Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival (7 page)

By the Burger King, soldiers from all around the country lie about in a fast-food funk. A squad of reservists from Washington State sits in the shade of a trailer licking the last of the cheeseburgers off their fingers. They are dusty and dirty, their skin burned from days in the sun.

“This place sucks shit through a straw,” one soldier tells me. I don’t ask him when he’s going home. He has no idea, so why rub it in?

When I first arrived in Sarajevo in 1993 I wore my Kevlar vest all the time. I even slept with it near my pillow. After a couple of trips, however, I’d hardly ever put it on. I’d keep it with me in my vehicle, but I wouldn’t bring it into people’s homes. Surrounded by Bosnians who didn’t have protection, I felt that it was inappropriate for me to stay sealed off. I wanted them to tell me their stories, risk exposing themselves to me. I couldn’t ask that of someone if I wasn’t willing to expose myself as well. Without the vest, I could feel the breeze on my chest, the closeness of another person, the sense of loss in everyone’s embrace.

I met a young woman named Eldina when she was fetching water one morning at a local pump, a chore she had to do five or six times a day, shifting heavy plastic containers from hand to hand. She invited me to her home, a small walk-up apartment where she lived with her father and grandmother.

We sat in one room of their three-room apartment. The windows, covered in heavy plastic, buckled with the wind trying to rip through the high floor. The grandmother tended a fire in the stove.

On their windowsill, Eldina had placed a tomato. I remarked how beautiful it was. Plump and red, a startling sight amid Sarajevo’s gray stones and rusted steel.

“Paradise is a tomato,” her grandmother said, delicately picking up the ripe fruit. “Paradise is a tomato.” Her eyes twinkled with the reflection of the wood burning in her small stove.

Eldina’s father was slim, haggard, with a look I saw on many men’s faces in the city that year. His hair was silver, oily, his index fingers stained from months of smoking at the front. He smiled only briefly, just long enough to show his teeth, then inhaled deeply on one of the cigarettes he always kept lit. Eldina’s mother and sister had left Sarajevo. Eldina believed that they were somewhere in Europe with relatives, but she’d not heard anything from them in several months.

“It’s not easy to raise a family,” her father said, sounding defensive. “I’m trying to take care of food and electricity. I’m trying the best in the situation.”

He was a driver before the war, and showed me a scrapbook with pictures from better days: family outings to the beach, a dinner party with candles and wine.

Eldina and her grandmother seemed strong. I felt they would survive. The father, I was not so sure about. He had a look I remembered seeing in my father the one time I was allowed to visit him in the hospital after his heart attack.

“The other day I saw my best friend on the Serb lines,” Eldina’s father told me. “I could have shot him.”

“Did you?”

“No.” He paused, a little embarrassed by the admission. “I was so shocked to see him there.”

Eldina had dressed up for my visit. She’d taken off the speckled gray overcoat she was wearing when I met her and put on a sweater and a colorful scarf. She was wearing makeup, trying to hide the freckles on her face. She was pretty, and I imagined her laying out her good clothes before going to sleep the night before. She watched me while her father spoke, attentive to filling my cup, making sure I was comfortable. I tried not to look at her too often. There was a hope in her eyes that made me sad.

Eldina’s boyfriend was a soldier. She showed me his picture; a stocky boy posing with a friend. Both were wearing heavy wool uniforms and pointing their guns at the camera.

“He’s been missing for almost a year,” she said as she looked at the photo. “Sometimes I dream he’s a prisoner held captive in a camp.”

“He’s dead,” her father told me later, with Eldina still in earshot. “People saw him die. They just never got his body back. He’s probably still lying in a field somewhere near the front.”

Eldina brought her baby over from his crib near the stove. Her boyfriend never saw his son. The thought kept going through my mind as I cradled the sleeping infant.

I wondered what my own little family would have done in Sarajevo. Would my mother have been able to survive selling possessions piecemeal in the marketplace like so many women had to do as the war dragged on? Would I have been able to provide for her and take care of myself?

While I was getting ready to leave, I noticed that Eldina’s grandmother was crying silently. I didn’t see the tears at first—they blended with her pale white, wrinkled flesh—but I saw them glisten on the back of her hand as she wiped them from her face. She reminded me of my childhood nanny, May, crying as she said goodbye. May had helped raise me from the time I was born, but when I started high school, she had to find another job. I didn’t want her to go, but there was nothing I could do. After she left, I couldn’t speak for days.

