Scott Taylor is different from you and me. For starters, he speaks with more feeling about his fear of public speaking, citing sleepless nights and knocking knees, than he does the five days he spent as a hostage in Iraq, ceremonial sword suspended over his head—a metaphor maybe, but one with very real implications for his mortality.

His three-year stint as a private in the Princess Patricia Canadian Light Infantry when he was a kid was a pivotal experience and it shows. He knows better than to wring his hands and lay bare his vulnerabilities—especially for the benefit of civilian audiences raised on a media diet of overwrought celebrity angst.

Taylor, best-selling author, award-winning journalist, editor and publisher of Ottawa-based magazine, Esprit de Corps, (www.espritdecorps.ca) is a singular, vivid and sometimes controversial presence among Canadian war correspondents.

No fear of flying here—Taylor, the subject of a documentary that recently appeared on Canadian television’s The Passionate Eye—has racked up more than one million air miles in the last 16 years, traveling to volatile spots all over the world—the Persian Gulf, Cambodia, Western Sahara, Croatia, Bosnia, Turkey, Yugoslavia, Kosovo and Macedonia.

Since 2000, he’s been to Iraq 21 times—on September 2004 he and a young woman from Turkey, journalist Zeynep Tugrul, were taken hostage by mujahadeen of Ansar al-Islam, a group linked to Al-Qaeda, at a checkpoint in the Northern Iraq city of Tal Afar.

Held for five harrowing days, Taylor was tortured and repeatedly threatened with death—the terrifying specter of beheading never far from his mind.

Being chained to a bed in a sweltering safe house in Northern Iraq represents a long and disparate journey from the suburbs of Scarborough, Ontario, where he grew up, the son of a professional artist, who transferred his love of art and all things military to his son.

A graduate of Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD)—Taylor, who on the surface doesn’t exactly embody the sensitive artist stereotype—is animated and appealingly youthful in both manner and appearance, with a sort of adolescent boy’s energy and sense of fun. Wisecracking and fiercely opinionated, he’s also relentless—succeeding finally in putting together an unlikely flag-football team at OCAD. They took on the University of Toronto team for one game.

“It was brutal,” he confesses.

“I didn’t really love that environment. I enjoyed it but the people around me, I didn’t really bond with and I wanted to have some sort of adventure before I got married. I was already engaged. My wife is my high school sweetheart—we go back 27 years. She was at OCAD. I was planning on going to work for my father—you can see your whole life…I wanted a challenge. I was supposed to go to Bolivia with a bunch of guys from the College that summer when we graduated. We were going to get jeeps, we had the whole thing planned out, we were going to go there, work and then come back and start our lives.”

At the last minute, the trip fell apart.

“The other guys said, ‘Oh, we weren’t serious anyway’—well, I was. It was a bit of a rite of passage. So I went off to a recruiting center and said, ‘Well, I’ll become a paratrooper, what the hell?’ It was the spring of ‘82.”

It was a match made in heaven.

“That environment, where they take everyone in from all walks of life, shave your head and give you these clothes, give you the same things and make you live in this communal area. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a lawyer’s son, or a kid off the street, you’re all brought together and boom! You’re shorn and told your left foot goes here, your right foot goes there; everyone is in step literally. You found out who you were pretty quick. I mean all you’re left with that’s personal had to fit in a shoebox cause everything else is inspected.

“Almost overnight everyone finds themselves. And the characters are much clearer—what we had at the College of Art—foppish, everyone is wearing a belly ring, well, that’s really different but they’re all different together. In the army they tell you what you can and can’t do and then you find ways around it and that in itself, those little idiosyncrasies, that guy’s into country music or he’s into this, you found quickly who you were. I never looked back.”

Taylor did a basic three-year engagement, stationed in Germany. He also took on the additional challenge of commando training.

“I didn’t want to join the army to count socks. I wanted to test myself. Do I have what it takes? Peace time army. It was the Cold War—and we had nothing…They talk about the budget now…We didn’t have blank ammunition. We had to yell, ‘Bullet! Bullet!’ and count them so you knew when to change the magazine for training. It was tough, a different environment. It’s almost like being in jail. There were a lot of fistfights and guys sleeping with bayonets under their pillows because you’re in one big communal group. And at the end of that you discover something, camaraderie—almost like trying to describe the taste of salt, unless you’ve tasted it you can’t describe it.”

After leaving the military he stayed on for two years as a civilian, working on the base as a graphic artist—a job he describes as “mind-numbingly boring.”

