College Issue: War College
AT THE LAST BOSNIAN CHECKPOINT on my way out of Sarajevo, I stop my Walkman and change tapes. I always have one tape primed for this part of the journey. I push my headphones down around the back of my neck, pick up my dark blue helmet – a gift from Newsweek – off the passenger seat next to me and put it on. I tighten the chin strap and put the earpieces on the headphones up against my ears, under the straps. I let the seat back a little, just to have a little more of me behind the false protection of the door. I turn on the tape, tap my finger to two or three beats on the hard ceramic chest plate of my bulletproof jacket and give a thumbs up to the always friendly Bosnian police. They sit in an old newspaper stand that has huge slabs of concrete leaned up against it to stop shrapnel. We are at the end of a Sarajevo nowhere-industrial zone.
I let out a breath and note that once again I am sweating. “What am I doing here?” I think to myself. It is difficult to imagine a place more deserving of this kind of thought. “What happened to Santa Barbara, lectures three days a week, ex-girlfriends, surfing, the smelly office of my college newspaper?” But those thoughts are fleeting – recollections of a world too far away to be real. I drop the clutch, pass the tank traps made from steel girders and make a left onto the Road.
Strictly speaking it is called Branko Bujic alley. But to the journalists it is known as the Airport Road. Really, it is the Road to Hell. Other than a handful of satellite telephones, the Airport Road is the only thing connecting Sarajevo, a city of 448,000 people and two dozen journalists, with the other 6 billion people in the world. Most of the time I forget there is a connection at all. Between Sarajevo and the rest of the world are a few thousand Serb nationalists who have been bombing the city since April of 1992. They keep me and the rest of the press corps in business. Without those crazed Serbs, Sarajevo would be only one of a long list of forgotten Olympic sites. But there would also be a lot more people who still have arms and legs – still have mothers, brothers and boyfriends.
First gear is short in my beat-up, rented red Renault 18. In Sarajevo my four-door Renault is considered “soft,” meaning that it won’t stop bullets or shell fragments. Most journalists who make this trip use “hard,” bulletproof, vehicles like Land Rovers. I couldn’t afford $100 a day for a proper Hertz. I give the car-owner’s family food, and they let me use it. (Also, the Avis-Hertz crowd wants a $15,000 to $20,000 deposit from journalists these days – it seems that the life span of rental cars here is particularly short.) In my Renault, Bondo fills the holes that a mortar made one day when it was parked.
My foot is all the way to the floor as I shift into second gear fifty yards down the Road. There are a few mortar scars on the pavement. The crater from mortar rounds and the shrapnel flying outward make indenta-tions that look like gray flowers blooming on the road. Up ahead an overpass stretches out of sight.
To my left is Sarajevo – Bosnian held – and to my right is the front line of the siege and destroyed industrial buildings and then the suburbs held by rebel Serbs. Until I reach the overpass, I’m relatively safe – once I start going up, like everyone else on this road, I’m pretty much fair game. I’ve taped TV (the accepted shorthand for press) on all the windows because it can’t hurt, but driving as fast as physically possible is the best protection.
Protection is an odd word here. On Christmas Day, I talked with my mom on the BBC satellite phone at the bargain rate of twenty dollars per minute. I told her how the halls of the hotel are below freezing because there are so many artillery holes in the building, how we have electricity only sporadically and how there is so little water that an alarm goes out among the press corps when it comes on. Still, she wanted to know “Is it safe there?” What can you tell your mother on a satellite phone from a place like Sarajevo, where every exit from the hotel is covered by snipers and rooms simply disappear during heavy barrages? I told her it was very safe inside the hotel – which itself is a lie, though if your window has not been blown out and you close your curtains, the sound of artillery in the early morning hours sounds remarkably like crashing waves. My first few mornings back in Sarajevo this last time, I woke up thinking I was camping out at the beach.
College Issue: War College, Page 1 of 5