I said goodbye to Eldina and her father, squeezed her grandmother’s hand and wished her well. I left behind some deutsche marks on the tray and walked quickly down the steps, glass crunching in the grooves of my boots, hot tears burning my throat.

BAGHDAD’S YARMOUK HOSPITAL
is gearing up for the January interim elections. Extra plasma, extra beds. In the back I find the staff washing blood off stretchers. I’m told I can stay at Yarmouk for no more than half an hour. A CNN security guard stands near me at all times, and out on the street, other armed guards watch the road. A suicide bomber targeted the hospital in September, killing six people and wounding twenty-two others. My guards aren’t taking any chances.

Yarmouk has the busiest ER in Iraq, and by midday it’s already packed.

“There was a car bomb this morning, an explosion at a police station. Some of them arrived here,” Dr. Rana Abdul Kareem tells me as she checks the chart of a man screaming on a nearby gurney. He is taken out, and another patient is brought in. The wheels of his gurney cut a path through a pool of blood on the floor.

“This man here has multiple bullet injuries,” Dr. Kareem says. “Another one is in the operating room, and there is another one lying there, and there were some people with superficial injuries we treated and discharged.”

The man they’ve just brought in has been placed in the center of the room. Several nurses dab at a gaping hole in his leg. He was driving his car and got caught in a firefight. His blood drips in a Jackson Pollock pattern next to a bloody sandal lying on the floor.

I’m at the hospital to do a story about reactions to the upcoming elections, and to ask Dr. Kareem about the prospects for peace. I know what she is going to say, but still I have to ask.

“For god’s sake, don’t speak about peace here. Just don’t speak about peace,” she says, spitting the word out as if sickened by the aftertaste. “Maybe after ten years we will have some peace, but now we have forgotten about something called peace in Iraq.”

Dr. Kareem is weary of cameras, sick of reporters asking questions, hinting at changes that never come. I start to ask her something else, and she stares at me, tired and angry. I realize I’ve seen that look before.

IT WAS MY
first trip to Sarajevo. 1993. The first year of the war. A woman was shot crossing the street, near Sniper Alley. Strangers hailed a passing car and loaded the woman into its backseat. I followed them to the hospital and into the ER. The doctors allowed me to shoot footage for a while. They were well versed in the kabuki of cameras, but no longer believed that anything about the situation in Bosnia would change.

“What picture has not already been taken?” a man in the ER asked me. “What haven’t you seen? What don’t you know? What remains to be said?”

I apologized, and put my camera down.

“Thank you,” he said. “I think it’s better if we die in silence.”

Initially, people wanted you to take their pictures, tell their stories. They thought it would make a difference, force America or Europe to act to end the bloodshed. “Sarajevo was a cosmopolitan city,” everyone said. “It didn’t matter if you were Muslim, Serb, or Croat.” As the war continued, however, the divisions were clearer. No one seemed to talk about living together again. No one wanted to talk at all.

At the Kino Café, about twenty young men and women sat in a smoke-filled room watching an American Western. The sound was low; you could barely hear Lee Marvin and Charles Bronson, but there were subtitles in what used to be called Serbo-Croatian but was now referred to as Bosnian. The young men were thin, many of them dressed in army uniforms; the women were stylish, their clothes pressed, hair and makeup well thought out.

“We want to look nice if we die,” said Slema. She was twenty-one and smiling, but only partially joking. “There’s no use to think about the future now. It’s Russian roulette. Any time a grenade can fall and we can all be destroyed.”

“It’s not the time to cry for deaths,” her friend said. “We live too fast. Everything is forgotten. Not forgotten—you remember somebody who was shot—but you don’t have time to think about it.”

“What do you think about?” I asked.

“How to survive. You can’t dream about tomorrow,” she said. “No, just live now. You think, ‘Now I am talking.’ You can’t say, ‘Tomorrow I will visit my grandmother’s.’ It’s not possible to say.”

“All the people in Sarajevo have a bullet for them,” Slema said, taking a drag on her cigarette. “All of them have their turn. They are just waiting for it. Wondering, ‘when is my turn?’”

