Four pages and no Jackal? I'm going to fix that right now.
I can't pick one. So here is pretty much everything he said. Read any of them. They're all solid gold.
The Jackal
On breaking a man's spirit
"You can't break a man the way you break a dog or a horse. The harder you beat a man, the taller he stands. To break a man's will, to break his spirit, you have to break his mind. Men have this idea that we can fight with dignity, that there's a proper way to kill someone. It's absurd. It's anesthetic; we need it to endure the bloody horror of murder. You must destroy that idea. Show them what a messy, terrible thing it is to kill a man, and then show them that you relish in it. Shoot to wound, then execute the wounded. Burn them. Take them in close combat. Destroy their preconceptions of what a man is and you become their personal monster. When they fear you, you become stronger. You become better. But let's never forget: it's a display, it's a posture, like a lion's roar or a gorilla thumping at its chest. If you lose yourself in the display, if you succumb to the horror, then you become the monster. You become reduced; not more than a man, but less - and it can be fatal."
On gunrunning
"Getting them in is easy. I brought them in over the mountains, through the desert, whatever. The hard part is moving them inside the country. Whenever you get stopped you gotta bribe someone or shoot someone and it's not good for business. No, once you're inside you want to hand off as fast as possible. Let the customer deal with it.
Hmmm... I delivered three hundred kilos of C4 to Mbantuwe about six months ago. He showed up with a dozen of his men, dead men. He packed C4 into their corpses. Figured no one would search them. Smart guy."
On gunrunning
"It's a romantic notion that they all came out of the Soviet Union after the collapse. That was a winfall back in '89, maybe through '91, but, that's all over. I move weapons, I profit from circulation. You get a cease-fire in Liberia, both sides disarm, you think they slag two thousand tonnes of guns? No, they sell them to me. I resell them wherever the next war is starting.
[...]
Well, that's about a half. The rest mostly come from old European armies, after they abandoned their colonies in the sixties and seventies. You know; French guns, Dutch, Belgian...
They're not bio-degradable. Only the dead are bio-degradable."
On gunrunning
"What's the difference? Same job, really. You get up, you get on the phone, you meet your clients, you discuss a fair price. You make a delivery and receive payment. Sounds boring, but it's not - it's just simple. I'm doing what men have been doing for thousands of years; trading one thing for another. If it's you who wants to attach morality to it, make it evil... insane. People who work in gun factories in Belgium or the States, they're unionized right? You think kids making radios in Bangladesh pull down forty grand a year on a forty hour week? You start thinking too much about morality - that's insane."
When asked why he's selling guns in the interviewer's homeland
"Every place is somebody's home, pal, but it doesn't stop people from going to war. I don't start wars; I didn't start this one. It seems like it's your fellow Africans that want each other dead. Besides, why should I give a shit about your home? Why should anyone? You want me to go somewhere else? So there's someone's home you don't give a shit about?
War is my home."
On getting into gunrunning
"Back in the Navy, we delivered guns all over the world. Dropping off guys with twenty crates of rifles for the local fighters, so they could knock over some dictator. Mind you, that's not twenty crates of factory M16's; these were illicit weapons. Confiscated in some raid and then redistributed. No paperwork, right? If a crate here or there goes missing, hey, it happens. Military teaches you two things: how to deal with bureaucracy, and how to avoid it. Learning how to avoid it means learning how to deal in arms. You muster out, you apply what you learned. Every gun runner I ever met got his start that way; losing illicit weapons in transport with national militaries."
On choosing sides
"I did it once; it was a bad idea. Cut my profits in half, almost got me killed. Never again. You sell to both sides. You can help level the field, stabilize the market, draw out the conflict and make more money. A big sale to one side doesn't generate repeat business. Both the APR and the UFLL are using my weapons. Now they're in détente. Both sides are stockpiling. Less violence, more spending. It's perfect.
If I pick sides, fewer will be displaced, but more will be dead. And I will probably be one of them.
I'm a humanist. I don't judge. Maybe you would."
Interviewer confesses he could never sell guns
"Bullshit, Reuben. You have all the skills to be an arms dealer. Better one than me even. You're smart, you're creative, you're a salesman; you sold me on doing these dumb interviews. Man, the rest is just paperwork."
On individual morality
"I'm talking facts, and you're talking theory. You're not a good person, Reuben, you've just been lucky enough. You've never had to be otherwise. When it comes down to it, what a man can do is what a man will do. But believe what you want."
Ruminating
"Saw this kid on the side of the road yesterday. Couldn't have been eighteen... seventeen. Had a shotgun across his lap, and a dead APR, half in the ditch, next to him. A couple of close-range blasts with that 12-gauge tore big chunks of hamburger out of his torso. The kid was lifting up the guy's leg, taking his boots. Kid just looked tired - just beaten down, ragged, tired, old. A kid that age shouldn't look like that."
