As the rest of us watched television dispatches last month of Libyan rebels battling forces loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, one American college student observed the scene from a much closer vantage.
Chris Jeon, a student at the University of California at Los Angeles, has been traveling the desert with rebel fighters, according to news correspondents who were surprised to find the young American this week in the outpost of Al Nawfaliyah, Libya. Both The Christian Science Monitor and The National, an English-language newspaper based in the United Arab Emirates, carried articles about Mr. Jeon’s odyssey in Thursday’s editions.
“It is the end of my summer vacation, so I thought it would be cool to join the rebels,” Mr. Jeon told The National. “This is one of the only real revolutions” in the world.
According to the two newspapers’ reports, the 21-year-old mathematics major bought a one-way ticket from Los Angeles to Cairo, took a train to Alexandria, Egypt, then caught a series of buses to Benghazi, Libya, the former provisional capital of the forces opposing Colonel Qaddafi. There, despite not speaking Arabic, he joined up with rebel fighters, who armed him with a Russian-made 12-gauge shotgun, and accepted him as something of a curiosity.
Read the full story on the Chronicle of Higher Ed.
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