“The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; thus the wise say the path to Salvation is hard”. This is an extract from the Katha Upanishad, one of the most ancient Hindu scriptures, also called “Death as Teacher”. It appears in the epigraph of W. Somerset Maugham’s novel The Razor’s Edge.
The same title and existential analogies feature in another, just released book: Razor’s Edge, Peter “Razor” Slade’s autobiography. He is a man with many questions: “Am I a mercenary? Am I a security consultant? Am I a private military contractor? Am I a freelancer, or, as they sometimes say today, a deniable? Am I a bit of all of them, perhaps?”
Slade, Australian, fought his first war in Vietnam between ’68 and ’70. Since then, barring rare time off, he has never stopped soldiering in one way or another. In 2005, at the age of 57, when most people are thinking of retiring, he went to Iraq. At the time he was living in Phuket, Thailand, with his wife Nen, and the tsunami that struck the island destroyed his livelihood. The only thing he could do was become a security contractor leading convoys across the country. In seven years he led a thousand missions. Then he decided the time had come to go back home. But, he argued, not because he was tired of the lifestyle.
He is pleased to see that his book is generating some interest. Even more so when people take the trouble to go and listen to him. Perhaps because he has lived too long in the shadow of “deniability”, an obsession for him. It’s an ambiguous term and represents a concept that is even more so: a powerful player moves his pawns without ever revealing himself, as prepared to sacrifice them as he is skilled in attributing the wrong moves to others.
Slade looks and sounds just as you would expect a contractor to, even down to his Zippo lighter decorated with military emblems. But he also goes against a lot of stereotypes. By wanting to escape his shadow of deniability and by repeating the need for reform. Paradoxically, but not that much, he embodies the image of the ideal contractor described by Laura Dickinson of the “Center for Law and Global Affairs”. In her book Outsourcing War and Peace: Preserving Public Values in a World of Privatized Foreign Affairs, Dickinson offers a series of reforms by which contractors can be made to comply with the core values of human rights, democratic accountability, and transparency.
But above all, Razor is breaking what he calls “his silences”. He is talking. A lot, almost uninterruptedly, his words expressing “a million continual thoughts”.
So, at least for me, the Starbucks in Phuket’s Jonceylon shopping mall becomes the café at Toulon’s harbour described by the narrator in Maugham’s novel, in that it “gives you the effect of a terminal to which all the ways of the wide world converge”. And just as the narrator enters the plot in that novel, talking to Razor draws me in to images of places that I know, scenes I have seen traces and wreckage of, stories whose survivors I have met. The meaning of his questions could also be mine: deep down the difference between one freelancer interpreting stories and another simply telling them lies on the razor’s edge. Both cases result in similar “collateral damage”, as Razor calls it: problems with friends or family. In the same way you feel in a sort of “comfort zone” when you are in a situation that involves you on a profound level.
“War is a drug. Not the fighting, but the environment,” says Razor. He is not referring just to the “hostile environment”. He is thinking of the friendship that war creates, what they call “mateship” in Australia, brotherhood, a mate being “someone who is not just a friend, but someone you can trust with your life”. As Hemingway wrote, war is evil, but there is something in war that draws out the best as well as the worst in men.
Razor is part of a culture that is deniable, denied, declared false or incorrect. This culture is analysed by philosopher James Hillman in A Terrible Love of War, where, smashing politically correct rhetoric, he pushes us into “the martial state of the soul”. It is the culture related by Sebastian Junger in War, which recounts his experience as an embedded journalist in Afghanistan. From that experience, Junger and photographer Tim Hetherington (killed in Libya in 2011) produced the documentary film Restrepo. Both the book and the documentary are a meditation on war as man’s timeless condition. War is what Junger defines as “the defence of the tribe”, an ancestral instinct. “Collective defence can be so compelling - so addictive, in fact - that eventually it becomes the rationale for why the group exists in the first place…Guys are not fighting for freedom or for patriotism. They are fighting because they know they can be killed”. This idea of instinct reappears in the book What It Is Like to Go to War by Karl Marlantes, who fought in Vietnam and recounted his experiences in the best-selling novel Matterhorn (reviewed here by Sebastian Junger).
But these considerations will come later, when you try to uphold the denials, exorcise the fears, deal with the doubts. “Who are the good guys and who the bad guys?” is a question that Razor often repeats and passes on to you.
Listening to Razor, I suddenly take a step back, as the narrator in Maugham’s novel does, and am faced with the differences. Like when Razor points to a series of photos in his book, and repeats: “He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead …he’s dead….” Few died of illness. One from suicide.
That razor’s edge subtly intersects with many others, and becomes a sharp spider web. You hear the recorded whispers of Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. “I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That's my dream; that's my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight razor... and surviving”.
That sense of anguish melts away at Razor’s home, in north Phuket, in a group of houses surrounded by a little shady garden that resembles a small town in the Australian outback. You breathe the calm atmosphere, eating a fresh mango, drinking fruit juice prepared by a smiling Nen, finally happy again. Razor’s presence is felt only in the little room where he works and stores his mementos. One of the most precious is the hammock of a Viet Cong soldier, carefully folded up with a load of flags. They give off a slight smell of mothballs.

