A Life of Comically Calamitous Close Calls: Luxor, Egypt (April 1974), Part Two

Victor Davis Hanson

I studied Classics at age 19–20 in Greece from August 1973 to July 1974.

It was quite a crazy year to be in the Eastern Mediterranean. Not long after I arrived, there was a Greek coup resulting in the removal of the Prime Minister/Col. Papadopoulos and his “colonel” junta.

It was replaced by the installation of an even more, and quite strange, right-wing junta. (They tried to cut off long hair from males’ heads on the street and used black ink to hide private parts in Playboy Magazines at kiosks for sale).

I watched the student protests during the storming of the Athens Polytechnic campus on November 17, 1973, from an apartment building roof, where a professor asked 6-7 of us to join him—without knowing of the explosive violence to ensue. We watched a Sherman (to Patton?) tank bulldoze the iron gate to the university.

All this followed the Yom Kippur War of early October when we were on a field trip in Crete. Three of us stayed up all night outside Chania to watch U.S. Phantom jets painted in camouflage land on an American carrier, I suppose to refuel. And then they took off to fly into Israel to resupply their shocked and wounded Air Force.

The NATO base at Souda Bay was off-limits to U.S. resupply efforts to Israel, so the carrier went offshore. (The Russians flew over Greek airspace to resupply the Arabs; yet fellow NATO country America’s jets were not allowed to fly over Greece to help Israel.)

What followed was the Arab oil embargo where heating oil was cut off to Athens’ apartments and electrical heaters were banned (lignite powered most of the grid then). We shivered that winter in sleeping bags beneath heavy woolen blankets.

By late July, the second dictatorship fell after the catastrophe in Cyprus, following the Turkish invasion.

It was not a good time to be an American. That summer Greeks in Athens would confront Americans and shake their fingers while cursing Henry Kissinger and his tilt toward Turkey.

In any case, in March a few of us wanted to go to Egypt since Anwar Sadat was now pro-American and had started in his Athens embassy office issuing visas (at a cost). We were told first to go to a Greek clinic for “shots,” given we were also warned post-war Egypt was still a mess (downed Israeli Phantom jet trophies piled up near the Hilton).

Ignorant Victor was instructed to ask for the “big shot” combo and so got plague/typhus/typhoid, yellow fever/smallpox/cholera/tetanus vaxes in two huge reusable steel syringes.

And that night of course I got a 102 temperature and was in bed for one week (a reminder that I often ignored that my hyperactive and thus defective immune system (later diagnosed with high serum tryptase) always overreacted to any vaccination.

In any case, we flew to Cairo, stayed in a dump hostel, took the train to Alexandria, and after a week all of us were half-sick of eating and drinking water without caution. On the long train ride to Luxor in Upper Egypt, I drank water in the railcar from the tap and was swarmed with mosquitoes. I had stopped taking huge Alka Seltzer-like chloroquine tablets.

Twelve hours after I got to Luxor, I had another 103 temperature and went into an infirmary. I gave the concierge all the Egyptian pounds I had (I had a paid train ticket to Cairo and a flight ticket back to Athens, but no money hence). I stayed in bed there for six days—and was fed and hydrated. I was told I had a bout with malaria.

An English tourist and doctor heard that an American was there and came in. He instructed me to take the tablets, chastised me for getting too many vaccinations, warned me not to drink tap water or eat ice, and said the on-off cycle of the disease would allow me to get back to Athens where there was a fine malaria clinic.

All that proved true. And as I made the long train ride back to Cairo, two seats ahead of me was the corpse of an elderly man who had suddenly had a heart attack en route, died, and was wrapped in muslin as we entered Cairo.

For the next four months back in Athens, I had zero energy, one day no fever, the next high fever, the third sort of fever. Finally, I made it home to California. And five months later, the mild malaria was gone after the internist doctor in Fresno gave me a drug I can’t recall.

I was never quite the same for 2–3 years.

Lesson #2 following the debacle two years earlier in New Haven: do not get multiple dangerous vaccinations (the tetanus one was a live weakened tetanus).

And under no circumstance travel to an Arab country just five months after it has lost a major war, and especially not as an American.

Take your preventative medicines for malaria.

Like the New Haven disaster, so too the second one was my fault as well. And I paid for it with the worst fatigue and night sweats I’ve ever had.