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It matters not whether these weapons of ours are humane: if they gain us our
freedom, they are justified before our conscience and before our God.
Adolf Hitler, 1 August 1923

1. Infamy

You cant break a man the way you break a dog or a horse. The harder you beat a
man, the taller he stands. To break a mans will. To break his spirit, you have to
break his mind. Men have this idea that we can fight with dignity, that theres a
proper way to kill someone. Its absurd - its a fucking anaesthetic. We need it to
endure the bloody horror of murder. You must destroy that idea. Show him what
a messy, terrible thing it is to kill a man. And then show him that you relish in it.
Shoot the wound, then execute the wounded. Burn them, take them in close
combat. Destroy their preconceptions of what a man is and you become their
personal monster. When they fear you, you become stronger. You become better.
But lets never forget. Its a display, a posture - like a lions roar or a gorilla
thumping at his chest. If you lose yourself in the display, if you succumb to the
horror - then you become the monster. You become reduced. Not more than a
man, but less. And it can be fatal.

2. Smuggling

Getting them in is easy. I get them in over the mountain, through the desert,
whatever. The hard part is moving them inside the country. Whenever you get
stopped you either gotta bribe someone or kill someone. Not good for business.
No, once your inside you want to hand off as fast as possible. Let the dealer deal
with it.

How do they move a shipment?

I delivered about 600 kilos of C4 to Pantue about 6 months ago, the guy showed
up with a dozen of his men, dead men. He packed C4 into their corpses. Figured
no one would search them. Smart guy,

3. Circulation

Where do you get the weapons?

Its a romantic notion that they all came out of the Soviet Union after the
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collapse. That was a windfall back in 89 maybe through 91, but thats all over. I
move weapons. I profit from circulation. You get a cease-fire in Liberia, both sides
disarm. Do you think theyll just slag 2,000 tons of guns? No. They sell them to
me. I resell them wherever the next war is starting.

Whats the percentage of the guns you sell that are from 1989?

Hm, well, thats about half. The rest mostly come from old European armies. They
abandon their colonies back in the 60s and 70s along with their guns. You know,
French guns, Dutch, Belgian...

So most of these guns are very old. They get sold, bought, and sold repeatedly.

Theyre not biodegradable. Only the dead are biodegradeable.

4. Economics

Why arms? Why not car parts [or] radios?

Whats the difference? Same job, really. You get up, you get on the phone, you
meet your clients, you discuss a fair price. You make a delivery, receive payment.
Sounds boring, but its not. Its just simple. Im doing what men have been doing
for thousands of years. Trading one thing for another. Its you who wants to
attach morality to it, make it evil. Insane. People who work in gun factories in
Belgium or the United States - theyre unionized, right? You think kids making
radios in Bangladesh pull down 40 grand a year on a 40 hour week? You start
thinking too much about morality, thats insane.

5. Home

Why Africa? People need weapons all over the world. Why here? Why my home?

Every place is someones home, pal. But it doesnt stop people from going to war.
I dont start wars, I didnt start this war. It seems like its your fellow Africans who
want each other dead. Besides, why should I give a shit about your home? Why
should I give a shit about anyone? You want me to go somewhere else? Is there
another persons home you dont give a shit about?

What if it was your home?

War is my home.
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6. Rat-Catcher

I spent a year in Black Beach once. In the dark, its a hell hole. Covered in raw
sewage. Guards breaking some other peoples fingers just out of pure fuckin
meanness. Men die of starvation there all the time. I saw a guy in the opposite
cell catch a rat with his teeth. They had him in handcuffs all day for two months.
He couldnt eat. Seeing someone do that - he was weeping when he crushed it to
death in his mouth. Seeing his eyes, his face. Its madness. He was dead 3 days
later.

What killed him?

Realization of what hed turned into.

7. Career Counseling

How do you become an arms dealer in the first place?

Back in the Navy, we delivered guns all over the world. Dropping off guys with
twenty crates of rifles for the local fighters, so they could knock over some
dictator. Mind you, that's not twenty crates of factory M16s; these were illicit
weapons. Confiscated in some raid and then redistributed. No paperwork, right?
If a crate here or there goes missing, hey, it happens. Military teaches you two
things: how to deal with bureaucracy, and how to avoid it. Learning how to avoid
it means learning how to deal in arms. You muster out, you apply what you
learned. Every gun runner I ever met got his start that way; losing illicit weapons
in transport with national militaries.