There was one highlight, however—a personal one—Taylor-made, you might say.

“I went from being a member of the junior ranks to the officers’ mess. I was the most valuable player on the team, playing football. I actually did put together a flag football team—I achieved that goal and we did win!”

He learned the ropes of magazine production working for a ski magazine in Europe and on the flight home to Canada decided he could do his own in-flight magazine and offer it to the military, which was, at that time, ferrying troops back and forth—eventually Air Canada was contracted to do the same job.

The first issue of Esprit de Corps—now a newsstand publication—debuted in April 1989.

Taylor merrily concedes that adventure and not journalism was uppermost in his mind—the military vetted the magazine for content and that was fine with him.

“We weren’t looking to upset anyone’s apple cart—it never crossed our minds.”

Things change and he began to fire a few tentative salvos—criticizing the appointment of a new defense minister, for example—the military returned fire, ordering the magazine off flights. He wrote a scathing review of military corruption in a best-selling book called Tarnished Brass and then came the Somalia scandal—in which the military attempted to cover-up, among other things, the torture and murder of a Somalia teenager by Canadian troops.

The Department of National Defense was not amused and declared war on Taylor and Esprit de Corps.

“We went from thirty to forty thousand dollars a month in ads to zero; three thousand bucks was a good month if we could scrape it up. We used to have eight people full time, now—we’ve got four and a half. There were some lean times… We were so far behind on the payments, we were parking the leased car around the corner and putting mud on the plates—we were pulling every trick in the books. The Globe and Mail ran a story on the front page that we were about to go under.”

Taylor and his wife and partner, Katherine, were also dealing with a sick baby.

“My son was born in September with a massive birth defect and they crushed us in July so here we are, we had to let staff go, we had no choice…I’m petrified of public speaking—I’m over it now and I do 100 speeches a year. But then, I’d go out and my knees would be shaking and I’d read it verbatim… I had to start writing more and take over the editor’s duties. I was churning out copy… You can’t have any pride, I had to get donations, money, the baby sick, all we could do is load and fire the guns…load and fire…”

Through forgiveness-of-debt and donations, the magazine survived and Taylor felt a growing commitment and sense of responsibility to represent the troops. It was the beginning of a grander vision about his obligation to tell the truth. He continues to be troubled by what he sees as official efforts to conceal or distort the truth—aided and abetted by the media.

“If you can make a difference—the difference being to put the truth out there…When you can see it and you can fight it…There are so many lies and so much propaganda and so many of my colleagues buy into these certain things and these myths and you try to break them down for the sake of the people whose lives they affect…You can’t demonize any people.”

His beliefs have put him in the middle of some dangerous and unusual situations—he was almost killed in a firefight in Bosnia and he recently spent six hours talking to Slobodan Milosevic in his prison cell.

“In some ways I’m not that big a risk taker. I mean if there’s risk of physical injury I’ve got to be hesitant…there’s a comfort zone. Through experience you get to know certain places. Obviously, my initial fear of going to Belgrade during the bombing…I went there as a NATO reporter with NATO bombing them. I had never been in Serbia proper before…I had been in the Balkans but I had never been there…There was an air raid every single day. You went into it and there were black outs…who would voluntarily go into that?

In 2003, he was expelled from Iraq, suspected of being a Mossad spy.

Looking and acting the part sometimes works to his advantage—according to Taylor, about the only thing he hasn’t done, is commandeer a vehicle.

“I still look like a soldier and the Americans see you jump out of a car somewhere in Northern Iraq, they’re going to assume automatically because of my age that I must be senior-ranking military or CIA or something. I mean they’re only 21-year-old kids and you know the jargon, like ‘Where’s your LT? Where’s your lieutenant.’ And you start barking at them, they’re afraid to bark back. They’re cowed. They’ve had all these experiences where it’s ‘Yes sir, no sir,’ right? So if you act authoritative…it’s disarming…They can’t help it, it’s like yelling at Pavlov’s dogs. They can’t help but respond in a certain way and you know that, right? And you can get through that—they’ve shown me all their prisoners and all the stuff they’ve done… Finally someone will timidly ask, ‘Well, who are you?’ And truthfully I say, ‘I’d rather not say.’ ‘Ahhh!’ they say. Oh, you must be one of those and then you jump back into some beat up old car with some Arab guy and off you go…it’s like, ‘Where we did he come from?’ It’s like the Scarlet Pimpernel…you just show up and then disappear…”

There was no bluffing his way out of being kidnapped by insurgents on September 7, 2004.

