War Hospital

by Sheri Fink

  “He’s going to escape!” the woman warns the crowd. “No, you won’t run away,” she tells him.

  As he stands up on the hood of the car, those in the back of the crowd can now see him and the crowd erupts in applause, cheers, and jeers. A child shouts, “He wants to speak. Speak to us.” A flutter of fingers continues to gesture, “No. No.” There are shouts of “You’re supporting Serbia.” After a few moments, the crowd quiets.

  “Je vais vous dire ce que je vais faire!” Morillon announces. “Nous ne vous abandonons pas.”

  “We don’t understand anything,” someone shouts in Bosnian. The translator gets up on the hood beside the general and begins to translate his words into Bosnian.

  “We’re not abandoning you,” Morillon repeats. “Shhh. Polako, polako. Polako.” Relax. Relax. He extends his hands to the side and motions for the crowd to calm down.

  “We’re not abandoning you. The UNPROFOR soldiers will stay here.”

  “Hey, friend, what about the grenades?” one pinch-faced man yells in Bosnian. “Hey, what about the grenades, huh? Huh? What about the grenades? The grenades are killing us!”

  Adults shout and babies cry.

  “Polako, polako. Polako, polako,” Morillon tries to quiet them, to throw up a breakwater. “We are going now. I’ve seen your situation. I visited all the houses here. I’ve seen you. I know what you need.”

  A thousand voices drown out his words. “Grenades.” “Serbs.” “Killing us.” “You are our only guarantee.”

  “Polako. Polako. Allow me to speak, please!” the general shouts. “Allow me to speak. You need peace.”

  “Mir. Mir. Mir.” Peace, peace, peace, echoes the wall of women.

  “To bring back peace, I have to go to Tuzla immediately and ask for a ceasefire,” he says, but his words are translated as, “I am here to ask, to try, that all attacks stop immediately.”

  “Immediately, immediately,” the crowd repeats. The women throw up their hands and beat them together, making thunderous claps.

  “If you please, tomorrow…,” Morillon yells, but to no avail. He is stranded on the hood of his vehicle. Morillon drops his gesticulating hand and turns to his translator with an embarrassed smile. He has no choice. He wades back into the sea, becoming one for a moment with the mingling, hollow-faced village people, and makes his way back toward the PTT.

  “Godina danu…” the crowd hisses repeatedly. For a year… a year… a year we’ve suffered. A woman in a green jacket with long straight hair channels the desperation until her words peter out in a hoarse croak and then another takes up the mantle. Women tremble with sobs, wiping their eyes with the corners of their headscarves, then looking back up at the speaker, wet eyes beaming. With pride? With prayer? With relief and release? Babies wail. Young and old have the same weary look, the same lined faces and teary eyes; even the men are crying.

  “He came here and he said that he is going to help us,” shrieks a woman. “We don’t have any more strength… We won’t disperse until this is solved. The question of peace is not to be solved in New York or Geneva; it’s to be solved here. This is where it’s been questioned for the past year. They don’t trust us. Let them just come here and be here for a week and then let them do whatever they want. Let them live my life. Nothing else. I won’t ask that from the ones who had a worse life than mine, though. We won’t disperse. We want bread. We want peace. And we want UNPROFOR here.”

  The crowd claps and cheers. “That’s right,” the people shout. “Long live the speaker!”

  * * *

  MORILLON STANDS NEAR THE ENTRANCE to the post office. With his translator, he tries to communicate with the people around him, trying still, it seems, to convince them that he must leave Srebrenica. Then he throws up his hands. “OK, OK, OK,” he says, clearly frustrated, and turns toward the doorway. The crowd parts for him, some people pushing others back to clear his path. Before he disappears inside, several women push pieces of their ersatz bread toward his face.

  “Znam!” he says in Bosnian, gesturing back. “I know!”

  * * *

  ERIC IS THRILLED, having witnessed the scene from the hospital window. The Serbs haven’t shelled the center of town since their arrival. The people are right, he thinks, Morillon’s presence is their best hope for of survival. He remembers a colleague’s comment on their last visit, “They should kidnap us.” Eric suspects that if he were Bosnian, he would have put Morillon in a corner, trained a gun on him, and kept him hostage until the end of the war. Eric isn’t scared at the thought of having to stay here with the people of Srebrenica.

