Who Trolled Amber? - Pig Iron - Episode 2: Spring break

Episode Date: September 11, 2023

At just 22 years old, Chris travels to Ukraine for his spring break, keen to see war up close. For the first time, he experiences the thrill and horror of the frontline. He's hooked. Five years later, Basia, along with Chris's cousin, Jeremy, visit Chris's parents in America to piece together who he really was. There they learn a troubling new detail about Chris's time in Ukraine.Listen to the full series today. For the premium Tortoise listening experience, curated by our journalists, download the free Tortoise audio app. For early and ad-free access to all our investigative series and daily and weekly shows, subscribe to Tortoise+ on Apple Podcasts.If you’d like to further support slow journalism and help us build a different kind of newsroom, do consider donating to Tortoise at tortoisemedia.com/support-us. Your contributions allow us to investigate, campaign and explore, and to build a newsroom that is responsible and sustainable. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Yes, please. Perfect. Thanks. It was cold. It was Christmas. I'd just put my tree up when I got a series of messages from Jeremy, Christopher Allen's long-lost cousin. Yeah, basically, I just wanted to be so brave. You know what I had to do? He tried to call the mysterious essay writer.

I have some information which will lead to justice about you. The number worked. the mysterious essay writer. The number works, but the line is terrible. And it's a really unsettling exchange. The essay writer talks around the information that he says he has. He doesn't want to get into detail on the phone. Is there anything else at the

moment that you want to tell me that I would share with the family? I would like the family to know if it is possible I wanted to meet them. He wants to meet Chris's family in person. Nobody is keen on that.

They've already been through so much. And that's where Jeremy is useful, and has been useful, for years. Okay. I'm signing off. He acts as a kind of delegate for them out in the world he can go to places that are just too painful for john and joyce to venture and this investigation falls into that category jeremy is keen for it to happen he pitched the story after all this was his idea and he's keen to go and meet the essay writer in john and joyce place. But none of it can really go anywhere if Chris's parents aren't on board. And I don't just mean on board with doing a podcast in the practical sense,

but more importantly, on board with me. Because to investigate Chris's killing, it's clear it means investigating Chris himself. It means going to uncomfortable places. In short, it might take me to answers about their son that they don't want. I'm Basha Cummings. From Tortoise, this is Pig Iron.

Episode 2, Spring Break. The essay had made all the questions that I had about Chris feel so much more urgent. The unsettling way that the writer had communicated, the claim he made that Chris was captured alive. I was keen to start working on verifying if any of it was true, but before I could begin, I needed to spend time with Chris's parents. So I asked to visit them with Jeremy to join too. And after a polite, nervous Zoom call, they agree. Me and my producer Gary fly to New York in March and on a sidewalk outside a car garage on an early spring morning, we meet Jeremy. Hello, very nice to see you. How are you doing? Yeah, I'm nervous. Are you? Yeah, I'm good. You? Yeah, probably the same. Our destination is Bath in the state of Maine. And there I want to begin to understand who Chris was

and why he wanted to go to war and what he found there. And I wanted to know what they think happened to him. OK. On the right-hand side, yeah. Yeah. I'll just say that periodically just to remind you. Bath is north of new york along the east coast home to one of the biggest military shipyards in the united states and home to chris's parents john and joyce as a journalist working closely with the family is

always fraught they've invited you in because they want help or they want their story heard there's almost always a reason and it's very rarely a happy one, that someone brings you into their lives. There's the ability to affect potentially real change or real introspection. But for both sides, there's always a risk. What if the story that you end up discovering, the one that you end up telling, isn't the one they want? What I'm curious about, and I suppose the thing that's unanswerable at this point is that does that only work if it was a targeted killing

oh no i don't i don't think so no no because that's i suppose that's where well it's a question of what is targeted yeah yeah like there is no doubt that whoever killed him on that day meant to do it. The question is why. Jeremy was hundreds of steps ahead of me. I couldn't start with any assumptions about what had happened to Chris. Here's the street. Shall I go left here? I could feel that Jeremy was nervous.

This was a big moment for him too. And I'm sure he was taking a gulp and wondering, is this even the right thing to do? To bring these two complete strangers in to dig around in Chris's life and in his death. Shoes. OK, I guess it's off. It goes through, guys.

We're getting close to Nordic countries. Here's our house. Here's Jeremy Bliss. Jeremy, it's you. I never thought you'd get here, Jeremy. Oh, my gosh. I know, you yourself. My goodness.

