- This topic has 23 replies, 15 voices, and was last updated 17 years, 1 month ago by
.
- Posts
With the varied experiences here, I was curious as to who has been the victim of violence while out and about on planet earth. It is not just a morbid curiosity, rather, I would like to know what happened, how it happened, how you got out of it/end result, and what you learned that may help prevent it again?
I personally have not been involved in anything greater than my clinic getting ransacked and stuff stolen. It didn’t have an effect on my personal safety. I make a habit, however, of keeping a mental database of other’s experience and lessons so that one day I may be able to use lessons learned the hard way to prevent my own demise.
Nothing too drastic:
A few stone throwing Arab kids in Jordan started taking shots at some american women I was staying with. I chased them away, then had a word to the local headmaster. Didn’t happen again.
Guy tried to lift my wallet in Marseilles, so I took a swing. He backed off.
Guy beating up a girl in Japan. I was the only other person around on the street. I stepped in and started wrestling with the guy, then the girl starts wailing on me “he’s my boyfrfiend, he’s my boyfriend” – so I stepped away. Asshole had already ripped my nice coat though.
Worked in a bar in London for a while. Too many fights there to write about. Not usually much in it though. One guy did go after me with a pool cue once, I caught the cue as he swung it at me, but his friend tackled him and took him away before it turned into too much.
Numerous incidents on my travels but none that amounted to “violence” apart from the horrors in Burundi in 1993. I saw the machetes being sharpened by the roadside by the militia in the hills above Bujumbura, and was in the front seat of a minibus that had to charge through a roadblock… But the worst violent incident was in Richmond, London:
Took a girl to a small bar down a side street. The bar was packed and everyone was enjoying themselves. A large number of guys arrived and quietly dispersed themselves among the crowd. Then, at some signal, they all started fighting the punters. I watched as a bouncer waded in and was promptly incapacitated as this fella pulled the bouncer’s jacket up over his head and then started stuffing beer glasses up into the guy’s face.
One guy was just picking up every glass he could find, and throwing them into the crowd. It was carnage.
The girl and I walked out of it untouched. Never went back there.Back around 1998 I was traveling by boat with the some Thai army soldiers on the Salaween river, which acts as a demarcation point for Thailand and Burma. The soldiers were just doing a routine run up and down the river and I managed to wrangle a ride after “bribing” them with some bbq chicken and beer, these soilders were young so they’re easy to make an impression on. Anyway during our journey I pull out my Nikon and start shooting film of some Burmese outposts that are dotted along the Burmese side of the river. The next thing we know we start hearing the rat-tat-tat sound of gun fire in our direction. Turns out the Burmese soldiers were watching me through binoculars and were not happy with what I was doing (getting the pictures was my motive for going on the boat in the first place, I was doing a favor for some Karen friends of mine who were associated with the KNLU). Nobody got hit because after about 50 seconds I realized they were shooting over our heads. When we got back to the Thai army camp in Mae Som Lep the CO balled out the soldiers I was with and then gave me a pretty good tongue lashing as well in broken English, the one thing I remember him saying to me was “farang ba ba baw baw ” which translates to something like foreigner fucking crazy. I look back on it now and laugh, it may not have been a violent situation but at the time it seemed a bit precarious, any way I got the photos and tha’s what counts.
OK
I got shot at in Albania; guys overtaking my car took a pot shot at me as he went past then spend away without further incident. Myself and my wife got robbed at gunpoint in Nairobi although again thankfully we were not touched or hurt in anyway.
I’ve hidden from Ethiopian airforce MiGs while working with Marxist rebels in the mountains of northern Ethiopia and watched helicopter gunships go by far overhead searching for us, and once I had a great bar room brawl in Turkana in northern Kenya over a girl!
Is that enough to fill your strange fantasies?@peterc wrote:
Angola: hold-up at gunpoint, drunk police
Albania: hold-up at gunpointBurundi: ambush
Congo Brazzaville: armed carjacking/random shooting
Congo DRC: ended up in the midst of an angry crowd, drunk police officersWant me to continue with ‘D’?
P.
Typical Lonelyplaneteer…NOT
:P~Stiv
Like 2charlie, most of what I have experienced has been at a professional level.
However, what has always scared me more than anything else is casual street violence or even bar brawls 1. because I am not used it and 2. because it comes across as very personal and most of my experiences of violence have been where law and order does not exist in any shape or form. It is all about what you are most used to.
I have run away from bar brawls and run towards gunfights.I have been assaulted, in some cases pretty badly as a journo and it never really bothered me, but paradoxically I have had some wretched 5 foot geek wave his fists at me and I have walked away, even though I could have remodelled him while still holding a pint in the other hand.
Other times on assigment I have given as good as I got and sent people home with Irish tatoos (shiners/bruises), if not worse. Every situation varies, but what makes the most significant difference in any case is how mentally and physically prepared I have been.
We can’t be switched on all the time and true to form, that is when I got hit, never having seen the one that got me, be it a punch, kick or worse.
Most of what I have learned about trouble is always having an escape route, whenever possible. I am the original chickenshit and what is always going around in my mind is “what the fuck am I doing here?” and “How do I get out of here?”
I hate surprises and as odd and paranoid as it may sound, but I never go anywhere, not even on holiday (whatever that is) expecting to have a nice time. I expect the worst 24/7 and from everyone, even nuns, nurses and….whatever.