WHEN I LEFT
Sarajevo the first time, driving to the airport, I had to slow down as I passed a crowd of worn men and boys gathered in a small clearing. Silhouetted against the high beam of a truck’s headlights were two pit bulls locked in an embrace. One dog clamped its jaws on the other’s neck. A few men yelled instructions, smoke pouring from their mouths in the cool night air. Most just watched. The fight didn’t last long. The smaller dog was soon on its side, unable to breathe. The larger one’s mouth was wrapped around its neck, waiting for it to suffocate. When the end was in sight, the victor clear, the dogs were pulled apart. One man clamped his hands around the nearly dead loser. Blood glistened between the man’s fingers as he tried to hold the dog’s throat together. Money was exchanged; the crowd moved to disperse. A convoy of Bosnian army trucks rumbled past, filled with young men on their way to the front. No one in the crowd even looked up.

THE FIRST TIME
I came to Iraq for CNN, I spent two days traveling with Ambassador J. Paul Bremer, then America’s top diplomat there. It was June 2004. Bremer was about to hand over power to the first interim Iraqi government, and was visiting northern Iraq, pressing the flesh one last time with Kurdish leaders.

Bremer was surrounded at all times by gun-toting guards, former Special Forces soldiers, now contracted to Blackwater, a private security firm. We had permission to be with Bremer, go everywhere he went, talk with him along the way, but the Blackwater guys didn’t care. They kept elbowing away my cameraman, Neil Hallsworth, every chance they got. They seemed to take great pleasure in it.

“Just give me a reason,” the head of the security detail told Neil repeatedly under his breath.

“A reason to what, shoot you?” I asked Neil when he told me what was going on.

“I think so,” he said, laughing.

“Well, if he does shoot you,” I said, “make sure you tape it, because it’ll be the most exciting video we get today.”

Bremer was always dressed in a business suit, with a starched shirt and French cuffs. His only concession to the dirt and dust of Iraq: the desert combat boots he seemed to wear at all times. He was constantly moving, surrounded by a gaggle of guards, young Ivy League aides, and old-school advance men. On one leg of the trip, I rode in a bus with his advance team. The head guy told me he used to work for the Bushes back in Texas, and now kept Bremer running on time. We were in a convoy of Kurdish police cars and buses that snaked along for what seemed like a mile.

“This is great. Really cutting a low profile with this one,” the advance man said, laughing and staring out the window of the bus. On both sides of the highway, angry Kurdish motorists sat waiting for our caravan to pass.

“It’s okay,” the advance man jokingly yelled out the window. “It’s John Kerry. Vote for Kerry!”

Nothing Bremer ever said was particularly newsworthy. He was, after all, a diplomat, and the dance he was required to perform didn’t allow for dramatic moves. Once he was out, he’d write a book—saying that there hadn’t been enough troops on the ground in Iraq—but while he was still there, he never said anything nearly so strong.

In the air, Bremer traveled in an armada of Black Hawks. The heavy rotors sliced the air, shaking the sky with the power of American might. Riding in a chopper, your body shakes so much that your skin starts to itch. The Black Hawk’s doors are open, and your feet dangle out in the air, blast-furnace heat bakes your face, sucking the moisture from your lips. Bremer’s choppers flew low, some fifty feet off the ground, too close for a rocket-propelled grenade to be effective, or so they said. They’d pitch up over power lines, then plunge back down, with the door gunner letting off a few rounds just to make sure the gun worked.

In one Kurdish town, Bremer’s security detail got into an argument with Iraqi journalists. The journalists stormed out, refusing to cover Bremer’s press conference. Bremer was going to sneak out the back and escape, but his advance man realized what a mess that would be, so he sent his boss out to the Kurdish journalists and Bremer held an impromptu meeting with them in the hallway. In the crowd, a teenager who’d just finished telling me how great America was had his hand slapped back by Bremer’s security detail when the boy tried to hand the ambassador a small Kurdish flag.

On our way back to Baghdad, I was told I could sit next to Bremer in his Black Hawk. It was a photo op: me sitting next to the big man. The truth was, with the crush of the rotor, conversation was nearly impossible. Besides, Bremer was wearing ear plugs, and clearly had no interest in talking with me. I ended up just smiling at him a couple of times and watching as he signed commendation letters to hundreds of Coalition Provisional Authority personnel. An aide handed him batches of the letters, which he scribbled his signature on, his White House cuff links catching the late-afternoon sun. There were three Blackwater gunmen seated around us, and perhaps a dozen more in the choppers that followed. The guard next to me had a Maori tattoo on his arm and was reading a well-worn paperback. At first I couldn’t see what it was, but as he turned a page, I caught a glimpse of the title:
How to Win Friends and Influence People.