The foundation for an infantryman, however, would always be the same—combat operations. “But the same principles that made you successful in combat ops,” said Major Jurney, raising his voice to be heard over the noise of a nearby well-drilling rig, “will make you successful in humanitarian ops. The key to success is how quickly you can tranistion from humanitarian relief to deadly force.”
And therein lies a conundrum. How can we be certain that any humanitarian organization’s—especially an army’s—self-proclaimed impartiality isn’t an illusion, a sinister form of hypocrisy, a tactic, a mask to be whisked away at the appropriate moment, revealing the unforgiving face of an adversary? Certainly the residents of Mogadishu have very little reason to trust the humanitarianism of America or its military. In Haiti the Clinton administration’s veneer of altruism became all too transparent when the National Security Council and people in the embassy instructed the Special Forces to treat the blood-drenched FRAPH, a far-right terrorist group, as if they were a legitimate political party, the “loyal opposition” to Haiti’s democratic forces. And while Rwanda and Bosnia (to name but two) provided indisputable evidence of our failure to act against massive aggression, why were we so intent on labeling the liberation forces in Kosovo “terrorists”? The blowback of moral equivalency: nobody’s right, nobody’s wrong, we want to help everybody. Yet the truth is that short of marching on Belgrade and ruling Yugoslavia for the next twenty years, places like Kosovo won’t fit nicely into America’s multicultural moral template. The Kosovars want what we have—independence and freedom from state-sponsored terrorism. In significant ways it is ours to give, but we hesitate to give it to them. This is not a moral decision. Our moral crusade ends here.
“They [the Clinton administration] are internally inconsistent about moralism,” said a senior officer I spoke with in a guarded, no-access command tent at Task Force Hawk who asked to remain unidentified. “When you start drifting into a moral universe, you have to ask, Whose morals? It’s impossible for those guys to have a consistent, coherent foreign policy, because every time they bump into something, it’s a Gordian knot. They’re trying to get somewhere, but they bump into inadequate resources and intractable moral dilemmas. They—Sandy Berger, Madeleine Albright—can’t help but be inconsistent.”
Meanwhile, there was no question among any of the Marines but that they were doing the right thing—helping the suffering Kosovars—and since no one could yet predict that the war would end so shortly, both the camp and the mission were expanding daily. As far as the eye could scan, green tents were being uncrated and erected to shelter an expected 20,000 refugees within the month, 30,000 if the war continued indefinitely. The Kilo Company had been there long enough to be replaced by Lima Comapny, whose men I watched unstrap their rucksacks and sit down on the ground to be briefed by their company commander, a Captain Dan Sullivan. Each new Marine had brought with him a fresh plastic tub of Huggies disposable wipes, and each man had an extra set of dogtags tucked into the laces of one of his boots, should the set around his neck be somehow blown away.
“The NGOs know we’re here to protect them, and they appreciate it,” the captain told his assembled company. “This is the first time most of you are doing real-world ops.” He didn’t want to catch anyone fooling around with his weapon or losing a single round of ammunition.
“The refugees have been through a lot of shit,” he said. “There are a lot of kids here that have seen more shit than you’ve ever seen in a war movie. Treat them with respect. Say hello to them, treat them as you would treat your grandmother if she was a refugee.” The captain tried to explain to his troops that they were in one of the poorest countries in the world, a place with strange customs, where it would not be unusual for them to see guys holding hands with each other. “Relax about it,” said the captain, and handed over the briefing to First Lieutenant Adam Henrich. “The people here quickly realized we’re not the bad guys, we’re here to help them,” Henrich told the Marines. “The NGOs, in my opinion, are doing the same thing we’re doing. In my opinion, we’re one big team.”
