Fearing For Your Survival

One night we were at a place called Mr. Kareem’s Chicken and it was the equivalent of KFC in downtown Peshawar and a young guy drove up in a little white Suzuki Swift, got out and babbled something and said my name, Commander Jerry. A couple of others sort of hustled him away and there was myself and my Sergeant-Major Dave McCracken, another Canadian named Wally Tobin and two New Zealanders. There was a, one of the contingents that was there besides us was New Zealanders. There was also Australians, Americans and Norwegians in our area. But two of the Kiwi guys, Terry Hokianga and the other guy and I should remember him more than Hoki. He was the guy that actually saved my life. The guy, the young guy, the Pakistani came back 10 or 15 minutes later with a pistol, jumped out and pointed it at me and just before he shot the Kiwi hit his arm and the round went off in the air. So we all hustled ourselves out of there pretty quickly. Now the other local Paks got a hold of the guy and took the pistol from him. Now why they did that I’m not clear either because we were obviously white and Christian and shouldn’t have been, you know, there. And we had gotten a little bit complacent I guess about our own security in where we would go and what time of day and stuff where we would go. We thought that we understood things fairly well and realized pretty quickly at that, that, you know, we weren’t in the right place that time. I mean that was a lesson on personal security. Time to start paying a little bit more attention to what we were doing and where we were doing it. And even though it was only 7 o’clock in the evening, having chicken at Mr. Kareem’s was not one of them.