How long have you been here? Through the front door, as we said our hellos, we walked into a beautiful room, a library of Chris's books, with a framed photograph of him looking right out at us. Chris on a bank of grass surrounded by trees, squinting a little bit into the sun. And beside the picture,

a Minolta film camera and strap and on another shelf, a small Ukrainian flag and some cigarettes and model planes and all these trinkets of a happy childhood. Wow. Welcome. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Dig in, guys. They seem to be excited to have us and they're grateful that we're going to be investigating their son's death. And I like them both a lot. And actually, to be honest, I don't just like them. I immediately want to help them. But I had to remind myself that however sympathetic

I am to their cause, I'm not here to join the campaign. And I know that over the next few days, the questions that I'll need to ask them will at times feel painful. Hey Jeremy, if you want to bring down clothing. What's that? If you want to bring down laundry. Oh, thank you. I will do that. Um, should we... Yeah. While we're staying at the house, Jeremy reminds Joyce that they have to make a video. Oh, thank you. I will do that. Should we... Yeah.

While we're staying at the house, Jeremy reminds Joyce that they have to make a video. It's for the United Nations. It's going to be played at a session of the Human Rights Council. I think we should do one recording. That's it. Can we both be in it? No, just you.

Why? It's just because there's only one intervener, only one speechmaker traditionally at the UN. It is really a grim task, condensing five years of horror into 90 short seconds. Joyce is understandably getting anxious, but she really wants to nail the video, and Jeremy is trying his best to keep her on time. Okay, this is going to have to be the one. So think high energy and speed, yeah? Tell me when

you're ready. Ready. Okay, good. Thank you, Mr. President. I speak on behalf of Reporters Without Borders, on behalf of my husband, John Allen. It's a summary of what they, the family, Jeremy, their lawyers, are calling for. ...is an attack on truth and justice in South Sudan, an attack on media freedom internationally, and an attack on our family. Joyce says her son, a journalist, was shot five times by the South Sudanese army. Why hasn't the government investigated what happened? Why hasn't the FBI undertaken the investigation that they promised to her? Why hasn't the US Department of Justice or the United Nations investigated Chris's killing as a war

crime? We plead with Christopher's two countries, the US and UK, to intervene. Perfect. Except I tripped up. Nope, perfect. It's done. How long was it, Jeremy? Just hang on. After takes and retakes, we return to the reason that we're here, to learn about their son. And we start, naturally, with the good stuff. His character was very evident pretty early in life, I think. Some two hours after birth.

He was curious and... Energetic. Chris said, I love this line, Chris said, no one gets between me and my brother. And Chris was standing on the very top. Well, nobody said don't go up. And that's what Chris would say, nobody said don't go up there. Isn't it wonderful that Chris is literally thinking outside the lines?

My voice was quivering. Yeah, he would find the exception to the rule. And Chris was fine. But that was his curiosity, and that was how his intelligence... They could, as you would expect, talk for hours, days, and indeed they did, about how brilliant Chris was. And I believed them. How he had grown up a happy, defiant kid

in a quiet suburb of Philadelphia. How he loved climbing. But this was good Chris. The Chris who is remembered, who's campaigned for. The version of him who was ambitious, quiet suburb of Philadelphia, how he loved climbing. But this was good Chris, the Chris who is remembered, who's campaigned for, the version of him who was ambitious, who had persevered in a tough, cliquey industry as a freelancer, who'd had his pictures ignored, his invoices paid late, if at all, but who, despite it all, had published reports from the front line. But I knew I needed to get into harder terrain.

So I'm actually sitting in the closet in the spare room, the guest room in John and Joyce's house. This is kind of my first moment alone to collect my thoughts after a really intense first day and the room is actually directly above the room and where we're doing all the interviews and very conscious that today was the easy day really I mean Joyce said herself it was it's it's easy to talk about because it's a joy and it's, John said too, it's the good stuff. And the next couple of days are not going to be easy.

And, you know, we're just all in this house together. My niece saw that my phone was ringing. It was Chris calling from South Sudan. And I was saying, John, it's Chris. Like, it's Chris. Yeah. Wake up, John. The day before, we were talking about Chris's love of climbing.