8. Stability

Do you ever choose sides in a conflict?

Aha, no. Did it once, bad idea. Cut my profits in half, and nearly got me killed.
Never again. You sell to both sides. You can help level the field, stabilize the
market. Draw out the conflict and make more money. Making a large sale to one
side doesnt get repeat business. Both the APR and the UFLL are using my
weapons. Now theyre in dtente. Both sides are stockpiling, less violence, more
spending. Its perfect.

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But its anarchy. Thousands are dead. Hundreds of thousands have been
displaced.

If I picked sides fewer would be displaced, but more would be dead. And Id
probably be one of them.

9. The Humanist

Have you ever refused to sell weapons to anybody?

Im a humanist, I dont judge. Maybe you would.

I couldnt sell arms.

Bullshit. You have all the skills to be an arms dealer. Better one then me, even.
Youre smart, youre creative, youre a salesman. Heh, you sold me on doing these
dumb interviews. Man, the rest is just paperwork.

I might be able, but Im psychologically unable to sell arms.

Im talking facts, youre talking theory. Youre not a good person, youve just
been lucky enough. Youve never had to be otherwise. When it comes down to it,
a man can do what a man will do. Believe what you want.

10. Stealing Boots

Saw this kid on the side of the road yesterday. Couldve been 18, 17. Had a
shotgun across his lap. A dead APR in the ditch next to him. Couple of rounds
from the 12-gauge tore big chunks of hamburger from his torso. Kid was lifting up
the guys leg, taking off his boots. Kid just looked tired. Beat down, ragged, tired -
old. A kid that age shouldnt look like that.

11. Gluten-Free

I'll tell you what's sick! People in the UK, in the US, fucking Canada, Sweden
they pay their taxes and some remote-piloted drone fires a missile into a public
market to hit some warlord. Yeah, so maybe war doesn't happen for another six
months, and the price of that gluten-free sorghum bread stays low. It's not sick to
arm peopleit's sick to bump off their crooks and dictators in protection of our
interests and then call it international justice. These people don't have remote-
piloted drones guarding their interests ten-thousand miles away. They don't have
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a war machine paid for with taxes. Where I am, they usually don't even have a
fucking government. The drone is the oppressor. The gluten-free sorghum bread
is the oppressor. The AK-47 is the great equalizer. I empower these people.

12. Necessary Evil

What do you think you're going to achieve with this interview? You think
somebody in the Pentagon is going to read it and come after me? Shit, no! I'm a
necessary evil. They want me here. They're glad I'm here. Because if I wasn't, they
might have to come try to stem the tide. It would be thankless and worthless, and
once the bodies start coming home in bags, they're screwed. A dead 23-year-old
from Iowa gets more airtime than the deaths of fifty-thousand people he gave his
life to protect. So even if they did give a shit, their own media prevents them from
taking action.

13. Lions Share

Who gets the lion's sharethat's what it's all about. Whether it's between
children, or animals, or warlords. It's not that everyone wants a piece, it's that
everyone wants the biggest piece. And the biggest piece doesn't go to the
monkey, or to the giraffe. The biggest piece goes to the lion. Because the lion is
the fucking king! That's how it works. It worked that way a million years before
there were men saying otherwise. That's probably how it should work.

But you are not the lion! They call you the Jackal.

Shhhsometimes the Jackal steals the lion's share. But don't tell anyone.

14. Unrecognizable

I saw that truck you were driving in. Perforated with .50 cal rounds and torched
on the side of the road. I looked insidecorpses blown to pieces and burnt,
unrecognizable. No camera, no tape recorder, no notebook. So I don't know,
maybe you're dead. Maybe not. Maybe you'll find these stupid tapes and do
whatever the hell you wanted to do with them. Or maybe the interview is over
wasted words, wasted life. Maybe I'll see you soon.

