Lions, Lambs, and Runts. 10/30/18

BURN, BABY BURN

Getting into Haiti meant paying off several senior officers until eventually, single stripe soldiers waved us through a series of shabby checkpoints. We drove past abandoned villages where hungry dogs scoured for food, abandoned by frightened owners the same day the earthquake crushed much of the island nation, like a drunken giant stomping, falling, and killing randomly. 

The following morning we reached the slummy outskirts of a freshly-destroyed Port-Au-Prince. The caravan slowed as it maneuvered around downed buildings and live wires. Several times, our drivers became lost and with our angry encouragement, they ignored desperate Haitians moving aimlessly around us begging for water, or, at the very least, hope. We offered neither, even though we carried the first by the hundreds in brand new, unopened bottles.

Hopelessness was quickly morphing into a confused and dedicated rage and the living barely moved as we rolled by and slowly into the badly damaged airport.

"The Presidential palace", Emmanuel moaned, "has been destroyed." His was sorrow as if he'd been punched in the gut and never saw it coming. "And our president is nowhere to be found!" He slammed on the brakes, barely missing a line of children walking alone and into lawless traffic. No stoplights or street signs. These people were zombies in the hours, days, months, and years following the killer terra moto. 

The balding tires on the SUV dropped hard into ten-inch deep potholes split open by the quake. Each jolt made the front bumper feel as if it was being torn off again and again. My notes, written by hand as we were driving were becoming harder to decipher. 

 

News agencies like CNN, Reuters, the Associated Press, and FOX routinely hire what the industry refers to as "fixers." These can be locals or imports quietly recruited to do the real, ''on the ground" dirty work that viewers, readers, and listeners are rarely told about. 

In Haiti, Emmanuel was hired as one of several drivers. A fixer in his own right who ferried our crews back and forth as needed. 

In Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria - wherever journalists venture around the world, fathers, brothers, nephews, and nieces - sometimes entire families are put on the payroll as fixers. Any region where journalists travel designated as a "hot spot" is where drivers, cooks, scouts, and translators are hired, and, by American standards anyway, are paid poorly.

Fixers in foreign countries are the gatekeepers, news directors, accountants, and all-around babysitters who "fix things." They've been vetted and claim to know which hotels and businesses are "media-friendly." Fixers are trusted to find drivers and camera crews to do the most dangerous work that many American reporters and photographers refuse to, or, their news agencies won't allow - for security and insurance reasons.

Drivers that know which roads are safe and which ones to avoid. Cooks that are trusted to buy and prepare food from market vendors that won't poison the product. Camera crews that consist of mostly young men willing to walk into ugly situations and shoot fresh, violent video of bomb attacks, executions, and uprisings. They sneak into rebel-held regions and score incredibly dangerous, nearly impossible on-camera interviews; they do everything they're asked because the ten or twenty U.S. dollars that news agencies pay each day, is more than they may make in a month.

Every morning, local fixers, in hot spots around the globe, kiss their families goodbye and drive away in the dark to jobs no one can know about. They leave knowing it takes just one curious or jealous neighbor to rat him out and have his entire family murdered. These real-world, real-life journalists often do the deadliest work that most "foreign correspondents" for whatever reason can't or won't. 

Young men barely out of their teens meet clandestinely in area hotels with American fixers. They're given crash courses on how to operate small and inexpensive video cameras. After several hours of "hands-on training", a slap on the back and a handshake, they're greenlighted to travel with security teams. 

Every morning after prayers they're driven to pre-determined locations by private military contractors. They avoid spies who would betray them for the equivalent of a Wendy's Triple Stack or a McDonald's Happy Meal. Under the watchful eye of mercenaries, they conduct quick interviews and shoot the most violent, but not necessarily the most relevant video of the day. Then, after the second of five daily prayers the armed entourage race back to the hotel, avoiding the triple threat of rogue soldiers, mobs, and the always diligent IED.

All of this happens while stables of foreign reporters, photographers, and producers that flew into the region to "cover the story", remain inside the relative safety of a hotel or secure compound.

Still, some journalists want to do their own reporting. They want to walk through the worst of it and find the most fascinating and knowledgeable source for their story.

On rare occasions, news organizations will credit, on air, the foreign camera crews who risked their lives for a story only to get paid the identical price of what four gallons of skim milk cost at Kroger.

In many parts of the world where war is raging, ten dollars American is a lot of money.

Before the first crew arrived in Port Au Prince, Fox News had already hired a string of local drivers and Emmanuel was one of them. Each driver was paid a daily flat fee and this desperate father wanted nothing more than to keep his temporary American employer happy. 

"Ok, please stop here!", I said, watching pedestrians barely escape being crushed by on-coming cars with drivers that didn't seem to care anyway. 

The vehicle slowed and then stopped completely. "This is not a good place for you to be, Mr. Orlando!", Emmanuel said flatly, clearly not liking the dropoff point I'd chosen. "Meet me back here in exactly one hour, OK?", I asked without waiting for an answer, then stepped quickly out of the family car.