And now they were telling me about the last time they spoke with their son, the night before he was killed. A phone call in which they tried to convince him to come home. So I said, and John was pretty much asleep. I said, Chris, go home. You've got this incredible story. You've been with these men for three weeks. You know them. You know their motivation. They've trusted you with their stories. You have their portraits. He, I said, leave. He said, why don't you support me? And I said, you always had our support. And

he said, why don't you understand that I've been with these guys for three weeks now, and I have to go the distance with them. And I said, it's because I love you. I mean, I don't want you to put yourself at risk. It was intense. And here's this boy that, this man that we had supported in every way possible, and now he's saying he's questioning that support because I'm telling him to turn around. He really felt like he needed to complete.

He had to see it through. Yeah. Yeah, he did. Had to see it through. Yeah. And so I woke up John, and we sang the song that we put him to bed with every night when he was a child. And we sang it to him. Did we dare sing it? Shalom, Christopher. Shalom, Christopher. Shalom, shalom.alom, Christopher. Shalom.

Shalom. We'll see you again. We'll see you again. Shalom. Shalom. Jeremy had warned me before we arrived that John and Joyce's grief was still raw. But now I understood what that really meant. And I understood what the lack of answers was doing to them. It was holding them in the nightmare.

I wanted to talk more about Ukraine and his decision in 2014 as a 23-year-old student to travel for spring break to a war zone. Inspired by the scenes of revolution that he'd seen on the streets of Kyiv, just wanting to be there in the middle of history in the making, this trip was, after all, the beginning of everything that was to come next. That spring break when he went to Ukraine while everybody else was going to Greek islands

and whatever, he didn't want to follow that path. So he had to do something a little different to everybody else. Because it's quite a thing, no, to use your spring break to go to a war zone. I suppose it gave him some sort of infamy. I don't think he was looking for that. I think he was just following his own path. I don't think he was. Were you worried when he told you he was going to go? I don't think I understood the situation until the building that he was in.

I had seen in the newspaper many, many times, like, whoa, this is where it's all happening. And how did he get there? Joyce is talking about a photograph Chris sent her from inside an administration building in Donetsk in eastern Ukraine. He'd talked his way inside, and from there, from that building, he'd seen the declaration of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic. I tried to remember what I was doing at this time. I think I'd just been freelancing badly. It was the summer before I got my first job in journalism,

and I must have just finished some kind of internship. But my life couldn't have looked more different to Chris's. And then I imagined Chris arriving in Donetsk alone, catching buses and riding taxis through shelling and fighting. There are times in this investigation that I felt close to Chris, but this was not one of those moments. Chris did not look from a distance and try to tell a story. He was in the story. I think you also, I guess when you're close to death in a trench with grad missiles falling down,

like it highlights you're truly alive and aware that most of us can never imagine. So I guess that was something too. I don't know that he felt truly alive. But he saw that in others. I think he saw that and he liked the interdependence of covering for someone. Yeah. Like their lives are in each other's hands.

Yeah. It was a quality of living he certainly didn't know in suburbia. And I think he wanted to understand. I don't think he wanted to be in it. I didn't think he wanted to pick up a gun. I think he wanted to tell about their motivations. It was really striking how quickly the conversation about Chris going to Ukraine and what kind of journalist he was and wanted to be became a conversation about the foreign fighters that he met there. The terminology is a little fraught. I'm calling them foreign

fighters, but some people have called them mercenaries. Indeed, Chris sometimes called them this too. The men who'd decided for various reasons that they wanted to leave their homes in America or the UK and volunteer to take up arms against the Russian-backed separatists. They joined groups called things like Right Sector, the Azov Battalion, the Donbass Battalion. Some of them were linked to extreme right-wing ideologies. At the memorial service, this very interesting character showed up, whom we had heard about. his name is Chris Lang and Chris Lang after the memorial service 20

30 people came back to the house and we talked until 2 in the morning and Chris said everybody wanted to tell my story journalists all over the place wanted to tell my story Chris was kicked out of, he had a dishonorable discharge from the Army. Chris Lang did. Chris Lang, and he came as a mercenary to the East to fight. And Chris was a character. He said, sitting around the fireplace, he said something like, I wouldn't let anybody tell my story except Chris

Allen like all these journalists wanted to come and tell my story but I wasn't going to say a word about who I was or what I was doing to anybody except for Chris because I knew Chris would accurately tell my story and I think Chris really wanted to understand Chris Lang Chris Lang was discharged for attempting to kill his wife. I said, Chris, what are you doing hanging out with this guy who is running around the house trying to kill his wife? He said, Mom, he didn't. He didn't kill his wife.