Moved from house-to-house over five days, Taylor was accused of being a spy for Israel and for the Americans—sometimes blindfolded, sometimes abused, he was also treated with occasional compassion, experiencing a surreal form of traditional Middle Eastern hospitality.
His life regularly threatened, Kalyshnikov cocked at his head, ceremonial sword in view, he was eventually strung up on a pole, his feet and legs beaten.

Despite his ordeal, convinced he was going to be killed, he resolved to die well.

“The only thing you’ve got is your dignity…It would only egg them on to see you pleading or to see you broken…not that you’re not freaking out inside. But again, there was the military training and for me, during the torture I kept thinking, ‘You will not see a Patricia break.’ I haven’t been in a uniform in twenty years but I clung to it…these bastards are not going to see a Patricia go down. You can still find that inner strength. It wouldn’t have mattered though if there was a second time…there’s no way I would have got through it twice. No way, the fear of going back into it…no way…no way…

“I didn’t think I was going to come out of it. I was sure I was going to die. It’s different when you think you might and you know you’re gonna…It’s a whole different mindset. Even those times when they would prep me to take me out—you just go blank—this is it, I’m going through that door and boom…There were so many times…and you don’t keep thinking, ‘Oh, I’m sure this is just a hoax’…Little things you think about….

“I knew I wasn’t going to die in that bed the final day, because whenever I had to go to the washroom the guy was really quick to wipe up. They’d release one hand so I could pee into a bottle and he’d take it away and he would mop everything up and I’m thinking, ‘Well, there’s no way they’re going to cut my head off if he’s working so hard for a drop of urine.’ So I knew this was not my place of death.”

Unexpectedly freed through the efforts of Turkish intelligence, in one day, he wrote a compelling 6,500-word account of what happened to him, (Five Days of Hell, www.espritdecorps.ca/in_the_news.htm) filed it—he writes in long-hand—and never read it again until recently.

Finally, on the way home on the plane he was able to sleep well for the first time since the kidnapping.

“Normally when I come home the compartmentalization takes over… I’ve got 21 trips over there—compartmentalization is a learned trick. That guy who’s rolling up in flea-infested blankets, he gets left behind. He showers up and comes home…I mean, less than six days later I was at a garage sale in Rockcliff in Ottawa—my son’s selling his toys and I’m making change for him and I’m thinking that six days earlier I’m chained to a bed and waiting to die.”
Eleven months later, the summer of 2005, he was back in Iraq in Tal Afar at the request of an American commander who read his book, Among the Others: Encounters with the Forgotten Turkmen of Iraq. He wanted Taylor to address troops from the 3rd Armored Cavalry concerning terrorist cells in Northern Iraq.

The decision to go back wasn’t as difficult as you might imagine—Taylor was confident the Americans would keep him safe and he wanted to share what he knew. One of his kidnappers had been captured and he was able to make a positive identification. It helped. And it was therapeutic for him, knowing that it hadn’t beaten him; he always said he would get back on the horse.

“When your work actually makes a difference and to say, ‘Well, I’m a little bit frightened…’ Well, I’m not. My real fear would be that impotent feeling of being pulled out of a checkpoint again (as opposed to) some sort of massive firefight with the Americans all around me—that I can deal with. I’m not going down like it was before. Not that I’m looking for it, but if they shot the helicopter or something it wouldn’t be the same as just driving in unarmed and going meekly back into it. That was the one thing I just couldn’t imagine doing and yet there’s no way to prevent it…

“The soldiers heard what had happened to me and they drove us downtown, and this young kid said, ‘I heard what happened to you. That will not happen to you again as long as there’s a man alive in this detachment.’ He didn’t know me from a hole in the ground. He said, ‘We will protect you, it’s our job,’ and I believed him. Then when we got out and it was really intense, the streets were empty…The last thing I wanted was anyone getting killed on my behalf…eventually we did accomplish the mission and got out of there.”

His experiences have given him rare insights into human nature that he says transcends geographical boundaries and racial and cultural distinctions.

“The stuff that’s happened to Iraq would break your heart. People say they put a different value on life—show me a mother anywhere, any culture when her kid is killed—you say ‘Oh, they don’t value life?’ I’ve seen them, it’s almost like their soul comes out…”

Taylor has plans to go to Afghanistan soon—he’s working on a biography of a warlord.

Eventually, he says, he’ll return to Iraq. As someone once noted, Scott Taylor doesn’t come with an off-switch—but maybe there’s a pause button.

“I’ll go back—when it’s really quiet.”