DAN ELDON

      I was in London in August, 1991 when Soviet communist hardliners attempted a coup d'etat against reformist leader Mikhail Gobrachev. Dazed and amazed by the fantastical news, I wondered with no little dread if I were not going to be caught up in the winds of a new European war. Yet just a few bewildering weeks later the coup was defeated and the Soviet Union relegated to the dust bin of history - the Cold War over so quickly that, in the words of communist-era Czech dissident/poet soon to be president-elect Vaclav Havel, "We had no time even to be astonished." And there I was singing, in what would have been unimaginable only a few years earlier, Beatles' songs and drinking cheap wine late into the night at the foot of the Jan Huz statue in historic old Prague with throngs of Czech students in a free country no longer on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. In the enthusiastic words of the Romantic poet William Wordsworth written 200 years earlier at the beginning of different revolutionary epoch: "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive / But to be young was very heaven!"

      I held hopes that we might on the brink of a happier and less dangerous global environment in a nuclear age, believing hopefully but naively in George Bush's "New World Order." And in many places I was not dissapointed. Nevertheless, the end of the Soviet-American rivalry also meant in other places the end of an artificial stability imposed by the superpowers which indirectly helped to bring about the unleashing of long-latent triabal and ethnic rivalries. Nature abhors a vacuum, and as tyrannical central authority collapsed in many countries, the result was all too often not freedom and prosperity but a descent into an anarchic Hobbesian war of all against all, giving a fresh face to life as "nasty, brutish and short." The New World Order in many such countries came to resemble this: a wild unkempt fifteen year-old calling himself "Commander Rambo"armed to the teeth wearing wraparound designer and holding his own personal roadblock with a private "army" behind him which fights, loots, terrorizes, rapes, murders at will. Part-soldier and part-thug, this boy-man and his compatriots are a law unto themselves, accountable to no one. Omnipresent fear and turmoil, savagery and lawlessness, empoverishment of the country and then starvation, ghastly massacres and widespread destruction, abject misery as far as the eye can see, - this, too, the end of the Cold War helped bring about as centralized states disintegrated into generalized anarchy. And with geopolitical responsibilities or rivalries no longer at stake, such Godforsaken places all too often receded into oblvion and out of the consciousness of the West from the Third World to the Fourth World, falling off the radar map of the outside world. Such was the fate of Somalia.

      Enter a remarkable young man named Dan Eldon. I suspect little did Eldon care that a loathsome but stable dictator named Siad Barre had held Somalia together for some twenty-two years before fleeing the country in January in 1991. But while in Africa working for Reuters in the summer of 1992, Eldon and a friend from the Philadelphia Inquirer set out from Kenya to the Somali town of Baidoa to see if there was any truth to the rumors of famine in the African nation. What they found would, within about a year, transform the twenty-one year old Eldon into an internationally renowned photojournalist and bring his short life to an end.

      The changes Eldon's life underwent during this short time in can be witnessed in the last one of the 17 black-bound volumes he had amassed since he began keeping journals as a school assignment at age 14. The first 16 journals were an astonishing collection of whimsical drawings, photographs and maps he had drawn or written on, short sayings, tales of romantic encounters, collages, clippings, paints, scraps, shards, and trash that reveal his ecelctic and vivid life. "If he was frustrated or overjoyed, he would just pour it all into his journals," Amy Eldon told CNN. "And because he had this outlet he was never bored." Kathy Eldon writes that her son was so consumed with documenting his life, and the events he witnessed in life, that "one girlfriend complained that he spent more time recording their relationship than actually enjoying it." Written during his time in Somalia, the Eldon's final journal takes on a much more somber hue, reflecting the profound change in his life since he first came upon the starving people of Somalia. Eldon's last journal contained only photographs attached to pages and was incomplete at the time of his death.

Before he traveled to Baidoa, Eldon had only seen two dead bodies. But in Baidoa, Eldon and his friend photographed skeletal children, scores of dead babies and hundreds of starving men and women. The photographs were the first to document the devastation in Somalia. Within months, he so quickly became acclimated to working in war conditions that he wrote a piece entitled "Photography in Danger Zones," that was published in Executive magazine in Kenya in November 1992. What Eldon witnessed in Somalia "affected him profoundly," Kathy Eldon told CNN. "He said, 'I don't know how this experience has affected me, but I feel different.' And, he was different. There was a depth to him and a pain to him that we had not seen before."

Eldon was by no means a stranger to Africa. Born in London in 1970 to a British father and American mother, Dan Eldon and his family moved to Nairobi when he was 7. Eldon developed a lifelong love affair with that continent and the Masaii tribesmen By the time he died, Eldon had traveled four continents, led expeditions across Africa, worked as a graphic designer for a New York magazine, helped make a film, and had became a respected photojournalist -- all before his sudden violent death in Somalia. Eldon had managed to cram more trips, adventures, jobs, occupations into his short an most people do in their entire lives. And even as Eldon continued taking pictures in Somalia he became such a popular figure among the locals that they dubbed him "Mayor of Mogadishu."

