
“Thank you,” the chief finally replied. “Please stay and talk with us. We will answer your questions.”
The crowd came apart softly now and we stayed to have a smaller discussion with the leader council there on the cliff. By the end of the day, we finished our interviews and drove back over the waddi to the next village of Dhur where Abdirizak, Dhegjar, and Matan through their networks had a man bring us his finest goat.
“I cannot wait to eat its liver,” I remember Abdirizak saying.”
And for their time we later bought the village a truckload of water which they had little of and for that they were somewhat glad we had come. But I never got the image of the one-legged man out of my mind.
And so we sat there on the windiest place on earth, holding our clothes on and had hot cardamom tea: Dhegjar, Abdirizak, Matan, I., R., Z., and me, the one-legged man, the elders, and the kids. And then we drove back across that rocky wasteland along the Indian Ocean coast. It felt pretty good.
We were all happy to get back to Bender Beyla where we had based our work, and then back to the port city of Bosasso. I don’t even remember saying goodbye or thank you or screw off or in God’s speed or anything like that to Dhegjar.
I remember filming our way into town from the dashboard and getting out of the car at the guest house. As always in Bosasso, the heat was so damn heavy I couldn’t stand around with goodbyes. I just got my shit and went inside.
The next day, there was confusion at the Bosasso aid office where I worked because someone from Bender Beyla had come up threatening our staff because they felt their clan was cheated out of a fair share of aid. But then there was a call on the radio.
It was Abel. I looked around. I had thought he was right here. Abel was the Kenyan auditor, a Christian, soft-spoken man. I remember him most because he and another devout Kenyan had softly scolded a third for bringing whiskey into a country ruled by Sharia law which forbade it.
They were tea drinkers. I made some wise-ass crack about Jesus drinking wine. Next thing, Abel is calling on the satellite phone from the middle of the desert we had just left. He has no idea where he is. There are no land markers. Habadlakh is injured. Dhegjar is badly injured, unconscious.
The head of the office, a powerful Somali-American woman named S. reacted viscerally. She told Abel to call back in two minutes. Then she called the UN for a search and rescue team. The UN plane circled for an hour and could not find them. Another group of guys from our office loaded into another vehicle and drove out there.
In the area where Abel, Habadlakh, and Dhegjar had been traveling, the route back to Bender Beyla, there were no roads or sign posts. There were just sand tracks crisscrossing each other in various directions. But after about three or four hours, the new team from our office found the wreckage.
Dhegjar had been driving Abel, with Habadlakh as his guard for the week, down to the sea shore to audit a project helping families who lost their homes or boats in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Dhegjar was likely trying to save time, as we all were.
Speeding through the sand slalom which curved back and forth, back and forth, he took a corner too tightly and the Landcruiser flipped. Abel had a bleeding head wound but was able to use the satellite phone. Habadlakh was better off, but shaken, worried he had an internal injury. Later, the Kenyan authorities refused to give him permission to ride with Abel and me on the air ambulance because he didn’t have a passport or visa, and because he was a Somali national.
And after the Landcruiser rolled, Dhegjar was out. He may have died on impact. But more likely he died waiting five hours for rescue under the scorching hot desert sun. The great tragedy for Dhegjar, through what I understood of him, was not only that he was killed far from home.
But that as a lifelong soldier, guard, and aid worker, he neither grew old, nor died a martyr. Instead, he was struck down in an easily avoidable accident and bled out because there was only slow rescue and distant medical service. Although in the West we may view his sacrifice as something heroic, his kids will only know that he died because of the country’s lack of development.
According to Muslim custom, the second team which had found the crash buried Dhegjar right away, out there in the desert near Bender Beyla, some seven hours by rocky track from his home town of Dhahar. Word would go out later to his family there who hadn’t seen him for at least a month. His wife and two kids. They were expected a baby.
Abel and I arrived on that air ambulance, a twelve-seater Beechcraft turbo-prop, at Nairobi’s second airport very late that night. Our agency head, D., picked us up and took us to the hospital where Abel was checked in and re-bandaged. I went to a little hotel and collapsed. It could have been any of us.