He didn't kill his wife. Only tried to. Well, you don't know that. That's the story. That's why he was discharged. But is that the whole story? And there's no excuse for trying to kill your wife if that's what he was trying to do. But I don't know that that's why he was discharged, but is that the whole story? And there's no excuse for trying to kill your wife if that's what he was trying to do, but I don't know that that's true.

And besides, I'm with him now, and I want to understand him now. So there was this thing about getting into the... unpacking Chris Lang. On one of the mornings, I began leafing through the books in Chris's library. So many of the titans of reporting were there. Michael Herr, Joan Didion, John Cracker, Ernest Hemingway. And some of the books were annotated. For example, I took Anthony Lloyd's book and had a look and there's all these sections which are underlined. And the sections that are underlined are all the bits

that are about like what war reporting is and how it takes a grip over you and you can tell that he was figuring a lot of stuff out when he was reading them. Anthony Lloyd had his own compelling mythology. He'd travelled to Bosnia in the 1990s when he was in his early 20s with a vague plan to become a journalist and bit by bit it sort of worked. After winging it for a bit he was offered a chance to cover for a guy from the Telegraph newspaper who'd been injured by a mine. He was a young man drawn to the front line, intermittently addicted to heroin. 25 years later, he's one of Britain's leading war reporters. And in the sections of his book that Chris had underlined, it felt like in Antony, he'd found a guide, a mentor. In a paragraph about photojournalism, Chris had marked, I saw it only as a passport to war. It felt to me that this was

a small find, an artifact of Chris's inner life. And it preempted one of the thornier questions that I wanted to ask John and Joyce, one that I'd been thinking about a lot as I'd heard more of the criticism of Chris. Directly, in some cases, from other journalists who had encountered him on the front line. The ones who told me that Chris just wanted to be there, on the zero line. And to be clear, I'm not asking these questions to suggest that somehow you should have known, but it's important, I think, to get a sense of risk and how he was dealing with risk and what his appetite for risk was. And that's why I wanted to ask whether you had a sense that he was at risk or that beyond the obvious risk of war reporting, that he was somehow

perhaps not quite clear where the lines were of what he should be doing or, you know, how to get to a front line, how to stay safe, all of those sorts of things that probably reporters who were around him who had been doing it for longer or had a newsroom behind them who could help them figure that stuff out, you know, he didn't have that. I don't think he chased have that I don't think he chased danger I don't think he put himself I think it was all calculated risk he was too smart to throw himself at the mercy of anybody I mean he wouldn't throw himself at the mercy of an editor for the sake of publication. And maybe I was naive. I mean, we were always concerned.

For sure we were concerned. But we didn't quite understand. Did we understand? I'm not sure if we really did. We knew there were a lot of risks. And I think given he was in his early 20s, and young men tend to take risks, there was some element of that there. You know, he had a body awareness that exceeded kids his age. Even as a child, Like when he learned to walk when he was nine months,

he had a sense of what his body could and couldn't do. He knew how far he could go. That was my sense of him as a kid. What happened when he left our home, I guess that's the story you're telling. I want to say that we had long talks about this, he and I, about the motivations of guys and why they're there. And I think he saw something in these volunteers that he did not see in life what compelled them. He really

wanted to understand what compelled them. Do you think he saw a bit of himself in them? That their lives, that they were going to sort of be on the front line of history in a different way? I think he did. Myself. So Joyce and John brought out these two boxes from their garage. We're not quite sure what's in them. In the evening, Jeremy and I go through boxes of Chris's stuff. And there we find plane tickets, passports and boxes of journals, all these small A5 pocketbooks that Chris clearly preferred.

We find a Ukrainian medical manual, various types of wound dressings. It's a metal cup for drinking. It's got water, purification tablets. I mean, this is all... He's pretty well prepared, isn't he? I wouldn't... In a notebook, one that he had taken to India and Pakistan on a backpacking trip in 2011,

I found a note from Joyce, folded into the back. A blessing for the traveller by the Irish poet John O'Donoghue. The first few lines read, Every time you leave home, another road takes you into a world you were never in. Jeremy was sifting through all of this for the first time, but for much of the last few days, he'd been sitting in the interviews, listening and taking notes. And a lot of it he already knew.

For much of what happened after Chris was killed, Jeremy was there in the emails organising help. And so some things had just become normal for him. And it's how I learned, almost accidentally, about one document in particular. Well, it seemed like Chris had distributed that emergency sheet fairly widely for people to be able to get in contact with you quite swiftly. I think the only person who had it was Eddie. I believe that's right. What emergency sheet? So the contact information sheet is something that Chris filled out and it's for freelancers to distribute to their contacts

when they're in the field and to their friends in the event of an emergency. It has... It's basically a list of instructions of what to do in the event of his disappearance or his death in South Sudan, who to contact, who to invite to his funeral. It's a document that's recommended by freelance reporting organizations so that there's some kind of support network in place in case you go missing. So the personal contacts included Joyce, then John.

