An Interview with Les Roberts

ePulse: Do you ever get angry? I guess there are two parts to this: 1) Do you ever get angry at the scrutiny of your reports, and 2) Do you get angry at what you see when you enter these war zones, when you are in Iraq or the Congo?

LR: The answer to [the second] is “Absolutely!” Yeah. What could make you get madder than - in the case of the Congo - society getting pushed so hard that children die like flies. Or in Bosnia, snipers shooting children as bait. What could be worse than that?

But as far as anger about in particular the press spin, which I think is what you are talking about. Scrutiny is more people saying they didn’t go to enough places to make a representative sample or there wasn’t really enough time for them to have possibly done this many interviews. Even though if you just look at the math in the paper, it’s more than an hour in the field per team and its absurd that a four question interview couldn’t be done in an hour per average. No, those things don’t make me angry. They make me disheartened and sad when I see them given so much credibility when they are so profoundly stupid in basis.

But the active spin on this, and in particular the need for President [George] Bush to deny this within an hour or two of it coming out, I see as testimony to how pertinent and important this is.

ePulse: Do you experience detachment when you enter a war zone in terms of personal safety in what you see around you?

LR: No. In terms of personal safety, you are always making decisions, making judgments to maximize your safety, and in particular the safety of your coworkers. I think, in fact, when you talk to a family who has lost someone and when in my case, I’m away from my wife for windows of months, I actually value life more. So in terms of some of the things we have heard soldiers say, for example at this conference, I don’t think I get reckless at all in settings of war. In fact, I probably start valuing my life more than I did before I came.

ePulse: Makes sense. [That] is something that someone like myself couldn’t see without experiencing that. So how do you prepare yourself to enter a war zone?

LR: Study. The most important thing is having colleagues who value you and want you to stay alive. By far that’s the most important thing for staying safe. [It is] infinitely more important than armed guards or all these strategies about driving in different ways to work every day and not putting your seat belt on until your driving and all those things they teach you in your security classes. Those things are trivial compared to having really competent, in-tuned colleagues that care for you.

ePulse: [Let’s] shift gears a little bit. Would you describe the program that you are currently teaching in?

LR: Yeah. It’s a really small program. There are three professors there most of the time and one or two more who wander in for a day or two for eight weeks in a row, so it’s very small. About thirty master’s students. Its purpose is to prepare people to be NGO and UN type workers in emergency settings. I have a lot of friends who teach in undergraduate schools and tell me how unmotivated their students are or my brother’s girlfriend who teaches graduate students and tells me how unmotivated in theater they are. I have brilliant students who work incredibly hard. It verges on inconceivable that they pay me to do this. It’s a really nice setup.