Losing his temper
"I'll tell you what's sick! People in the UK, in the US, fucking Canada, Sweden - they pay their taxes and some remote-piloted drone fires a missile into a public market to hit some warlord. Yeah, so maybe war doesn't happen for another six months, and the price of that gluten-free sorghum bread stays low. It's not sick to arm people, it's sick to bump off their crooks and dictators in protection of our interests and then call it international justice. These people don't have remote-piloted drones guarding their interests ten-thousand miles away. They don't have a war machine paid for with taxes. Where I am, they usually don't even have a fucking government. The drone is the oppressor. The gluten-free sorghum bread is the oppressor. The AK-47 is the great equalizer. I empower these people."
Ranting
"What do you think you're going to achieve with this interview? You think somebody in the Pentagon is going to read it and come after me? Shit no! I'm a necessary evil. They want me here. They're glad I'm here. Because if I wasn't, they might have to come try to stem the tide. It would be thankless and worthless, and once the bodies start coming home in bags, they're screwed. A dead 23-year-old from Iowa gets more airtime than the deaths of fifty-thousand people he gave his life to protect. So even if they did give a shit, their own media prevents them from taking action."
Musing
"Who gets the lion's share; that's what it's all about. Whether it's between children, or animals, or warlords. It's not that everyone wants a piece, it's that everyone wants the biggest piece. And the biggest piece doesn't go to the monkey, or to the giraffe. The biggest piece goes to the lion. Because the lion is the fucking king! That's how it works. It worked that way a million years before there were men saying otherwise. That's probably how it should work.
Shhh... Sometimes the Jackal steals the lion's share. But don't tell anyone."
Musing
"I saw that truck you were driving in. Perforated with .50 cal rounds and torched on the side of the road. I looked inside; corpses blown to pieces and burnt, unrecognizable. No camera, no tape recorder, no notebook. So I don't know, maybe you're dead. Maybe not. Maybe you'll find these stupid tapes and do whatever the hell you wanted to do with them. Or maybe the interview is over - wasted words, wasted life. Maybe I'll see you soon."
Musing
"Saw a firefight today; a little skirmish broke out at this roadblock when some APR guys got lost in their truck. Maybe five or six of them, trading fire with the UFLL guys manning the CP. Went on for twenty minutes; guys popping up from behind rocks to spray a few shots, you know, randomly, at each other. All of them almost too afraid to die. When it was over, the two UFLL guys who were unhurt ended up running off into the jungle, terrified. I went down and had a look around. A guy had been shot through the stomach; bloody mess. He saw me and whimpered at me to finish him off. Funny, how guys get shot because they're too afraid to die, and they're lying there dying, and they're too afraid to live. Idiots."
Starting to crack
"You see these APR kids, or UFLL kids, or whoever is listening to these damn broadcasts on the radio. Mbantuwe, Tambossa, I can't even remember who, because what's the difference? Glassy-eyed little shits shouting out in support of whatever propaganda, lies, bullshit's being spouted at them. It's absurd. These guys are already dead. They're blowing each other away for someone else's - for someone else. Tambossa, Mbantuwe, UFLL, APR - there's no popular resistance, no liberty or labor. There's no ideology at all. There isn't even a desire to win. There's no sense in it, no sense in it at all. What would it matter if we butchered the lot of them? Would it change anything?"
Losing grip on reality
"If you have to kill someone - if you have to - is it somehow better to do it clean with a bullet through the head? Is it somehow worse to chop them up with an axe? And what if you have to kill ten, or a hundred, or a thousand? What if in doing it, you save a thousand or spare ten? What if you save yourself? What is the measure of a man, or of his murder? By what insane calculus can we answer questions like these? Should we even try?"
Meeting the player for the first time
"*reading dossier* "The target's presence in the state continues to be a distabalising influence. He is largely responsible for the recent influx of weapons in the country, in clear violation of the Joint Signatory Framework. His reputation as a dangerous arms dealer... is well deserved." *points gun at himself* "Orders are to terminate." Well that didn't work out the way they planned- I'm still breathing and you're the one with malaria. You can tell them you tried. But that means fuck-all, doesn't it? You're fired, you know it and so do I. You had your shot but now it's over. And since men like you only work for money, you're no longer my problem. You'll have to find something else to do with yourself now. What your old clients don't seem to understand is that they can't kill me. Do you understand what I'm saying? Nobody kills me. NOBODY. *embeds machete into the wall next to the players head* I'm the one who decides who lives and who dies, me!... You know, there's a book I read a long time ago. I still think about it every day. It helps me understand life out here. The book talks about men- what motivates them. It's simple, really. "A living being seeks above all else to discharge its strength. Life itself is will to power. Nothing else matters." *tosses the gun onto the table* So long."