He must have written it before he left, One and two on the list of his parents. Then his childhood best friend, Eddie. Then his closest friend in Brussels, where he had lived for a while. Then someone called Igor. Helena. Then his girlfriend, Helena. And Sava, his roommate in Ukraine. And beneath Sava, an unexpected name. Then Craig Lang.

Craig Lang. I knew vaguely who he was. When Chris had been in Ukraine, Craig Lang had been a foreign volunteer fighter in right sector, a Ukrainian nationalist battalion, a group that had been linked with extreme right-wing ideologies. Before coming to Maine, I'd read a long article by a journalist called Charlotte Alfred about Chris's journalism, and she had connected Craig and Chris from their time in Ukraine. A quick Google search will tell you that in 2018, after Chris's death, Craig Lang had been accused of a terrible crime, a double murder in Florida. So I knew enough to recognize that the name on this contact sheet was significant. In fact, I'd heard Joyce talk about him.

She'd called him Chris Lang, the man who had come to Chris's memorial in Philadelphia, the one who said how much the fighters had trusted Chris. But I thought that was because he had been reporting their story. Now, Craig Lang's name was among Chris's closest friends and family, number seven on the list. So what was their relationship, really? Lots of love.

Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. It was time to leave Maine. We were all exhausted, John and Joyce most of all. It had been a really gruelling few days for them. And as we were leaving, Joyce said quite quietly, tenderly to Jeremy,

that she hoped that he would protect Chris. It was a natural maternal thing for a grieving mother to say, but it made me wonder, protect him from what? From us? From what we might uncover? We now had two crucial documents, two new leads. An essay claiming that Chris had been captured and killed, written by a mysterious man who wanted to meet in person. And we had this contact sheet.

I wanted to find and speak to everyone on it. ACAST powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. Hi, I'm Una Chaplin, and I'm the host of a new podcast called Hollywood Exiles. It tells the story of how my grandfather, Charlie Chaplin, and many others were caught up in a campaign to root out communism in Hollywood. It's a story of glamour and scandal and political intrigue and a battle for the soul of the nation. Hollywood Exiles from CBC Podcasts and the BBC World Service. Find it wherever you get your podcasts.

ACAST helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. ACAST.com Number three on the list, Eddie. Chris's best friend from childhood in Philadelphia, back where Chris had grown up.

...the number plate too, so it might be interesting to ask Eddie about that. And also, Eddie was the person Chris' best friend from childhood in Philadelphia, back where Chris had grown up. I was really hoping that Eddie might help me rough up my sense of who Chris really was. I wanted to know how he talked to his friends about Ukraine and why he was drawn there. Basically, the stuff that you wouldn't tell your mum and dad. But it didn't quite turn out that way. We chatted in this really cold kitchen behind the meeting hall where Chris's memorial had been held a few months after his death. And Eddie proudly, as we were talking, propped up a photo of Chris behind him so that he was literally looking down on us as we spoke.

You know, his legacy is an important thing to protect. Yeah, he's unable, I feel like, to defend himself. Not that he needs defending all the time. It's this question of like, what, you know, how how how do we do with the legacy of someone who was so young, but also produced so much? If I had been killed in a horrible way, I'd want someone like Eddie on my side. He was loyal, protective, but it didn't get me any closer to Chris. I found that a very frustrating experience or a strange experience. It made me think a lot about the stories that you tell about people who are no longer around. And particularly,

I think somebody who's young and who died in such a terrible way, it felt like we're starting to hear the same stories being repeated, that they've kind of become a part of Chris's myth. Back in New York in a dingy hotel room, Jeremy and I tried to make sense of what we'd learned. I felt like we needed to talk through the possibility that this investigation might put him in a difficult position. If he was explicitly the family's envoy, if they wanted him to protect Chris,

could he really dig into this uncomfortable world with me? I was going to have to consider the possibility that Chris had gotten too close to the foreign fighters. Was that why he had been called a white rebel? And what might that do in a campaign that championed Chris as a journalist killed for doing his job? I wanted to be certain of the line between Jeremy and I. So how do you weigh the possibility