After dinner—trays of huge grilled T-bone steaks delivered from the NGOs kitchen—I walked across the bivouac with Captain Sullivan and Lima Company’s gunnery sergeant, Jack Sterling, to the CAAT (Combined Anti-Armor Team) motor pool—Humvees mounted with TOW missiles, Mark 19 automatic grenade launchers, and .50-caliber machine guns—and we took one of the vehicles up to the camp’s main gate for a walking tour of the extensive compound. Although the Pentagon had instructed the Marines not to plan for any ground combat operations, few of the soldiers actually believed they weren’t headed for a fight. “We thought we’d be in Kosovo right now, kicking ass and taking names,” said Sterling, “but here we are with the refugee girls, singing songs.”
We strolled down the graveled avenues past row after row of neat tents, families sitting silently in the shadows beyond the thresholds, mothers preparing the evening meal, old men and old women with head scarves nodding at us, teenage girls like any teenage girls anywhere in line at the water fountains, children running toward us to ask our names, take our hands in theirs. Here in Albania the refugees were free to come and go as they pleased, unlike at the dismal, filthy camps I would later see in Macedonia, where the Kosovars were locked in, concentration camp–style, behind fences and barbed wire. Here at Camp Hope, the mood was upbeat, if not uplifting; relieved, if not refreshed. Among the youngest refugees, laughter was not uncommon, nor was the sense of enterprise. People had begun to build primitive kiosks to sell little things, soda and gum and cigarettes; the KLA even had its own clandestine recruiting tent.
For two hours, until well after dark, the gunnery sergeant and I walked the perimeter, visiting the new guards, Lima Company’s teenage Marines at their lonely posts for their first night of duty ashore. Despite my hesitation to play along, Sterling made me complicit in a ritual, requiring each young soldier at each scattered checkpoint to articulate his mission. It’s good for them, said the gunnery sergeant, to have to explain themselves to somebody who isn’t in a uniform, and I was reminded of something Major Jurney had told me, that he himself was a product of lessons learned in engagements past, forced to develop his social skills, to communicate more comfortably, to agree to TV interviews, to be mindful of the diplomacy of community relations.
The nearly full moon had risen by the time I made my way back to the Marines’ blacked-out encampment, serene in its constant watchfulness, and crawled into my borrowed sleeping bag, watching the cool mist descend outside the mosquito netting. In the morning the searing heat returned and with it the novelty of Important Visitors. (There was a need for novelty. The days I spent in Albania with Task Force Hawk and its superfluous Apache helicopters were an admirable mix of industry, boredom, and suburban living. “We have some surrealism around here,” I heard an infantry officer say, lounging in front of his tent in a lawn chair. “I feel like I’m in Atlanta, Georgia, sitting on my porch.” Soldiers don’t go anywhere these days without their TVs, VCRs, PCs and cell phones. The compound bristled with groves of satellite antennae, its boardwalks and grounds coiled with cable hookups. The spring rains had stopped and the mud had dried, and there wasn’t much to do but slowly mass forces and matériel, perfect the logistics—communicate, communicate—and be more diligent about physical exercise, given the abundance and quality of chow.)
The brass and the staff from Joint Task Force Shining Hope had planned a major photo op and were being choppered in from their headquarters at Rinas airfield, forty miles away. Before long the crowd of officers had arrived, their every step photographed by a cadre of the military’s own spinners. The idea was to do something nice, something fun, for the kids. The refugee children were lined up according to age groups and marched to the far end of the camp, where engineers had scraped a play area and blanketed it with gravel. An Air Force sergeant proudly displayed a blueprint for an extravagant playground he had designed. Luggin
g sacks of candy, the task force folks divided themselves up among the groups of children and organized games, assisted by translators and staff from Save the Children.
I lingered behind with one of the civilian watchdogs assigned to the MEU from the Center for Naval Analysis. Although they were civil service, the analysts wore battle-dress uniforms and helmets when they accompanied the Marines ashore from the Kearsarge. Even dressed to kill, this man looked like a Beltway technocrat and spoke lovingly, and at great length, about the various types of gravel spread around the camp. As we spoke, I looked over his shoulder at a large African American soldier teaching a circle of refugee children the hokey-pokey, putting his left hand in, his left hand out, twirling all about in his shiny black combat boots. It was a fine sight.