  Eric suspects that careful planning lies behind this “spontaneous” appeal of women and children. He figures Nedret must have played a part. The Srebrenicans’ tactics remind him of the old saying: “The iron fist is in the velvet glove.”

  * * *

  IN THE AFTERNOON, Eric, Georges, and Muriel join Nedret, who has long since ended his strike against drug-selling, in the operating room. Bandages, scrubbed but still stained, hang drying, and bubbling pots boil the instruments into some semblance of sterility. Throughout the day, the air has rumbled with the sound of distant shellfire. The injured, embodiments of that sound, arrive.

  One of the first patients to lie on the operating table has a gunshot wound of the buttock. Nedret probes for the bullet with a metal rod, causing the patient to thrash and groan with pain. It takes five or ten minutes before he notices, by turning the man, the exit wound. None of them, not even Eric, thought to check for it.

  After several other patients, Nedret examines a man who has a very tiny shrapnel hole in his abdomen. The wound looks so small that it surprises Eric when Nedret says, “We have to open.” A male nurse anesthetizes the patient with an injection of newly arrived ketamine, and Nedret cuts a long incision across the man’s abdomen. The bowels are full of blood. He finds a perforation in the intestines. Nedret was right. An innocent-appearing wound masked a devastating injury.

  Eric supposes they can do nothing. The location of the injury indicates a difficult bowel resection and colostomy, neither of which seems possible here. In these conditions, he believes, the patient has a negligible chance of survival. He keeps his skepticism to himself, though, deferring to Nedret’s experience, and soon he, too, is silently rooting for the patient to stay alive.

  Nedret carries out the operation in disorderly fashion. Each time he finds another injury he seems exasperated, but then painstakingly works to fix it. Without muscle relaxants, the belly is tense and difficult for Nedret to maneuver. The patient regularly emerges from anesthesia, and his movements awaken an inattentive nurse, who quickly injects another bolus of ketamine into his IV.

  Hours pass. It grows dark and Eric takes turns with other aid workers shining a flashlight onto the operating field. At one point, a shell falls close enough to dislodge a piece of plaster from the ceiling, which falls into the patient’s open abdomen. Eric begins to despair—it would take an artist, he thinks, to fix these wounds. Then a heavyset man appears in the operating room like a character in a bizarre dream. He stops before the doctors and lifts his shirt. The fleshy belly that protrudes over his pants has a long, vertical scar.

  “I operated on him without any anesthetics,” Nedret boasts.

  The man smiles broadly.

  “Nedret good,” he says.

  Eric pictures him on the table like the current patient, losing blood, being exposed to infection, and somehow surviving. So, there is a chance—maybe it’s one in a hundred or one in a thousand—but he is convinced that Nedret performs some miracles. He learns what Nedret has already learned, that the human body is so well designed, with so many compensatory systems, that it’s actually quite hard to kill a man. Real war is not like the movies, where one bullet makes a man fall down dead.

  As the hours pass, Eric and the others, gazes constricted to the narrow operating field, are transfixed by its mélange of red blood, yellow fat, pink skin, and silver instruments. Unraveling
the intestines, Nedret finds seemingly endless injuries. The doctors and nurses keep working with dogged determination through their exhaustion, cracking silly jokes, but inside themselves they will the patient, as they will Srebrenica itself, to survive against all odds.

  Contrary to Eric’s expectations, the patient lives. Nedret patches the last of his injuries and offers a liberal libation of iodine. The man’s anatomy has reemerged like a puzzle pieced together.

  A nurse is instructed to administer high doses of antibiotics throughout the night via the patient’s IV to help prevent a severe infection from feces contaminating his abdomen. His bowel tissue could still die, insufficiently nourished by damaged blood vessels. The patient needs a modern intensive care unit—with monitors recording his vital signs and dripping lifesaving potions—but in Srebrenica, of course, there is no such thing. Eric feels he has just witnessed the most prehistoric, ridiculous, yet noble practice of medicine that exists.

