[wordup] Young Pioneers Interview with Robert Pelton

[Adam Shand]

Via: http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/001488.html
From: http://www.youngpioneers.com/content/pelton.shtml

ROBERT YOUNG PELTON
A conversation with the adventurist.

Travel writer Tim Cahill once described Robert Young Pelton as "the man 
most guys think they are after slamming two tequilas," which is 
probably something of an understatement. Standing somewhere in the 
realm between freelance war reporter and adventure traveler with a 
death wish, Pelton is most famously known for authoring "The World's 
Most Dangerous Places," a regularly updated guide to surviving in war 
zones, which is required reading for the CIA and the Special Forces. 
And while he prefers to keep a low profile, chances are you've seen his 
handiwork at least once: Remember the exclusive CNN footage of a dirty 
and disheveled John Walker Lindh, who'd just been discovered in 
Mazar-e-Sharif? The unseen interviewer was Pelton. And although he also 
made headlines last year after being kidnapped by rebel FARC forces in 
Columbia, Pelton's name usually appears in print only as a byline to 
the astonishing essays he files for major travel magazines about trips 
to Sierra Leone, Liberia, Chechnya - anywhere, really, where a bloody 
conflict is being overlooked by the mainstream media. Young Pioneers 
spoke with Pelton just days after he'd returned from a visit to 
Afghanistan, where he'd gone to shoot footage for his television 
show-also called The World's Most Dangerous Places-which airs on The 
Discovery Channel.

Interview by Dan Eldridge

Young Pioneers: I realize everyone probably asks you this, but when you 
had your fifteen minutes of mainstream fame after discovering the 
American Taliban, was that a particularly weird thing for you?

Robert Young Pelton: Well, I wasn't here. I've been famous twice in my 
life, once when I was kidnapped, (in Columbia, -ed.) and the other time 
was when I did that interview of John Walker Lindh for CNN. And both 
times I wasn't in the country. I never actually saw any of the 
publicity. I don't think I'm a celebrity. I'm always doing the same 
thing; I'm writing books and doing TV shows and writing articles. I 
don't try to generate publicity, other than to help people understand 
what's going on where I just came from. But when I was in Afghanistan, 
I had between three to twelve people a day walk up to me and recognize 
me. So maybe I'm big in Afghanistan!

YP: I'm curious to know how different Afghanistan feels to you now, 
compared with your first visit.

RYP: Well, it was strange to me because I've never been to Afghanistan 
when there wasn't a war. Things like booking hotels and reserving 
dinners at restaurants and paying for airline flights was just sort of 
alien to me. I'm used to just jumping on a military helicopter or a 
tank or something. But I think there's two kinds of Afghanistan. 
There's Kabul, which is like Washington DC, full of people making lots 
of money, and hustle and bustle, and then there's the rest of 
Afghanistan, which never really changes. It's just a lack of warfare in 
some areas - that's the difference. But the Taliban, they're still 
pretty strong in certain areas. They're called the Shadow Government, 
but they control swaths of the country. They estimate that about half 
of the south is controlled by the Taliban. Not visibly, like, when you 
walk down the street you don't see a guy with a gun. But the people 
don't make decisions unless they consult with the Taliban. And there's 
a lot of intimidation as well.

YP: I know you had a handful of careers before you started doing this. 
Is travel something you were always interested in?

RYP: Yeah, I was a poor kid. I grew up in what they would call the 
slums of Edmonton, Alberta. Not that they'd be slums compared to Third 
World countries. But to me it was a great curiosity to see the rest of 
the world and to learn about other countries. I was 17 when I went 
around the world. I paid $100 to get to Europe, and I squandered the 
rest of my $400 buying a one-way ticket from Europe to Australia. And 
then I hitchhiked through Central America, and I would work in the bush 
as a lumberjack, or whatever, and make money, and then travel. And now 
my thing is basically trying to figure out about the world, and helping 
people understand what's going on in places that nobody wants to travel 
to. So in a sense, you'd have to say I'm in the anti-travel business.

YP: Is visiting dangerous countries primarily a business decision for 
you, or does that just happen to be what you're interested in?

RYP: It has nothing to do with business. When I was in my forties, a 
number of people I knew were dying from cancer, and I realized that if 
I didn't start doing exactly what I wanted to do, there wouldn't be 
much time to do it. So I decided to just do what I wanted to do. At the 
time, I ran a marketing company. I was a strategic planner. I had fifty 
employees and 10,000 square feet. I was on the Inc. 500 list.

YP: So this was something that had been brewing in your head for a long 
time?

