A small example of this idea, from Muslim Africa, occurs in an essay on Morocco by Paul Bowles. Somewhere in the desert during the 1950s he watched an impatient city Muslim slam a car door on the hand of an old man from the country. “Calmly the old man opened the door with his other hand,” Bowles wrote. “The tip of his middle finger dangled by a bit of skin. He looked at it an instant, then quietly scooped up a handful of that ubiquitous dust, put the two parts of the finger together and poured the dust over it, saying softly, ‘Thanks be to Allah.’ With that, the expression on his face never having changed, he picked up his bundle and staff and walked away.”
That wasn’t the version of Islam I encountered in Somalia. It was also not the Islam of Salafi terrorists in Europe. Public debates about Islam rumbling in both Europe and the United States before I left for Somalia had grown harsh and manic while I sat around as a hostage, and they were no closer to resolution when I got out. The debate itself had coarsened, in fact—there was a stink of tribalism. The great, aging poet of Gerlach’s generation, a Somali camel herder born in the 1940s named Hadraawi, has fiercely beautiful poems against tribalism, which he calls “this baleful malaria” infecting Somalia, and in the West we were learning to enjoy (all over again) the low and feverish heat of the same disease.
I thought about the drumming, trumpeting parades held centuries ago in Italian villages whenever a batch of captives came home from the Barbary Coast, with their songs of liberation belted out by Catholic choruses in the sunshine. They celebrated the difference between Christian Europe and the Muslim enemy. My ordeal in Somalia introduced me to the shape of those differences, the underwater contours of a cultural chasm that many people in the West would like to exaggerate or ignore. Neither approach does much good. It’s ridiculous to hear that Somali pirates “aren’t really Muslim,” when most of them are nothing else, and excuses to abuse the infidel are there in the Koran for anyone to read. On the other hand, a pirate interviewed in a Kenyan jail by U.N. researchers in 2012 put the problem very well. “If I go back to Somalia,” he said, “I would like to pursue an education. Because right now I don’t know what is right and what is wrong. In Somalia people are born Muslim and they know how to recite the Koran. But everybody forgot what the actual principles are.”
V
In November, I noticed a Facebook message from Mohammed Tahliil, the boss of my guard group in Hobyo. I recoiled from the message and ignored him at first. But Tahliil had been gentle, even good humored, so eventually I wrote back.
“Hi Mohammed.”
“How are you Michael,” he wrote. “I am at Hobyo. I hope u are fine. The pirates who held u hostage killed each other over group vendetta and money issues.”
“Which pirates got killed?” I wrote.
He listed them, and when I asked for details about Abdi Yare, he wrote, “Abdi Yare was supervisor/pirate action group leader. . . . He collected the ransom money. Abdi Yare team was attacked by Ali Duulaay team at Galkayo over the ransom money.”
He went on:
Many youth members were sympathetic with your pain in bondage. We’re happy that you came out alive. The local community members had no power to rescue you, but the youth, women, area folks and faith leaders strived to plea on your behalf to reduce harm to you, and redeem the good name of the native people and the land.
The native communities, the individual persons in youth and women groups, and faith leaders who pleaded for your freedom and safety will remain a silhouette and unknown ghost to you. Just know that you were not alone, and you had many friends in the darkness. . . . Every society / community has a few good persons in a sea of evil men.
Tahliil’s English had never been so fluent. I wondered if someone else was typing into his phone. When I asked for a picture of Abdi Yare, he suggested looking through my “old friend’s” material. I contacted Ashwin and culled some frames from his video footage. Ashwin lived in an old brick house in a German town not far from my uncle in Cologne, and we met more than once just after my release to exchange notes. We’d made a number of tactical mistakes in Somalia, but there was no bad blood; the risks had been clear before we landed.
While we drove to the airport, Ashwin said, he had spotted Somalis on a technical in the distance, among the rocks, waiting. We had taken a detour through town, which led us to an alternate road to the airport, so it’s possible the pirates were hoping to catch us both on the more obvious road, before Ashwin boarded his flight. “I think it is just dumb luck that they didn’t catch me,” he said.
