Short Cuts: The Libyan Coastguard
J. Jason Mitchell, 16 March 2017
When we left Malta for the Libyan coast twenty hours away, two birds followed us. We were crewing aboard the Minden, a decommissioned 26-metre German coastguard patrol boat on the lookout for refugee rafts. At some point beyond sight of land, we realised these birds – suddenly our birds – were marooned, locked into a pattern of flight that went around our ship, then broke for...