An American Family in Libya

      During the late 1970s I lived with my wife, Jeanne, and three kids in Marsa-el-Brega, Libya, about halfway between Tripoli and Benghasi. In those days, it sat in a large fenced enclave, about five miles across, surrounded by the Great Sahara Desert to the south and the Gulf of Sirte, the southern reach of the Mediterranean Sea, on the north. Brega was the site of a large natural gas liquefaction plant and crude oil terminal jointly owned by Exxon and the National Oil Company of Libya.

      Life was a strange combination of the idyllic and the perverse. On one hand we lived in comfortable houses with modern kitchens and tile floors. An attractive recreation center had a passable restaurant and a beautiful pool overlooking the Mediterranean. On the other hand, Libya's leader, Moammar Qaddaffi, toadied up to the Soviet Union, and much of Libya's consumer goods came from Eastern Europe. Quality was generally bad, and supplies always short. Shirts might have one sleeve longer than the other, or puckered seams. Once we found a hairy cow's ear in a can of Bulgarian corned beef.

      A Libyan equivalent of summer camp for twelve-year-old boys was the Traffic Police Cadet Corps. In summer most major intersections and all highway check points were manned (boyed?) by youngsters in white police uniform, authentic down to the white holster and real pistol (hopefully unloaded, but who knew?). In late afternoon, the adult supervisor could be counted on to be asleep in a nearby guard building, so the boys had full authority to halt and search passing traffic.

      In July 1978, I drove to Agedabia, a small town about two hours' drive from Brega, to get a new muffler for my car. Parts were in short supply since all auto dealerships and parts stores had been nationalized as part of Colonel Qaddaffi's drive to eliminate evil capitalism. As I approached the checkpoint two miles out of Agedabia, a cadet flagged me down. A law of human nature says that possession of a firearm imparts an authority and arrogance not otherwise manifested in its possessor. If the possessor is twelve years old, the effect is magnified.

      Though I was in a hurry, I greeted him in Arabic and inquired as to his health, usually flattering to children when it comes from an adult foreigner. As he replied, his eyes caught the hand microphone of my two-way radio attached to the dash. He jumped in without pausing for permission, turned on the AM radio and began chatting into the mike while he twiddled the tuner.

      Getting no reply, he demanded that I make it work. The radio was single-channel for use in the gas plant at Brega, and useless for the conversation that the boy had in mind. I said it was broken, which he accepted as the normal state of things in Libya.

      Then he asked my destination. When I told him he shouted toward the guard building at the side of the road. A sleepy voice answered from inside and the boy signaled for me to take him along. He continued to play with the silent microphone.

      The town of Agedabia is a conglomeration of one- and two-story buildings, some made of soft blocks of locally quarried caliche, and others made of concrete. Because the stone is soft and because Libyan masons just stack the blocks, it is hard to tell the age of a building. In fact, it is often hard to tell whether it is being built or being demolished.

     Most educated Arabs keep their houses neat and trim inside, but don't care a fig about the outside. Consequently rubble, drifted sand and trash pile up outside the walls. This would have given an abandoned appearance to the town except for the groups of children and goats roaming the dusty streets.

      It was down one of these unpaved streets that the boy-cop demanded I turn. It was dark, narrow and deserted, and I became a bit nervous as the boy played with the pistol in his holster.

     "Wayne timshee (Where do you want to go)?" I asked him.

      He waved his hand to indicate straight ahead. I braked to avoid a boy who dashed out of a side street, rolling a hoop with a stick. He stopped and stared at us as we proceeded. After a few minutes, the cadet stopped me in front of a gate and jumped out, slammed the door behind him without a word and dashed to the gate. He disappeared without looking back and my encounter with Libyan boy-cops was over. I found a shop that had my muffler and made my way back to Brega.

Exerpted from "Oil Patch" by Gary Gentry www.authorhouse.com/bookstore