The Stories section features the introduction to “Razor’s Edge”. Thanks go to “Razor” himself for allowing me to publish it (and allowing me to call him by that name). It’s clear from the introduction that the book can be interpreted in different ways: both by the “normal” public or by those in the know. It’s a story that is at times dark and possibly unpleasant. Like many other parts of the book. But it is authentic.

“When the disciple is ready, the Master will appear”, goes the saying. I sure didn’t feel ready at all, but the Master appeared. It was just before sundown, above the Chao Phraya, the river that crosses Bangkok, with the tower of a pagoda in the background. Of course, he did not just materialise in mid-air. Like me, he was standing on the blooming rooftop terrace on top of the Baan Chao Phraya, the big tall tenement block where I live.
The Master is called Jackie Ho. It sounds like such a typical ‘Master’ name or an echo of Jackie Chan that it doesn’t ring true. But Jackie Ho is a chef, actually the Executive Chef of all Chinese cuisine at the Peninsula Hotel, one of the most luxurious hotels in the capital of the Kingdom of Thailand. He used to hold the same job at the excellent China House restaurant inside the Oriental Hotel. He has also worked in Indonesia, China and his birthplace, Hong Kong. He is considered a Master of Cantonese cuisine.
But I hadn’t invited him that night to show me his cooking skills. That evening he was moving fast, focused, precise and powerful in a form of kung fu. I had asked him if he could teach me and he had agreed. So, according to the ancient rules, he was now my Sifu, or Master. Or almost, given that in order to use this term I would have to be formally accepted as his pupil, with ceremony attached.
Only later did I ask him what particular martial art he practised. He told me it is called Hung Fut Pai and is a style deriving, as they all do, from that practised at the Shaolin monastery. It is not well known and has an uncertain history, at least for those who, like me, are unable to consult Chinese texts. Master Jackie learned it as a child in Hong Kong and has continued to train ever since. To him it is the most effective form of self-defence, and has had to use it on occasion to defend himself from street thugs. He showed me a scar from a knife wound on his forearm. “But they came out much worse”, he laughed.
My training began that evening. Every morning at 8 I go to the rooftop terrace. And I wait. Sometimes the Master comes and teaches me some of the basic form of Hung Fut Pai – I don’t yet know how many moves it contains – more often than not he doesn’t come and I try to repeat the moves I learned the previous session, generally with little success. There is a kind of tacit agreement between us: we don’t make appointments, or set dates or times. We leave it up to chance, to coincidence. Sometimes we miss each other by just a few minutes and find out only later when we bump into each other on the boat taking us to and from home.
According to Jackie, it takes one month to learn the first form, but after a month I understood he meant thirty lessons, which meant that I would take much longer. In the meantime it’s an exercise in patience, a way to begin the day with commitment. It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t work out; it gives you the chance to enjoy the last minutes of cool up on the roof before the heat of the day arrives, shake off your sleepiness and dreams, focus on the body, the breathing, the blood flow and the little aches and pains.

This is one of those stories that in the Japanese tradition (yes, let’s mix up those cultures) is called zuihitsu, literally follow the brush, in reference to the fact that the author gives free reign to his thoughts, allowing the hand to simply record them. You might compare it to a hotchpotch or a collection of random thoughts. In reality it is an actual literary genre (which emerged in the Heian Period, between 794 and 1185 of the Common Era) and refers to a collection of brief pieces in which “the observations and reflections of the writer are presented with stylistic grace”.
Grace and style aside, this story is a pretext for reflecting on the randomness and on the surprises that the world has in store for us, especially in this part of the world, where chance is incorporated into the natural order of things, it is part of a plot. In short, it’s no mere chance. And that is why the Master appears.