One startling image from his footage was a close-up of one guard, a shapeless and sullen-looking man squatting behind the antiaircraft cannon on the technical that drove with us to Hobyo.
“Jesus, it’s Dhuxul,” I blurted.
Seeing his face again lit a cold, raging fire. It explained why he’d looked so familiar to me in Galkayo. He’d ridden with us to Hobyo. “He is a high-ranking pirate,” Yoonis had bragged when I first moved into Dhuxul’s house as a hostage, and now my anger at the men who’d hired him—the gap-toothed “security chief” called Nuur, but also Digsi, Hamid, and ultimately Gerlach, who bore responsibility for our safety—seethed in my blood like acid. (I still kept anger in a storehouse like that, whole barrels of it, corroding in the shade. The question was how to dispose of it.)
“Abdi Yare” remained an important puzzle, though. Too many pirates went by that name. The one who mattered evidently was the mastermind behind my capture, a boss who also went by “Qoryare” and “Nuur Jareer.” Still working on a hunch, I sent another frame from Ashwin’s footage to Tahliil, a picture of the pirate with a keffiyeh-wrapped face whom we had interviewed in Hobyo, “Mustaf Mohammed Sheikh.”
“Mohammed, what is this man’s name?” I wrote.
Mohammed wrote back, not entirely to my surprise:
“His name is Nuur Jareer.”
I remembered the way this pirate had stared at me through his keffiyeh in the hot room in Hobyo—his supposed fisherman’s anger, his portentous unsteady eyes—and it startled me to think he was dead. He’d meant me nothing but harm. The Sa’ad elder, Digsi, may have cooperated with him: he’d organized the interview, and I believe Digsi had wanted to trick us into an ambush in Garacad, on our way back from Hobyo.
Gerlach was also, at best, an incompetent guide. Hamid and Digsi had hired pirates to serve as “security” under his watch, and he should have vetted those decisions. It was my own mistake to trust him. But Ashwin and I both had the impression that Gerlach and President Alin were speaking for their clan in Galmudug when they welcomed us. Evidently not. It’s possible that Gerlach himself was betrayed, and of course it never escaped my attention that the evil in my captors’ minds had proliferated in a furnace of victimhood, of resentment and bottomless blame. So heating up similar passions was no way to recover.
Gerlach and I met several times in Berlin, over lunch—alone or with other people—to exchange information. At last I showed him Ashwin’s picture of Dhuxul. He became incoherent, and confused. When I told him how upset I was with his services, he stood up and left.
We no longer speak.
VI
The mysterious American who’d landed in Galkayo to release me in June was real: Mom had hired him. He went by Joe, and parts of the wild story Hassan had told me were true. Joe had a military background. He worked for a private contracting firm in Somalia. As a Navy SEAL during the Battle of Mogadishu, he had forged connections among the Sa’ad clan, so he thought he could help.
Joe contacted my mother in the spring of 2014, and with her permission he talked to a faction of the gang. By June he had made a deal, and he flew to Galkayo with seven hundred thousand dollars from her ransom fund, and a great deal of her trust. “What I’d heard, and what everybody had heard, was that the pirates were broke,” Joe told me. “The creditors wanted money, the guards were sick of it, they were ready to be paid, and so your price went down,” meaning that Dhuxul, at least, had offered to let me go for a b
argain.
Armed with a pistol, accompanied by a doctor and a Somali police colonel he trusted, Joe met a pirate representative in a Galkayo hotel. Joe doesn’t know the man’s real name, but he went by Abdi Yare. He was an accountant for the group, and I believe he kept in telephone contact with Dhuxul during the meeting.
One day before Joe landed, the surviving crew from the Albedo had walked free, so a ransom had slopped through the Galmudug pirate community. Joe worried that something might go sour. Sure enough, in the hotel, the accountant felt bold enough to demand more cash.