  * * *

  THE SKY IS DARK when Eric crosses the street to the post office to join the rest of the internationals. On the way, he notices refugees still flooding into town, children falling asleep in the snow when their families stop to rest. People are gathered outside the post office to ensure that Morillon doesn’t escape; many—the new refugees—have nowhere else to go. The street is dotted with campfires. Someone throws a green plastic milkcrate into one fire and flames roar to the height of the tallest heads. The displaced villagers face the fire, hands raised, with scarves or blankets wrapped around their heads. The temperature is far below freezing.

  The expatriates meet together in the post office to discuss whether they are hostages. The U.N. soldiers make a contingency plan for a breakout by force. The idea sickens Eric, but he doesn’t believe they’ll do it. Morillon announces, as he did at the spa in Serbia, that nobody will deprive him of his freedom of movement. He makes plans to sneak out of the enclave on foot, instructing the soldiers to rendezvous with him on the road to Bratunac in the U.N. vehicle.

  Morillon disappears. As the night progresses, the crowd of Bosnians around the post office swells instead of diminishes, preventing the Canadian soldiers from moving the vehicle. Eric decides to sleep, lying down on the freezing, concrete floor, fully clothed. He reminds himself that such discomfort is a daily occurrence for the people around him in this hellish town. Still, he awakens feeling pummeled.

  In the morning, Morillon is nowhere to be found, and his aide-decamp takes charge of the small roomful of soldiers and aid workers, mounting a table to address them. “It’s a putsch!” Georges whispers, sotto voce, to Eric and Muriel. The only ones able to giggle about the situation, they take care to hide their whimsy. The soldiers gripe amongst themselves that they are hostages: “Next thing you know, we’ll have guns at our heads.” In a grave voice, the officer announces that they must pool and ration their food, eating only once every other day. The MSF team members neither object to the idea nor tell the others that the Bosnian medical staff insisted they eat at the hospital.

  The frightened young soldiers, seemingly insensitive to the plight of the tens of thousands of endangered people around them, evoke little sympathy from Eric. Still, he reassures them that the MSF team hasn’t detected any hostility in town. He tells his own team that the only thing to fear is a Serb takeover of the town, and it isn’t worth discussing or worrying about something over which they have no control.

  He returns to the hospital and finds the patient they operated on last evening still alive. But now an infusion is dripping imperceptibly through a tiny butterfly needle in the patient’s vein rather than flowing through an IV catheter. The patient looks as if he’s in pain and, upon further investigation, it seems as if he hasn’t received the heavy doses of antibiotics and painkillers the doctors instructed the nurse to provide. The internationals can’t understand it. From what they can gather, the IV came out and the nurses didn’t see the point in replacing it, spending precious resources and time on a patient they believed would soon die.

  Eric suspects that the medical workers’ blasé attitude is a result of the fact that they are so battered and worn, malnourished, stressed, and exhausted that they can no longer organize themselves to work effectively. They aren’t used to having resources and have lost practice with simple procedures such as starting an IV. Yesterday, the nurses hadn’t even seemed to know whether they had any infusions in stock. It makes Eric even more committed to supporting them with a full team of MSF medical workers. Here in Srebrenica, doctors and nurses have been practicing “virtual reality” medicine.

  One of the first tasks that needs to be done is to organize the medical supplies. Yesterday Eric dug around the so-called pharmacy, a room overflowing with boxes and dirty bags brought straight from where they were airdropped in the mountains. He found a box of infusions that he could have sworn were delivered with the first aid convoy, four months ago. While a severely anemic woman was lying in the hospital in need of a blood transfusion, eight unmarked, instructionless boxes filled with plastic blood-collection bags were sitting in the storeroom.

  Eric decides that it will be much more useful for the MSF team to organize the pharmacy than to watch Nedret operate again. Eric, Georges, and Muriel get busy sorting goods. Then the crackle of a loudspeaker brings them to the windows of the room, which sits on the top floor of the hospital facing the post office.