The upside is that I am never pissed off when things go to hell (and they frequently do) and really enjoy it when they don’t. Everything positive is a bonus.
Oh and learn (to PhD level) to be patient.
Cheers.the majority of violence i’ve been involved in has taken place near home rather than abroad (maybe that’s subconciously why i like to travel?).
nothing that serious, a few things stick out.
me and a buddy beat a guy who was beating his girlfriend in korea. we were drunk walking back to the hotel at the end of the night, stumbled on the scence, agreed something should be done. girl caught a cab and we went on our way without much concern for the dude.
almost got into a fight with a couple russians sailors who came to drink with me and my russian buddy alex (all started over the fact that i was leaving and didn’t want to drink any more, silly as it sounds). alex defused that one before any actual trouble happened though.
any other time i even came close to getting in a fight in korea it was with drunk or loudmouth GI’s in Itaewon.
holland and i almost had to duke it out with a bar owner and his thugs in thailand over a disputed bar tab. a local moto taxi came round and tried to mediate, wound up taking our side. holland picked up a pipe, and that’s when i decided i’d settle things by offering to pay half. at that point i had become more apprehensive of the legal consequences than the physical ones. they accepted. after waking up and thinking about it though, i’m pretty sure we wound up getting a discount on the actual bill…
closer to home i’ve been in a few rumbles. broke my hand in a fight, swelled up like a softball with fingers. split my head open and needed stitches. been hit in the head on a couple occasions with baseball bats, both aluminum and wood (wood is worse). caught a grazing knife wound to the head. been thrown down a flight of stairs. so on and so forth.
only lesson i can really think of is that it’s incredibly helpful to have someone around stay cool and and try to calm everyone down and resolve things peacefully, but even while that’s happening, just make sure you’re thinking about your positioning because shit could happen at any moment.
Actually not so much. A couple of punches and kicks in the head.
Numerous minor bar brawls and some big.Ususally I do a “Mikethehack” before trouble starts or the other side decieds that it´s an bad idea.
Last night was fun. 5-6+ girls jumped me on the dancefloor, actually each other, I just happened to stand in the middle, guess they didn’t see me…..
@RiverRat wrote:
Vietnam=VC, NVA
El Salvador=FLN
Mexico= Zapatistas
Colombia=FARC, ELN
Peru=Sendero Luminoso
Iraq=Iraqi Military, various & sundry militias and drunken forays with the SAS. :lol:
mike’s got you beat by a mile :P
@RiverRat wrote:
Vietnam=VC, NVA
El Salvador=FLN
Mexico= Zapatistas
Colombia=FARC, ELN
Peru=Sendero Luminoso
Iraq=Iraqi Military, various & sundry militias and drunken forays with the SAS. :lol:
Well spotted Kilroy.
Yup, no Penta.Your life sounds like it was really boring, RiverRat.
No Penta? You ain’t lived.
:-)yeah – there’s no topping RiverRat…
for me, other than the fact that my nose looks like Micheal Ware’s thanks to a big mouth and political know it all stance in high school, it’s pretty generic stuff:
~general crazy bar brawls / riots and / or getting lost in cities you shouldn’t get lost in while on the road for a few years with bands – you know, that kind of tourist ignorance that leads one through projects and reserves going for 4 am booze runs and substance hunts – whether in Ohio or Arizona, Cali or NY…
~ saw lots of crazy shite living @ Cambie and Hastings in Vancouver in a squat during the early 90’s…not to mention the rampant overdoses and muggings every last Wed of each month aka ‘Welfare Wednesay’
~ Pepper spray, tear gas, and tazer stinging (they HURT!!) and beatings during various street stuff in Seattle, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa by cops and supporters – but that’s to be expected.
~ having an all ages club that I booked and managed (for touring bands) in Victoria swarmed by hundreds of wannabe Vietnemese gang members in their parents Lexii (as Steve Coogan would say) that were mad that they lost their ‘dance night’ to a bunch of punk rock shows.
~ sitting down for a smoke in a park one night on Queen W in Toronto (the park next to the Mental Health & Addiction Centre ) and having someone grab me from behind while someone else ran out of the bushes yelling “nevermind…it’s not a girl.” – whew…
~and then another night getting stopped by a giant skinhead on the corner of Queen @ Yonge – where he grabbed me by the hood of my sweatshirt demanding to know where I had just come from (which was a grad party at the Rex for the college Audio Engineering/Production program I had completed).
Apparently there was an Artists against Racism gig, and since I was known musician he likely thought that’s where I was coming from.Since it was after 2 am, people would look over and see him brandishing this giant butterfly knife he had drawn back to stick me with, and as soon as he looked at passing pedestrians I started jumping up and down and making noises like I was nuts.
He backed away and I darted into the middle of Queen St. into a cab – and off 4 blocks where I lived on the corner of Queen E @ George ( just W of Sherbourne).
As soon as I got in, I called the cops – unfortunatelt for him, he had started walking down Queen directly to the area I lived…and he was easy to ID thanks to the giant calligraphy-styled “Irish” tattooed on his neck…DUH.
JUST as the cops pulled up and I walked out to talk to them…who comes bounding down the street? Good old ‘Irish’ the skinhead…I pointed right at him and said “there he is, fellas”.
Turns out he had just been released from prison 3 weeks prior and was wanted for a rape and mugging he had committed the previous week.
that’s one smart dude.
Now I want to hear more of River Rat’s adventures, thank you!
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.