SARAJEVO
Sarajevo provoked biblical metaphors. To my closest friend, the ruins “looked like Hell with the fires out.” At a hospital where Serbs had dragged Croatian and Muslim patients outside and shot them so they could use the beds for their own wounded, one of my young sergeants muttered partly to himself, partly to me, and partly, I think, to humanity, “We are pilgrims in an unholy place.”
It was a haunting, yet exciting place – a place whose promise seemed strangely withheld. There was an awesome beauty about it: three quarters ringed by mountains, tucked inside a valley formed by those converging peaks just wide enough and flat enough to set a city amidst rugged hills that build into snowcaps visible in the distance. Bisecting it, right through the very heart of the city, ran a fast moving mountain stream. If not for the devastation, the landscape might have been mistaken for parts of the American West.
When the air was still, a distinct smell associated itself with the city. It was usually faint and not always unpleasant; it was the residue of dust, shattered masonry, broken water mains, ruptured gas lines, and the death that still lay covered and unclaimed under the rubble of the ravished streets.
Bosnia, and Sarajevo in microcosm, were places to which numbers attached themselves. Depending on whose numbers one believed, two and a half to seven and a half million land mines, two hundred thousand dead, two and a half million refugees. So much promise violated by smart, handsome people who seemed almost genetically predisposed to do harm to one another. There was a number attached to me as well. This would be my last year in uniform, so I wanted this job to go well, to contribute even if in some small way, to be able to look back years from now and to believe the things we did might have helped make a difference. Perhaps most of all, I wanted to bring home safely the young men and women who accompanied me and who, as I shared their lives with them, became in ways that no outsider can understand, closer than family.
It was perhaps prophetic that the first sight visitors saw at the sandbagged and shattered airport was a sign that said “Welcome to Sarajevo.” It had been mostly shot away; the final ‘e’ was gone from “Welcome” and the ‘j’ was mostly missing from “Sarajevo.”
For many years afterward I kept on my desk a small snapshot. The picture was of another sign located just past the last guard post on the road from the airport. In enormous letters it cautioned convoys not to stop or slow down. Down the road a short distance was a hard right turn that aimed travelers straight down Sniper Alley into the core of the city. Visible in the background of the photo, half off the road in the right hand ditch, was a gutted tank. When the hulk was removed several days later, two corpses were found beneath it.
Months of bitter fighting had devastated the city: block after block torn apart by shelling and house to house fighting; burned out buildings – one almost looked as if it has been melted by the heat and the blast; piles of rubble, destroyed tanks and armored vehicles. Streetcars were a favorite target. Their shot-up remains lay scattered all over the city. There was an entire cemetery of murdered streetcars in an open field along Sniper Alley.
At exposed intersections, freight car containers or destroyed trolleys were used for protection from snipers. They were placed so that vehicles – there were not yet very many in the city – could move between the barriers; hugging close to them afforded pedestrians some protection from the sniper fire that had until so recently raked the major streets.
The city was mostly black at night, but there were hundreds of people of all ages out walking. Dozens of young people strolled arm in arm through the downtown area. They were anxious to be outside, above ground, free from the nightly terror visited on them
from the nearby hills, away from the cellars that had bounded their existence for so many months. Many took their promenade in their finest clothes, luxuriating in the delicious air of the unthreatened dark.
Away from the downtown area, firing continued around the edge of the city, thunderclap reminders that there was still far to go and much to be done. The shooting was usually not continuous but rather a series of shots followed seconds or minutes later by another volley in a lethal ping pong that lasted through the night.
As I began to learn the city and move around in it, I found my way to Zetra stadium. I thought immediately of my daughters, both enthusiastic, knowledgeable fans of figure skating. At the 1984 Olympics, the skating competition was held at this poignant place. Here was where Torvill and Dean skated to “Bolero,” perhaps the most famous routine in all of skating history. Now, the roof of the stadium has been torn apart as if at this one place in the entire world a massive, angry presence had sought vengeance on this particular spot. The rink where Torvill and Dean skated was filled with trucks, half tracks and armored personnel carriers. Incongruously – and perhaps the ultimate obscenity – above those implements of war, still hanging from a shattered beam, was the Olympic scoreboard. It was punctured with bullet holes and the Olympic rings were partly missing.