5. The Other Soldiers of Tomorrow
In Kukës, high up in the mountains of the Albainian-Kosovar frontier a week later, it didn’t take long to relearn a basic lesson, that no matter how light-footed you walked through a war zone, something’s bound to happen. I choppered up from the Rinas airfield with the Italian Coast Guard, seated between an Oxfam engineer and a portly Italian general going up to inspect his troops responsible for guarding the Kukës refugee camp. As we flew in, the reservoir below the city seemed to bob with countless flocks of seagulls, but as we made our descent I saw not birds but a vast spread of rubbish riding the still, blue water.
Barry Davies, the Oxfam engineer responsible for bringing water to the camps, had to tell his younger workers to get a grip when they arrived in town with the first crush of refugees. You’re not doctors, he felt obliged to lecture his crew. You’re not psychiatrists. The female interpreter would translate the stories of the rapes and executions to the team, and the less experienced workers would come unfocused, frantic with compassion, and Barry would tell them firmly to concentrate on the job, water was what they had come to do, look beyond the suffering and get these people water or things are going to get a lot worse.
Kukës, which had the potential to be a gorgeous alpine town nestled under snow-blotched summits, was a dump of rotting concrete apartment buildings and garbage-laden streets, full of spies and mercenaries, guerrilla fighters and groups of haggard-looking men—the tractor drivers the world had watched on TV. The Oxfam engineer’s apartment, which rented for $60 a month back in the spring, now cost $2,000. A toy Uzi lay on the living-room couch, left by the child whose family had moved out instantly, doubling up with relatives, to bank the cash. Everybody’s armed, everybody’s balanced on the edge, another nation with another festering pathology. There was a battle on the hillside above town last night, two klicks this side of the border, an Italian doctor told me matter-of-factly. NATO bombs, mortar and machine-gun fire, tracers slicing through the air.
Deep inside the Italian camp, filming a queue of women at a waterpipe, I soon find myself in trouble—two AK47s jammed in my face, a cocked fist aimed at my jaw. The KLA were forbidden inside the camp in uniform or armed, but here they were, and furious, mistakenly believing I had captured their presence on my camera. Instead of intervening on my behalf, the local employees of Oxfam who had brought me there averted their eyes and backed away, out of the probable line of fire. Throughout Albania, especially in the north, journalists and aid workers had been robbed and threatened and occasionally roughed up or held hostage by troupes of rogues—the mafia, the police, the KLA—had their cars stolen, their money, their satellite phones, but I didn’t know of any Westerner who had been seriously injured, even up here on the border, except by Serb snipers. Nothing much happened now either—the two KLA soldiers demanded my camera, I refused, we yelled at each other in our respective languages, and finally they went away—and the reason I even bring it up is to acknowledge the distance covered by the American military since a sergeant told Philip Caputo in Vietnam, “You’re going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteen-year-old American boy.”
I can easily imagine the circumstances that might skyrocket that brutality back to the surface, but as a rule it just isn’t there in the ranks. “The truth about the Army,” Colonel Volney Warner at Task Force Hawk told me, “is that there’s very little difference between me and Private First Class Snuffie. She’s bright, intelligent, talented, well-read. If I go to another [country’s] army, the private first class is agrarian, uneducated, undisciplined, unprofessional.” Because the US Army has had little success recruiting from the middle class, it creates its own middle class, replete with bourgeois values. Because it has mostly eroded racial and gender barriers like no other giant institution in the world, it inculcates open-mindedness and tolerance and good manners. “The Army doesn’t look for brutes anymore,” said Captain Marty Downie, also at Task Force Hawk. “They want the thinking man, someone who’s going to make a smart decision, someone with a conscience.” It’s a smokeless, lite beer, nice guy/gal culture that prides itself on calculated lethality. I was offended (absurdly) by the very nature of these two KLA fighters who, compared with American GIs, were so quick to stick their guns in my face. It’s not a question of who are the more effective, efficient killers—we Americans are. But these guys were more dangerous, period, and the distinction is not a small one, here in the Balkans, or the Middle East, or Africa.