By the time of his death,. He traveled through four continents, led expeditions across Aftica, wrote a book, worked as a graphic designer in New York, made a film,

Eldon didn't see the Somalians primarily as victis but as people just like anyone else who had had the the bad luck to be born into very different circumstances. Yet Eldon seemed pulled to the darkness of the violence like a moth to a flame and had few illusions about what was going on around him. He made the following comments which seem to eerily foreshadow his oncoming death:

"The hardest situation to deal with is a frenzied mob, because they cannot be reasoned with. I try to appeal to one or two of the most sympathetic and restrained looking people with the most effective looking assault rifles, but I have realized that no photograph is worth my life."

Eldon's photos of famine in Somalia made the covers of newspapers and magazines around the globe and served as an SOS to the world. Within months, the International Red Cross determined that one-fourth of 6 million Somalis were starving. On August 28, the United States began delivering emergency food supplies to the nation. Attacks on relief efforts by Somalia's warring factions would lead to the arrival of international peacekeeping forces under the auspicies of the United Nations. say how it all fell apart as predictably the various warlords turned the violence they had been wreaking on each other to the United Nations forces sent to ensure the security of food shippments.

On July 12, 1993, U.N. troops bombed a house believed to be the headquarters for the warlord known as Gen. Mohammed Farah Aidid. Eldon, who had been retained as a free-lancer for Reuters nine months earlier, and three other journalists were dispatched to the scene to record the carnage.

They were met by an angry mob of more than 100 people who turned on the journalists who were trying to help them. Eldon and his friends were stoned to death by the crowd.

Dan Eldon was 22. He was expecting a Reuters photographer to arrive in Somalia that day to replace him.

Documenting his own life

Not long after Eldon's death, someone delivered a rucksack of his belongings to his family. In the sack was a journal, the 17th that Dan had written since he began keeping journals as a school assignment at age 14.

Eldon's family was very familiar with his journals. But this one was different, reflecting the profound change in his life since he first found the starving people of Somalia.

Eldon always kept his journals close and only shared them with the closest of family members. But since his death, his mother has compiled the collection into a book that she has just published: "The Journals of Dan Eldon: The Journey is the Destination."

Eldon's family believes that even though he kept his journals private while he was living, they are something he would want shared now that he is gone. The Eldons also believe Dan's journals contain something for everyone.

"I think people are fascinated by the extent of his life," says his mother, Kathy Eldon, who edited the book. "By the depth and breadth, and width and height ... just the diversity of Dan's life as witnessed through the journals."

His sister, Amy, says Dan literally poured his life into the pages of the 17 black-bound volumes.

"If he was frustrated or overjoyed, he would just pour it all into his journals," Amy Eldon told CNN. "And because he had this outlet he was never bored."

In the book's forward, Kathy Eldon writes that her son was so consumed with documenting his life, and the events he witnessed in life, that "one girlfriend complained that he spent more time recording their relationship than actually enjoying it."

An unusual life

The book documents that the young man of 22 packed more into his short life than most people can cram into 80 years.

Born in London in 1970 to a British father and American mother, Dan Eldon and his family moved to Nairobi when he was 7. By the time he died, Eldon had traveled four continents, led expeditions across Africa, worked as a graphic designer for a New York magazine, helped make a film, and helped create a better life for some 6 million people.

Kathy Eldon says her son was always capitivated by Africa and always drawn to help others.

At age 14, the young Eldon learned a young Kenyan child needed heart surgery. He mobilized an effort to raise money for her surgery, designing boxer shorts and tee shirts, setting up bake sales and hosting dances in his back yard. The surgery was successful, but the child contracted malaria and died.

When he was 17, Dan left Africa for New York to work as a design intern for Mademoiselle magazine. He returned to Nairobi three months later and bought a 17-year-old Land Rover he nicknamed Deziree.

Eldon and two friends set off on a safari through Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. In Malawi, the pair happened across a vast refugee camp of displaced Mozambicans who had fled civil war. Their plight so moved Dan that when he entered Pasadena Community College, in California, he founded a charity, Student Transport Aid, dedicated to helping the refugees.

The group raised $17,000, and 14 people, including Eldon, traveled to Africa the following summer to deliver aid. By the end of their expedition, they had donated to the refugees a land cruiser, money for two wells, blankets and tools. Eldon was 19.

In one of his journals, Eldon penned a mission statement for the relief team: "To explore the unknown and the familiar, distant and near, and to record, in detail with the eyes of a child, any beauty of the flesh or otherwise, horror, irony, traces of utopia or Hell."

In a video of their journey, Dan said: "It wasn't that we wanted to bring them the things because they were pathetic and couldn't do anything for themselves. It was because when we were there they were dancing for us, and the children just seemed so alive and happy ... the whole thing isn't a sympathy thing."

'You may only dance a short while'

Eldon's mother says the images he witnessed on his first trip to Somalia changed him enough to make his entire family take notice.