15. Gutshot

Saw a fire fight todaya little skirmish broke out at this roadblock when some
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APR guys got lost in their truck. Maybe five or six of them, trading fire with the
UFLL guys manning the CP. Went on for twenty minutes; guys popping up from
behind rocks to spray a few shots, you know, randomly, at each other. All of them
almost too afraid to die. When it was over, the two UFLL guys who were unhurt
ended up running off into the jungle, terrified. I went down and had a look
around. A guy had been shot through the stomachbloody mess. He saw me and
whimpered at me to finish him off. Funny, how guys get shot because they're too
afraid to die, and they're lying there dying, and they're too afraid to live. Idiots.

16. No Sense

You see these APR kids, or UFLL kids, or whoever is listening to these damn
broadcasts on the radio. Mbantuwe, Tambossa, I can't even remember who,
because what's the difference? Glassy-eyed little shits shouting out in support of
whatever propaganda, lies, bullshit's being spouted at them. It's absurd. These
guys are already dead. They're blowing each other away for someone else's - for
someone else. Tambossa, Mbantuwe, UFLL, APR - there's no popular resistance,
no liberty or labor. There's no ideology at all. There isn't even a desire to win.
There's no sense in it, no sense in it at all. What would it matter if we butchered
the lot of them? Would it change anything?

16. Numbers

If you have to kill someoneif you have tois it somehow better to do it clean
with a bullet through the head? Is it somehow worse to chop them up with an
axe? And what if you have to kill ten, or a hundred, or a thousand? What if in
doing it, you save a thousand or spare ten? What if you save yourself? What is the
measure of a man, or of his murder? By what insane calculus can we answer
questions like these? Should we even try?

17. Will to Power

The target's presence in the state continues to be a destabilizing influence. He is
largely responsible for the recent influx of weapons in the country, in clear
violation of the Joint Signatory Framework. His reputation as a dangerous arms
dealer... is well deserved. Orders are to terminate.

Well, that didn't work out the way they plannedI'm still breathing and you're
the one with malaria. You can tell them you tried. But that means fuck-all, doesn't
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it? You're fired, you know it and so do I. You had your shot but now it's over. And
since men like you only work for money, you're no longer my problem. You'll have
to find something else to do with yourself now. What your old clients don't seem
to understand is that they can't kill me. Do you understand what I'm saying?
Nobody kills me. NOBODY. I'm the one who decides who lives and who dies, me!
You know, there's a book I read a long time ago. I still think about it every day. It
helps me understand life out here. The book talks about menwhat motivates
them. It's simple, really. A living being seeks above all else to discharge its
strength. Life itself is will to power. Nothing else matters. So long.

18. Cancer

Stop squirming. Thought you'd be dead by now, you're stronger than I thought.
But not strong enough to stop the UFLL. They screwed you pretty good. So we've
got new men in office. Now what do you think's going to happen? You already
know, the whole world knows. First they'll take everything they can get their
hands on; rob the banks, the stores. Then the men will be lined up against the
wall and shot. They'll chop the children's arms off and cut the tendons in their
necks. And the women... It's a goddamn disease, is what it is. It's a cancer, you see
it. They can't get enough. They just take and take until it kills them. And once
they're gone, someone else takes their place and they're diseased too. Every cell
is infected. And the longer you stay the deeper the virus goes. In the end, nobody
will be left. Just the disease. So what do you do about this particular situation?
Quarantine the patients. Or you just get dirty along with the rest of them. You
stay here. And you'll watch your back if you know what's good for you.

19. Comedy

If you're here to help rubber-stamp that cease-fire, you're too late. A peace
agreement! What a joke. A comedy act. You think these men wanted peace? They
wanted privacy, is what the wanted. They wanted the world to stop paying
attention to them so they could go on with their raping and pillaging, in peace,
you see. It's going to stop. I'm going to stop them, and they'll know. They'll be
cursing my name when the blood comes spurting out of their necks. And you're
not going to stop meyou think I don't know you? What you're about, what you
came here to do? Wake up, I used to BE you. They're going to think YOU did this.
A dirty mercenary who'll do anything for a payout. That's good, it means the war
will start all over again. The REAL blood letting has begun. We're going to cure
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these men of their disease, you and I. We're going to pull it right out of their
veins.

[pause]

What have you got there, diamonds?