RYP: Well, everybody has their likes and dislikes in life, and we tend 
to have two weeks a year in which to do those things, and I just 
thought, this is bullshit. If I'm working fifty weeks out of the year, 
when exactly am I going to do something that's relevant to my own 
existence?

YP: Did it take a long time for you to get to that point where you felt 
like, Okay, I can make a living doing this?

RYP: Well, strangely enough, I started getting TV offers immediately. I 
got a very sizeable book contract to write my autobiography. And then I 
got a publishing contract to write "Dangerous Places." So it was a very 
smooth transition, and I can't explain why. It's not something that you 
could probably replicate.

YP: I think there's a sense of serendipity, sometimes, when you jump 
into doing something that's a bit of a risk, but you know it's 
something that you absolutely have to do.

RYP: A lot of people write to me and say, "Well, gee, I want to take 
cruises and write about it for a living, so hire me to do it." Like, 
"This is my dream that benefits me, so pay me to do it." And you have 
to explain to those people that it's not about you. It's about what 
value you give to other people. But just you, enjoying yourself, is not 
really of relevance or financial interest to the world, so...

YP: Are there any conflicts going on right now that no one's really 
paying attention to?

RYP: Nepal is interesting to me, because, you know, there's a major war 
there, and granted, it's a long way away, but it's something that just 
doesn't seem to get much coverage. And Columbia, for example, is an 
extremely violent place, with American troops there, and major 
implications for our country. And one of the largest terrorist 
organizations is in Columbia, and it's just three hours away by plane. 
You wonder why there's so much focus on the War on Terror, and you 
never, ever see Columbia included in that.

YP: Right. Columbia's so close, and it's such a rough situation.

RYP: And it directly effects American interests, because of the drug 
situation, and the fact that these people are well-armed and large in 
numbers. There's more FARC than there are Taliban, and yet we don't 
seem to care too much about Columbia.

YP: I read that when you went hiking in the Darien Gap recently, you 
went in with a couple of twenty-something backpackers. That's not 
something you normally do, is it?

RYP: No! My wife was giving me a hard time for going into Columbia. I 
had just come back from Liberia, and that's a pretty gruesome war. They 
had given me a severed head as a gift, and there was a lot of fighting 
and death and people being disemboweled and their hearts being eaten, 
and it didn't bother me that much. So I thought maybe I was getting 
tweaked. So I said, "Well, maybe I'll just do something normal." Of 
course, then I got kidnapped and a bunch of people got killed, and they 
killed all the people we stayed with, and it turned into a blood bath.

YP: Wow. You're destined for that sort of thing, I guess. That must 
have been terrifying, and for your family as well.

RYP: It wasn't terrifying for me because it's what I normally do, but I 
think it was terrifying for my family, because the first press report 
that came out mentioned that paramilitaries had invaded the village and 
killed everybody, and that three journalists had run away, and that 
they had found three bodies but that they didn't know if they were the 
journalist's. And that was it. Can you imagine having to deal with that 
news report?

YP: How do they deal with it?

RYP: Well, my wife took it well. My wife has a very strong trust in the 
fact that if anybody can survive any situation, it would be me. And if 
I don't survive, it's because it wasn't survivable. And in that 
particular case, I didn't deliberately go down there to get into 
trouble. And that's usually when I get into trouble, is when I'm not in 
a war zone. Like when I got blown up in Uganda and I had a motorcycle 
crash in Peru. In war zones I'm pretty buttoned down.

YP: I know you've said that your book is required reading for the CIA.

RYP: Yeah, the CIA was very upset because we'd taken two years to 
updated "Dangerous Places." They use that book because it's a very 
simple, interesting, intelligent read, and more importantly, it teaches 
you how to think, and how to deal with these places. It's not an 
intelligence book. It's not there to be a reference guide per se, it's 
just the first step in trying to understand these places, because they 
change so quickly.

YP: To me that would seem like a pretty huge responsibility to keep in 
mind every time I sat down to update the book.

RYP: It is! It's a tough thing to do, because you're dealing with a 
1,000-page book and twenty-six war zones. But it's something that I do 
because I think it adds value to the global fabric. There's nothing 
else like it out there.

YP: What exactly would you call the type of writing that you're doing?

RYP: I like to think I'm doing the same thing that Herodotus and Homer 
did. There was a time when people actually went into these regions and 
just wrote down what they saw and came back, and it didn't really have 
relevance until maybe a year later, or five years later. And I mean, 
I'm not the only one that does it. I'm not the best one that does it. 
Maybe I'm a historian, if nothing else.