that he may have become too close to these mercenaries or that he may have done things or said things that now feel very uncomfortable with that sort of family connection to John and Joyce where they see you as their envoy and a protector of Chris's legacy? I think I'm now very comfortable with the idea, and I basically was, but now I'm very comfortable with the idea that protecting Chris is telling the true story and Chris didn't ever do anything that he wouldn't

own up to so he was he he wouldn't have been embarrassed or ashamed of any of his decisions and therefore there's no reason for me to be on his behalf. But that might damage your relationship with them? I don't think it will because I don't feel in my heart, this is heart-feeling, not a logical one, that it will ultimately be negative. I've known, everyone's known who's close to the case that he got close to some of the mercenaries. But I know that ideologically Chris was not aligned with you know I don't know that from

some written document or for some proof but I know from knowing him that he wasn't aligned with those more radical ideologies and I think you know you can't have the benefit of a podcast or a deep investigation into someone without having warts and all. It's a decision that they made. So I don't think it will ruin my relationship with anyone. We decided I would do the interviews, the investigating of Chris and his career and his relationships, and Jeremy would continue to investigate what happened in South Sudan, as he had been for years now, with me working alongside.

And on that note, we flew back to London. In the days and weeks after returning from Maine, Jeremy began sharing folders and folders of stuff that he'd collected over the last five years. Things like legal documents, emails, Chris's pitches, his journals, his notes. And so I started to work my way through them. And I focused on his earliest two trips. The first one in April of 2014, which was just after the war broke out in the Donbass, the one that he went to for his spring break. And the summer of 2014, when he went back for a longer time and embedded with Ukrainian battalions. And in a series of bullet points made in the summer of 2014,

I found an extraordinary detail. OK, so I just started recording because I've been going through, I printed off all of Chris's notes that I was given from his time in Ukraine. They're really interesting. I mean, he definitely had that kind of reporter's instinct. You know, they're really evocative. He describes the sounds that he hears, the sound of men cleaning their guns,

the clicking and sliding of metal. There's one bit here where he writes, this doesn't feel real, neither does what I'm doing. So you get from these notes that he's living something very intensely and he doesn't yet know how to make sense of it. But the reason I'm recording now is because something really stood out to me. And I guess I should preface this by saying that I knew already from talking to Jeremy and to another journalist, Charlotte Alfred, who's done a lot on Chris's case,

to Jeremy and to another journalist, Charlotte Alfred, who's done a lot on Chris's case, that they said that Chris had fired a gun at some point in one of these early trips. And in my head, I kind of imagined it like you've not been in this world before and somebody says, here, have a go and you shoot a tree or something. You know, that doesn't seem mad to me. You know, that doesn't seem mad to me. But that, based on these notes, does not seem to be what happened. In fact, something much, much more serious piece of weaponry. It's basically like a tube that's propped up on a base and you put a mortar shell into it and when it drops down to the bottom, it ignites and explodes out and it can go tens of meters or hundreds of meters

and it's essentially, I mean, it's a bomb. And so Chris writes, I fire a mortar. He says that it's directed towards a bridge in a separatist-controlled town. He writes that I told them I only shoot this and point at his camera, but I ended up firing. It seems the done thing, he writes. But this bit, it just, I mean, well, let me read it he writes um what does it mean nothing everything like each man here i played a part in what happened here

for that i am responsible maybe i killed a soldier though the fire was directed to the edge of the town maybe i killed a civilian maybe i hit nothing the mortar was aimed to the edge of the town. Maybe I killed a civilian. Maybe I hit nothing. The mortar was aimed, though. The shell could have been dropped in the tube anyway. How complicit am I? Next time, in episode three. War is ruled by the dynamic of chaos. You are going to make mistakes.

Everybody makes mistakes in Europe. I think he thought that the laws of war didn't apply to him. He says, these European soldiers of fortune are trying to make plans so we'd all go together. And you reply to say, we're in Africa. And he says, South Sudan, it's chaos out there. This series is reported and written by me, Basha Cummings. Additional investigation is by Jeremy Bliss. The producer is Gary Marshall.

Additional reporting is by Xavier Greenwood. Sound design is by Carla Patella. Original theme by Tom Kinsella. With thanks to Charlotte Alfred and Kacper Ekavek. The executive producer is Kerry Thomas. Pig Iron is a Tortoise production. need delivered with Uber Eats? Well, almost, almost anything. So no, you can't get snowballs on Uber Eats. But meatballs, mozzarella balls, and arancini balls? Yes, we deliver those. Moose?

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