“What do you mean you need more money? We’ve discussed this many, many times,” Joe said.
The accountant was alone, without weapons. Joe had a pistol, a knife, and two assistants. “When I leave here,” he said, “either Michael’s coming with me or I’m gonna kill you in the bathroom. This isn’t a case of ‘If it doesn’t go well, we’ll both go home.’”
The phone rang. Probably Dhuxul. Joe wouldn’t let the accountant answer.
“I’m just a middleman,” the accountant protested.
“I don’t care,” said Joe.
“Allah knows I haven’t done anything bad,” the accountant said.
“You’re about to have a chance to explain it to him.”
The phone rang again. Joe warned him not to answer, since there was too much risk that the accountant might ask for armed help. The accountant answered anyway. Joe lost his temper. He pulled his knife and dragged the pirate to the bathroom, intending to kill him, but one of Joe’s assistants, the Somali police colonel, persuaded him to stop.
I met Joe one spring night on the coast of Virginia, where he told me this version of the story. He was an unassuming man with a shy smile and a mustache. He’d volunteered for the mission because he’d found a way in; he took some considered risks and he set a mercenary’s price. This was his line of work. But hearing sketches of plots to retrieve me from Somalia—imagining the sacrifices required by rescuers in case anything failed—still buckles my knees.
“The pirates told me you showed up in fatigues,” I said.
“No, I was in civilian clothes.”
“They said you spent a couple of days in jail, because they couldn’t verify your Galmudug visa.”
He chuckled. “I left the same day.”
“But killing the accountant,” I said. “That was part of an official plan?”
“Well, it was my plan. I was on my own on this.” He smiled. “I wasn’t representing anybody.”
I went to Somalia with a stubborn and fairly proud streak of individualism, which my experience has tempered with oceans of gratitude. I’d built a personal ethic of taking calculated risks as a journalist, of trying to burden no one but myself, so relying on people to come get me was a disgrace. But when you need help, you need help. And showing gratitude was the way to manage my corroding barrels of anger. Joe knows I’m grateful, but the anonymous members of the military ought to know it, too. I’ve heard rumors in the meantime of a SEAL plan to remove me by force from the Naham 3, and I’ve heard a rumor that the SEALs who rescued Jessica Buchanan were also looking for my sorry hide. The story goes that U.S. intelligence had placed me in the same bush camp. I can’t see much further into these stories, and the rumors might be wrong. The Buchanan raid probably did lengthen my time in Somalia. But so did pirate politics; so did my own boneheadedness. I can’t regret the results of the raid if it freed Jessica and Poul and denied the pirates a second ransom, and what else is left, besides my own reaction?
“Seek not for events to happen as you wish, but wish for events to happen as they do,” Epictetus said, “and your life will go smoothly and serenely.”
VII
In late 2015, I flew to the Seychelles to see Rolly. His daughter Maryse decided not to tell him beforehand. “We were thinking that we will give him a surprise,” she wrote. Even as a retired former hostage, in his seventies, with a pension, Rolly took a fishing boat out for weeklong trips around Mahé, so Maryse would have to find an excuse to keep him on land.
“He has stopped drinking for a while now,” she advised me.
“No problem, I’ll buy him a soda,” I wrote.
“Haha! The minute he sees u he is going to drink.”
Victoria was a modern city built around a harbor, with lush and beautiful palm-grown hills, pirate-themed restaurants, and a feeling of lassitude and sweat. Maryse met me at the airport and drove me up from the bright and busy town to a hillside community with vast shade trees and long concrete bungalows. This was Belvedere, a planned-housing estate. We walked between two of the bungalows and found Rolly on his doorstep, muttering something cranky in Creole.
When he spotted me, he shouted.
“Eh!” he said. “Mi-chael!”
“Rolly!”