The sights of the city began to weave themselves into my consciousness where they will always remain. I found myself wondering who can possibly replace all this broken glass? I didn’t think there was enough in all of Europe.
On a narrow street near the stadium were houses that had been vacated by owners who knew the territory would soon be given to their adversaries. Everything had been stripped from the homes: electric wiring, wall sockets, window frames, doors, door knobs, faucets, plumbing. Nothing remained but the frames.
An entire mountain side near Zetra Stadium was now a graveyard. Small parks and lawns in residential areas became burial sites when the shelling was fierce or the “real” cemeteries were filled. Some families disinterred the corpses of relatives from graveyards in sectors their opponents would occupy.
One evening I walked across the bridge where a Serbian nationalist assassinated an Austrian Arch Duke and precipitated the start of World War I. The ethnic and religious strains that prompted that long ago assassination still remain. I was reminded once again that there is so far to go.
But there were also lighter moments that I will carry with me as well. The young American GIs in Sarajevo said that if we go to war we should go with the British: “The food in their dining halls is really good.” They were, as usual, wise beyond their years. I discovered the truth of their comment when I dined with British colleagues a few nights later. Even in the half-destroyed hotel which was their headquarters, they served dinner on regimental china.
The kids of Sarajevo were eager to shake hands and try their few words of English. They had marvelous smiles and luminous eyes. They liked American chewing gum.
It was the very old and the very young, those most vulnerable, whose smiles seemed most genuine.
Days later, on my way to catch my return flight, I bought a banana split at a small café the owner had resurrected from the ruins. A vender was selling flowers on a corner of Sniper Alley. There was an occasional streetcar. Perhaps in my American optimism – or my farm boy naiveté – I regarded these as tiny beginnings. Small prayers offered up from a still-heathen landscape. Most of the rubble had been cleared from the airport, another sign of progress.
I left with these impressions: devastation amidst breathtaking beauty, life returning to a place that has too many cemeteries, crowds of strollers relishing the freedom to walk in the evening air not far from where tracers light the night sky, glimmerings of hope in an uncertain future.
The young people with me also returned unharmed, and I believe in some small way we have helped others plant tiny seeds that may – there is no assurance – take deeper root. At least that is what I told myself, and that made it okay to leave.
It was a haunting, yet exciting place – a place whose promise seemed strangely withheld. There was an awesome beauty about it: three quarters ringed by mountains, tucked inside a valley formed by those converging peaks just wide enough and flat enough to set a city amidst rugged hills that build into snowcaps visible in the distance. Bisecting it, right through the very heart of the city, ran a fast moving mountain stream. If not for the devastation, the landscape might have been mistaken for parts of the American West.
When the air was still, a distinct smell associated itself with the city. It was usually faint and not always unpleasant; it was the residue of dust, shattered masonry, broken water mains, ruptured gas lines, and the death that still lay covered and unclaimed under the rubble of the ravished streets.
Bosnia, and Sarajevo in microcosm, were places to which numbers attached themselves. Depending on whose numbers one believed, two and a half to seven and a half million land mines, two hundred thousand dead, two and a half million refugees. So much promise violated by smart, handsome people who seemed almost genetically predisposed to do harm to one another. There was a number attached to me as well. This would be my last year in uniform, so I wanted this job to go well, to contribute even if in some small way, to be able to look back years from now and to believe the things we did might have helped make a difference. Perhaps most of all, I wanted to bring home safely the young men and women who accompanied me and who, as I shared their lives with them, became in ways that no outsider can understand, closer than family.
It was perhaps prophetic that the first sight visitors saw at the sandbagged and shattered airport was a sign that said “Welcome to Sarajevo.” It had been mostly shot away; the final ‘e’ was gone from “Welcome” and the ‘j’ was mostly missing from “Sarajevo.”
For many years afterward I kept on my desk a small snapshot. The picture was of another sign located just past the last guard post on the road from the airport. In enormous letters it cautioned convoys not to stop or slow down. Down the road a short distance was a hard right turn that aimed travelers straight down Sniper Alley into the core of the city. Visible in the background of the photo, half off the road in the right hand ditch, was a gutted tank. When the hulk was removed several days later, two corpses were found beneath it.
