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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.
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ISSUE 01 / SPRING 04
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