It was the seventy-second day of bombing—six more days to go. I walked up a mountain road toward the border. The war was almost over but no one knew that yet, and the exodus of refugees continued to trickle down the slope toward Kukës, cars with license plates ripped away, tiny tractors pulling wagons stuffed with people and foam mattresses and pots and pans, women in wool coats and head scarves on this hot, bright day, pretty young mothers cradling swaddled infants. It was a lovely day for a ride out of hell. The last tractor I saw before I turned back to the Italian camp was pulling a cart loaded with children, two dozen little ones, presided over by one old man wearing a white skullcap, the de facto patriarch of a wayward future.
Overhead, American jets and their surging, pulsing roar had been continuous since midafternoon. Occasionally I would spot their metallic specks, gleaming in the sun. Back in the refugee camp, I was surrounded by children who didn’t want to let go of my hand, who wanted to play with my camera, wanted to introduce me to their sisters, their brothers, their mothers. Where are your fathers? They pointed to the mountains. In Kosovo.
The oldest, a fifteen-year-old boy, with raven-black hair and a grim smile, slashed his hand from ear to ear, again and again, holding an invisible knife, as he explained what had happened back in his village. There was an immense explosion, like the snap of a woolen blanket amplified a hundred thousand times. “Aviones, aviones!” squealed the children. The earth tremored lightly underfoot.
Would you like to know that if the bomb doesn’t fall on you, it is a wonderful, terrible thing to behold?
Again, on the other side of the hill above Kukës, the earth exploded with a single, solid, indescribably powerful boom. “Aviones, aviones!” cheered the kids. So very high above us were the twin contrails of a B-52 bomber. The children were all over me, jumping up and down, dancing crazily, singing, singing. It was power itself, sheer and absolute and disembodied, that enchanted them, they who had known only the fate of the powerless. For a moment, believe me, they were happy amid the horrors of the world. There was one tenacious little boy in a Mickey Mouse T-shirt who positively refused to let go of my hand, and it was this child, I know, who was leading us all into the next century.
The children, I should add, were singing songs of war.
(December, 1999)
Leave
When you teach grad students, as I do every winter, especially those would-be masters, the brainy, dreamy, slack-ass selves who have been squeezed directly through the educational intestine from high school through university and into the relatively expansive bowl of highest, never-ending education, you keep having a recurring thought, each time you enter a seminar room and scan the robust, na
scently cynical faces of the whatever generation horseshoed around the table, receptive to the morsels of your wisdom and the tricks of your trade, and the thought is an admonishment, and the admonishment is this: When are you guys ever going to get the fuck out of here?
And I don’t mean finish the degree, get a job, a life. I mean turn your life upside down, expose it raw to the muddle. Go. Put out, as the New Testament would have it (Luke 5:4), into deep water. A headline in the New York Times on gardening delivers the same marching orders: “If a Plant’s Roots Are Too Tight, Repot.” Go among strangers in strange lands. Sniff, lick, and swallow the mysteries, even if you can’t digest them. Learn to say clearly in an unpronounceable language, Please, I very much need a toilet. A doctor. Change for a 500,000 note. I very much need a friend. I very much need an air strike.
It’s not the traditional Grand Tour I’m advocating, though some of the most enduring lessons of traveling are inaccessible until you’re out there moving and then they’re indelible upon the soul. One thing about crossing borders, going into the world—you quickly learn that despite your marvelous ideals, you can’t change it, at least not easily, but the world beyond the horizon can easily change you, and not just a little. Unless perhaps you are cursed, even at a young age, with being unchangeable.
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