BLUE HELMET

A U.N. peacekeeper recounts his adventures in East Africa.

Carpenter, a retired U.S. Marines officer and founder of the nonprofit World Without War, recounts his time serving with the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS), helping other aid workers deal with famine, disease, and poverty. He first shipped out to South Sudan in 2019, and he sets his book’s tone immediately by relating the moment when he and his colleagues hit an explosive device and came under enemy fire: “Bullets continued to hum through the air above us and smack into the side of our vehicle as we crouched behind it in a slick mixture of blood and sweat.” The author settled into his peacekeeping mission, although he quickly felt insulated from the real nature of the country and its people. Carpenter volunteered to accompany a general on a visit to an unruly sector west of the capital city of Juba, penetrating deep into a region of tropical forests, swamps, and grasslands, which gave him a chance to see the poverty of the country up close. The people, he recalls, “lived in huts made of woven reeds covered with white and blue tarps that gave them an average living area of forty-three square feet per person—a space more confined than the smallest US prison cells.” The author details the environmental factors of his mission (including, in the chapter titled “Africa Wants To Kill You,” the constant threat of malaria) in passing; his focus is on the difficulties he and his colleagues encountered in trying to help a fractured and violent country.

Carpenter writes vividly and passionately about that country, which clearly touched his heart in the months he served there. He describes South Sudan as “a country of red dirt, brown rivers, green trees, and blue skies as far as the eye could see…a country of sad donkeys pulling dilapidated water carts, weary militiamen riding battle-scarred technicals, and corrupt politicians in gleaming new Escalades.” During his time there, Carpenter dealt with a wide variety of crises, including military eruptions that prompted him to craft tactical memos (“We need to push up the Bor-Pibor axis,” reads one such detailed paper, “clear Manyabol and re-establish our ground ‘Lines of Communication’ to reinforce Pibor”), and he conveys these and other duties in colorful and forceful prose. The author left the country in 2020, and his memoir brims with the frustration he and his colleagues felt about the one-step-forward-two-steps-back nature of their work in an environment where the agendas of rival organizations and petty military potentates often clashed. As one general put it when he and his fellow peacekeepers were suddenly withdrawn from a scene, “Yesterday we were on the ground, and all it took was a phone call to get us out.” The final chapters of the book are poignant, with the author reflecting on the country’s ongoing turmoil. The result is a singular, personal account of being on the cutting edge of U.N. peacekeeping efforts.

An edifying and powerful memoir of a U.N. peacekeeper’s year in a troubled land.