Months of bitter fighting had devastated the city: block after block torn apart by shelling and house to house fighting; burned out buildings – one almost looked as if it has been melted by the heat and the blast; piles of rubble, destroyed tanks and armored vehicles. Streetcars were a favorite target. Their shot-up remains lay scattered all over the city. There was an entire cemetery of murdered streetcars in an open field along Sniper Alley.
At exposed intersections, freight car containers or destroyed trolleys were used for protection from snipers. They were placed so that vehicles – there were not yet very many in the city – could move between the barriers; hugging close to them afforded pedestrians some protection from the sniper fire that had until so recently raked the major streets.
The city was mostly black at night, but there were hundreds of people of all ages out walking. Dozens of young people strolled arm in arm through the downtown area. They were anxious to be outside, above ground, free from the nightly terror visited on them
from the nearby hills, away from the cellars that had bounded their existence for so many months. Many took their promenade in their finest clothes, luxuriating in the delicious air of the unthreatened dark.
Away from the downtown area, firing continued around the edge of the city, thunderclap reminders that there was still far to go and much to be done. The shooting was usually not continuous but rather a series of shots followed seconds or minutes later by another volley in a lethal ping pong that lasted through the night.
As I began to learn the city and move around in it, I found my way to Zetra stadium. I thought immediately of my daughters, both enthusiastic, knowledgeable fans of figure skating. At the 1984 Olympics, the skating competition was held at this poignant place. Here was where Torvill and Dean skated to “Bolero,” perhaps the most famous routine in all of skating history. Now, the roof of the stadium has been torn apart as if at this one place in the entire world a massive, angry presence had sought vengeance on this particular spot. The rink where Torvill and Dean skated was filled with trucks, half tracks and armored personnel carriers. Incongruously – and perhaps the ultimate obscenity – above those implements of war, still hanging from a shattered beam, was the Olympic scoreboard. It was punctured with bullet holes and the Olympic rings were partly missing.
The sights of the city began to weave themselves into my consciousness where they will always remain. I found myself wondering who can possibly replace all this broken glass? I didn’t think there was enough in all of Europe.
On a narrow street near the stadium were houses that had been vacated by owners who knew the territory would soon be given to their adversaries. Everything had been stripped from the homes: electric wiring, wall sockets, window frames, doors, door knobs, faucets, plumbing. Nothing remained but the frames.
An entire mountain side near Zetra Stadium was now a graveyard. Small parks and lawns in residential areas became burial sites when the shelling was fierce or the “real” cemeteries were filled. Some families disinterred the corpses of relatives from graveyards in sectors their opponents would occupy.
One evening I walked across the bridge where a Serbian nationalist assassinated an Austrian Arch Duke and precipitated the start of World War I. The ethnic and religious strains that prompted that long ago assassination still remain. I was reminded once again that there is so far to go.
But there were also lighter moments that I will carry with me as well. The young American GIs in Sarajevo said that if we go to war we should go with the British: “The food in their dining halls is really good.” They were, as usual, wise beyond their years. I discovered the truth of their comment when I dined with British colleagues a few nights later. Even in the half-destroyed hotel which was their headquarters, they served dinner on regimental china.
The kids of Sarajevo were eager to shake hands and try their few words of English. They had marvelous smiles and luminous eyes. They liked American chewing gum.
It was the very old and the very young, those most vulnerable, whose smiles seemed most genuine.
Days later, on my way to catch my return flight, I bought a banana split at a small café the owner had resurrected from the ruins. A vender was selling flowers on a corner of Sniper Alley. There was an occasional streetcar. Perhaps in my American optimism – or my farm boy naiveté – I regarded these as tiny beginnings. Small prayers offered up from a still-heathen landscape. Most of the rubble had been cleared from the airport, another sign of progress.
I left with these impressions: devastation amidst breathtaking beauty, life returning to a place that has too many cemeteries, crowds of strollers relishing the freedom to walk in the evening air not far from where tracers light the night sky, glimmerings of hope in an uncertain future.
The young people with me also returned unharmed, and I believe in some small way we have helped others plant tiny seeds that may – there is no assurance – take deeper root. At least that is what I told myself, and that made it okay to leave.