We spent a good two hours on the porch while daughters, grandchildren, sons-in-law, friends from up the road, and neighbors came and went. I reminded him of the promise we’d made in Somalia, to have a reunion drink “under the mango tree,” wherever that was. I offered to buy him a Coke. But in the afternoon, he took me to a neighborhood liquor store for a round of beer, then found a crowd of buddies in the front yard of a house across from his bungalow, under a massive, drooping, wide-spreading mango tree that was so large it had escaped my attention. “Bonswar,” Rolly said to each man as we clinked our bottles. They called him “Ti Rolly”—short for Petit Rolly, since he was short.
“I’m not enabling you, am I?” I said to Rolly.
“Eh?”
“It’s okay if you drink?”
“Is okay, Michael. Sometimes I stop, for my health. Is not a big problem.”
I nodded.
“We do it like this in Seychelles,” he said.
The house and the giant mango tree, the whole slope of Rolly’s road, overlooked a grass-grown cemetery with white monuments and stone crosses. The men around us mumbled, and we heard laughter from the children and grandchildren in front of Rolly’s bungalow.
“You have a nice family.”
“Yah. Thank you.”
“How are you doing?” I said.
“Me, I’m okay, Michael.”
“You sleeping well?”
“Yes, yes.”
“No nightmares, nothing like that?” I said.
“No, no.”
In Somalia we had both slept poorly. In Berlin I still woke up at night with my heart racing. Nightmares weren’t the problem—I could count my Somali nightmares on a single hand—but as a hostage I had picked up the habit of bolting out of sleep around three or four in the morning to listen for drones. Now I slept with mild sedatives.
“Me, I hear this fat man get arrested,” Rolly said.
“Garfanji? I heard the same thing.” The Somali government had put him in jail for a month or two near the end of my confinement, in 2014. “It didn’t last long.”
“Oh yah? He go free again?”
“He’s got too many friends in Mogadishu.”
“Ahh,” said Rolly, in weary contemplation. “But Ali—he dead now, eh?”
“Ali Duulaay got killed in a shootout, from what I hear. Over my ransom,” I said. “Same with Ahmed Dirie.”
“Yes, I hear that.”
One of Rolly’s friends interrupted us to say that Marc was coming over—we would see him any minute.
“How is Marc?” I said.
“He’s okay, Michael.”
Rolly and Marc had been free for two years, and when Rolly said they were okay, I believed him. But okay was a deep intangible for us, and its meaning bent away from the usual one. It meant living above a certain waterline, surviving on the right side of self-destruction.
We sat in silence for a while.
“But the children,” he went on. “They still in Somalia?”
“Yes, the whole Naham 3 crew,” I said, “minus two men. Jie and Nasurin have died.”
We’d known both of them, but not well. Nasurin was a short Indonesian with a wispy mus
tache. Jie was the witty Chinese kid. The rumor about his death wasn’t true after all, but I didn’t know that yet, and the uncertainty over who was dead or alive was a perfect illustration of the quicksand I had slipped into, the mire of obscurities and half-truths that had almost swallowed me whole.
“Bakayle’s in charge of the children now,” I said. “With Ali gone.”
“Which one?” said Rolly.
“You know Bakayle—‘Fifty Million.’”
“Oh, Jesus. This man? Oh, Michael.”
“I know.”
We sipped our beer. I’d been out for more than a year, but my freedom wasn’t complete with the Naham 3 crew still in Somalia.
“I got this Bible the children give me,” Rolly said. “I take it with me from the boat.”
“The one the pirate kicked?”
“Yah! It falling apart now. But I tell my family, ‘When I die, please bury this Bible with me.’ On top of my coffin, like that.”
The graveyard down the slope was called Mont Fleuri, and on Sundays it teemed with life. Children and families moved among the white monuments, holding flowers or balloons.
Recovering from captivity is different for every hostage, and Rolly had benefited from a large and boisterous family. He swore by fishing and religion; his family loved him. Nothing else mattered. The president of the Seychelles invited him and Marc to an annual presidential birthday party, at a mansion in Victoria, which made Ti Rolly cocky and proud. A former hostage needs social support, no less than a soldier returning from war.
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