by Patrick Appel
Noah Shachtman interviews David Axe about his exploits and his and Matt Bor's latest graphic novel, War Is Boring:
Danger Room: Okay. Of all the fucked-up places you’ve been, what’s the most fucked-up of all? Why?
David Axe: Chad, by far. Even in Somalia, I felt like there was a fairly clear division between “danger” and “safety.” When I was with my fixers, I felt safe. In Chad, I never felt safe. In that country, violence visited me everywhere: in the capital, when corrupt cops hijacked my car; in a Catholic mission in Sudanese border country, when heavily-armed child soldiers hopped the fence and tried to break into my photographer’s and my rooms as a gunfight erupted all around us. Now, as it turns out, my sense of safety in Somalia was an illusion. Just a few months after I left Mogadishu, the guards my then-girlfriend Daria and I had worked with — and had felt safe with — sold a couple of Western freelance reporters into the captivity of an Islamic group. The reporters — Amanda Lindhout and Nigel Brennan — were held for months, tortured, abused. My fixer in Mogadishu narrowly escaped coming to a bad end in that episode. Realizing he could no longer trust the guards and others around him, he went into hiding.
The Dish 