  The sun is in Eric’s eyes, but he can make out General Morillon standing at an open window above the building’s entrance, framed by a projecting concrete canopy. A large crowd is assembled outside. Eric assumes that Morillon is about to demand the immediate release of the U.N. soldiers, something he fears will destroy all credibility with the Bosnians.

  The general begins to speak slowly, in English, through a white megaphone. His voice is deep and robotic as he enunciates every syllable. “I del-i-ber-ate-ly came here,” he says, looking down at a black notebook. “And I have now de-ci-ded to stay here in Sre-bre-niche-a.” Below him, parked beside the post office, five Canadian soldiers sitting atop their white U.N. armored personnel carrier look up with surprised expressions. Morillon continues.

  “You are now under the pro-tec-tion of the U.N. forces.”

  The jaw of one of the Canadian soldiers literally drops. Watching from the hospital, Eric cracks, “Now we’re in real shit.” White-bearded Larry Hollingworth pushes a U.N. flag out the window beside the general. It ripples in the breeze as Morillon waves.

  As the announcement is translated, the people in the crowd on the sun-drenched hill break into huge smiles. Happiness beautifies them. They begin to clap and whistle and shriek with joy. Some clasp hands to their ears against the deafening ruckus. The noise of their jubilation echoes across the narrow valley.

  Eric is stunned. He looks at Georges and Muriel.

  “I think we’re living a moment of history,” he says.

  Is the general sincere? If so, then finally! Finally! Finally! Finally a U.N. commander has clearly declared that he will stand between the Serbs and their victims. It’s fabulous! If only Morillon will spread his statement to the world and then stick to his guns, no matter how the Serbs respond.

  This is exactly what Eric has been hoping for. He watches Morillon descend into the crowd. Tony Birtley, an ABC news correspondent who sneaked into Srebrenica several weeks ago, pushes his way through the people and trains his video camera on the general’s face.

  “If this doesn’t work, General, what do you think it will do to the people?”

  “It wi-i-i-i-i-ll work, it will work,” Morillon says, raising the pitch of his voice like a parent soothing a silly child. He grins and dismisses the reporter with a wave of his hand, then turns his back and walks away.

  Morillon’s statement that his headquarters is now in Srebrenica is underlined with ceremony. The Canadian soldiers form a color guard in front of the APC. Morillon faces them, and on his order they lift their guns and fire. Morillon salutes, and a soldier slowly raises the blue U.N. flag,
hand over hand, up the flagpole of the Srebrenica post office.

  Eric moves away from the windows and sits down on one of the cardboard boxes of medical aid. Georges and Muriel seat themselves, too. What does it all mean? Impossible to know. Reality dampens their joy. Practically, what has changed? The city is still encircled and besieged. At least 200 patients need to be evacuated. The medical and humanitarian needs are still unmet, and the local medical staff is exhausted and leaderless. All of MSF’s work lies ahead of them, and nearly everything they need to do it must come from outside the pocket. Trucks and helicopters. Medical supplies. Hygiene kits. Most importantly, a surgeon. Eric and Muriel will make arrangements in Belgrade, while Georges plays the role of advocate at MSF headquarters in Belgium. He’ll tell the world what he witnessed and demand international action to protect the city.

  Eric would like to stay longer, but, becoming acutely aware of his lack of a change of underwear and uncomfortable about relying on the Bosnians for everything, he prepares to leave the enclave with the team. The following day, Sunday, the town authorities permit a U.N. military observer to leave with one refugee official and the three MSF workers in exchange for the promise that more military observers and a relief convoy will be delivered within three days. On Eric’s way out, he bids General Morillon farewell, congratulating him on his decision and inquiring whether his statement is being publicized outside of Srebrenica.

  Yes, the general tells him. Little does Eric know, but Morillon’s unscripted actions and unapproved media statements have circled the globe. Over ham radio, the general spoke directly to the Serbs, telling them that his presence in Srebrenica served not only the interests of the thousands suffering in the town, but also the interests of peace and therefore the Serb nation. “Understand that it is also for you, Serbs, that I am present and that I will stay in Srebrenica,” he told them. However, it is Morillon’s demands to Serb leaders, read over HF radio to U.N. headquarters in his car, that are sending U.N. leaders scrambling.