I watched Emmanuel slowly drive away, past swarms of pawns, chess pieces that littered the board. Some standing, others laying on their sides. Kings and queens, rooks and horses - all going nowhere and wandering anywhere like zombies, while I kept walking towards the manic noise and that overpowering stench.

Pastel pinks, ocean spray blues, and soft peridots adorned many structures in this Caribbean country. Today though, every hue was horrifically mixed with concrete and rebar, bodies and blood, and seemingly useless Christian prayers and Voodoo incantations. 

I kept walking and watching; unsure of everything. 

Almost immediately, children, dirty and in half-pants, half-shirts, and no shoes were following me. Smiling and begging with young, weathered and bloody hands. They spoke a skittish mix of Haitian and French Creole spiked with bad tourist English. Children, bellies bloated and no more than two or three years old, held hands and followed older children who maybe thought I could help. I was not their color and I stood out. Maybe, they thought, a stranger could find a safer place far from the catastrophic earthquake that leveled their world and made many of these children new orphans.

I had one bottle of warm water in my work bag and meant for me. The youngest children, hand in hand, are on my heels. I give the bottle to a small girl in a dress, torn and tattered, that smothers her brown, boney frame. Her hair is frazzled and her braids have come loose. Her hands are small and dirty, sifting through trash, rubble, and rotting corpses in search of food. I didn't notice the older boy until the second he snatched the bottle from her hands and disappeared into the background of bodies and aftershocks. Instantly, her eyes go glassy and I walked away. I felt bad but left her anyway.

A crowd is wailing disconnectedly and in unison and I walk around the block, zeroing in on the noise. Small, shoeless feet are following me. I hear men shouting orders in Creole that I don't understand. 

On a nameless street corner, I see what I can't believe; people are throwing bodies onto a pile of fire six feet high. Two men have the inglorious task of pouring petrol on the corpses that have begun to stretch and crack open. 

Some bodies are burning hard and pushing a trail of gray smoke into an otherwise clear and beautiful blue sky; a silent witness to the horror below. I hear popping noises and what sounds like meat sizzling at a Saturday barbeque. Whole corpses burning, full of iron-rich blood and cerebrospinal fluid are giving off a sweet musky and metallic smell. 

Unforgettable. 

Some torsos refuse to light, while small flames are bobbing up and down, dancing and spreading beneath arms, legs, and heads. 

The little thief boy has reappeared. Skinny, like a scarecrow, his body sinks to the ground horrified. He's too close to the human heap and the flames shooting through eyeballs and nostrils. I want to weep but cannot. The boy's ribs stick out from his body like sharp knuckles on a closed fist.

No one else notices or maybe they don't care as he walks towards the human bonfire. He's mesmerized and standing close to a body whose arms are smoking and bent unnaturally. Its' mouth is gaping open as if still screaming when strangers tossed her like a bag of rancid trash. I see hair on fire and skin melting around a slender, silver bracelet adorning their wrist. Words once etched into the soft metal are gone, but the bangle sits precariously on the edge of the smoking bone. 

The water bottle, half empty, falls to the ground and the boys' hollow frame follows; a small, convulsing pile of pain, bones, and flesh. He seems even smaller staring into the pyre at the gruesome sight of his mothers' skin dripping steadily off her exposed bones. The wristlet has slipped off and disappeared into the fire. A son, weeping in the raunchy stench for his mother, now fully-engulfed, moans, "Manman!" 

That horrible moment in Haiti never left me and why it came back to life this evening inside my corner cell, I don't know. My eyes are wet. I've been crying in my sleep in the top bunk while a convicted rapist sleeps beneath me. 

The earthquake was real. I was there as a journalist reporting for a national news agency. I'd interviewed presidents and priests, dictators and Hollywood starlets, fathers and mothers whose children had been kidnapped and killed.

I'd been in the business for twenty-five years, reporting from Richmond, Virginia, Austin, Texas, Cleveland, Ohio, and various places around the world. 

I'd reported LIVE from war zones, killer quakes, enemy combatant detention centers, and violent political protests in Baghdad, Haiti, Central, South, and Latin America. And now, I too had become part of the voracious and unforgiving news cycle in the worst possible way.

Sweet Jesus, how did this happen?

Orly Salinas has worked for NBC, ABC, CBS affiliates and Fox News. He was arrested in the summer of 2016, charged with two counts of sexual assault and spent the next six months confined in the sex offender unit of a for-profit correctional facility. 

The 25-year journalist was released, and all charges immediately dropped following a hearing that took all of twenty-two seconds.

The prosecutor - for six months - had failed to divulge exculpatory evidence; conclusive lab results failed to show any DNA present. 

Law enforcement cameras had also captured the accuser asking several times and clearly, "What if Orly didn't do this, can he sue me for slander?" 

The county prosecutor failed to inform the court about any of it.

The book covers all of it; the truth, the lies, and the why's of what really happens inside a sex offender unit; the most hated hole in any correctional facility.