To End a War

by Richard Holbrooke

  As we talked, General Wesley Clark joined us. He was in a complicated position on our team. A West Pointer, a Rhodes scholar from Arkansas, and a Vietnam veteran, he had been one of the fastest rising officers in the United States Army—the youngest brigadier general at the time he got his first star. He had a personal relationship, although not close, with another Rhodes scholar from Arkansas who was now our Commander in Chief. With three stars, Clark was at the crossroads of his career; this assignment would lead him either to a fourth star—every general officer’s dream—or to retirement. Assignment to a diplomatic negotiating team offered some exciting possibilities, but it could be hazardous duty for a military officer, since it might put him into career-endangering conflicts with more senior officers. Clark’s boyish demeanor and charm masked, but only slightly, his extraordinary intensity. No one worked longer hours or pushed himself harder than Wes Clark. Great things were expected of him—and he expected them of himself.

  Of the people at the hotel that evening, the one I knew least was Samuel Nelson Drew, a forty-seven-year-old Air Force colonel who had recently joined the National Security Council staff. In civilian clothes he seemed less like a military officer than an academic. (He had a doctorate from the University of Virginia.) A devoted family man with a strong Christian faith, he had worked for almost four years at NATO headquarters, where, among other responsibilities, he had headed a special crisis task force on Yugoslavia.

  In our first meeting with Milosevic, Nelson hung back, saying almost nothing. But near the end of dinner, Milosevic began to pay close attention to him. Sensing that he could become a vital part of our team, I took him aside that night, and urged him to speak up more. As we prepared for the next day’s trip, he seemed subdued, and spent part of the evening writing a long letter to his wife.

  On Saturday, August 19, we ate breakfast early and returned to the French air base. The French helicopter had room for only six passengers, but we were seven, counting Rosemarie Pauli and General Clark’s executive assistant, Lieutenant Colonel Dan Gerstein. So Rosemarie, who had visited Sarajevo on two earlier trips with me, offered her seat to Gerstein.

  The helicopter ride was relatively uneventful, although swooping between hills and looking for breaks in the clouds can never be entirely routine. Nelson Drew, seeing the savage land for the first time, stared silently out the small window. After about ninety minutes, we landed in a soccer field at Veliko Polje, near the Mount Igman pass. Our greeting party was headed by Lieutenant Colonel Randy Banky, the senior American military liaison officer with the U.N. forces in Sarajevo. Two vehicles waited for us on the soccer field—a large, heavy French armored personnel carrier, painted U.N. white, and a U.S. Army Humvee.

  General Clark talked to Colonel Banky for a moment. Then he turned to me and yelled over the roar of the helicopter, “Have you ever been in one of our new Humvees? You ought to see how much better it is than the jeeps you were used to in Vietnam.”

  The French armored personnel carrier, or APC, would take the rest of the party to Sarajevo. As we walked to the APC, I asked Kruzel what the attitude of the Pentagon would be if the United States sent troops to Bosnia as part of a peace settlement. “They wouldn’t like it,” he said in his half-sardonic, half-joking style, “because it would disrupt their training schedule.”

  Another American introduced himself at the doors of the APC: Pete Hargreaves, a security officer in the American Embassy in Sarajevo. The doors on the back of the massive vehicle swung open and everyone took seats on the side benches, Bob Frasure at the front left, the others facing each other, Gerstein and Hargreaves in the seats nearest the back doors. “Think hard about how we handle the meeting with Izetbegovic,” I said to Bob Frasure. He gave an ironic laugh and, as I turned back toward the Humvee, the doors of the APC slammed shut.

  Clark sat to my right in the backseat of the Humvee. Colonel Banky and the driver, an American sergeant, took the two seats in front. The vehicle was heavily armored and the windows, which could be opened, were almost two inches thick. Nonetheless, Clark insisted that we buckle our seat belts and put on flak jackets and helmets. In the August heat, our colleagues in the APC did not take these precautions.

  For almost an hour we traveled toward Sarajevo through seemingly peaceful woods, although the road was bumpy and in poor condition. The French military, in whose sector Sarajevo and Mount Igman fell, had recently begun upgrading the road and patrolling it with tanks, part of the new and powerful Rapid Reaction Force (RRF) established by French President Jacques Chirac to show the Serbs that France intended to pursue a more aggressive policy.

  The road emerged from the woods and reached a steep incline above the Sarajevo valley, where, hugging the mountain wall, it suddenly narrowed. On our left was a nearly vertical wall, to our right a sharp drop-off. We were approaching the most dangerous part of the road, where we would be directly exposed to Serb machine gunners. But in these well-armored cars we felt safe. It was about 9:30 in the morning.

  The Humvee rounded a corner. On the left, a French convoy going the other way had pulled over against the inside wall to let us pass on the outside. As we approached the last French tank, we saw a soldier yelling and gesturing, but we couldn’t hear what he was saying through the thick windows. Our driver got out of the car, looking puzzled. “I don’t understand this guy,” he said. “He’s speaking French.” I jumped out of the Humvee to help, but I couldn’t quite grasp what the French soldier was saying, something about a vehicle behind us going over the edge of the road. I thought that I had misunderstood him. Behind us was—nothing. I signaled Clark to join me. The APC must be far behind us, I thought. Then it hit me.

  Clark and I ran back about thirty yards. About six inches of red clay seemed to have broken off the edge of the roadbed. We could hear voices in the woods below, but we saw nothing except a few flattened trees. Somewhere below us lay the APC with our colleagues.

  Wearing heavy flak jackets and helmets, we jumped off the edge of the road and started down the steep incline. We were less than ten feet below the roadbed when two enormous explosions went off. Small-arms fire broke out around us. From below and above people cried out in French, “Mines! Get back on the road!” Grasping roots to pull ourselves up, we scrambled back onto the road.

  The shooting continued. Far below in the distance lay villages with a clear line of fire. We had no idea whether they were Serb or Muslim. I ran back to our Humvee and asked the sergeant to turn it around in case we had to get back to the relative safety of the woods and the soccer field-helipad. We tried to set up our portable satellite dish to establish communications with the outside world, but the vertical rise of the mountain made contact impossible. Colonel Banky had disappeared.

  Finally—it seemed like an eternity but was in fact less than ten minutes—a French corporal ran up to us. The missing APC, he said, was not immediately below us, as we had thought, but beyond the next hairpin turn.

  At that moment we realized how bad the situation was. Until then we had expected to find our colleagues injured but, we hoped, not seriously. I had not allowed myself to think of any worse possibility.

  Wes and I started running down the road, twenty pounds of extra weight cutting into our necks and chests. We rounded the hairpin turn and followed the road for almost a kilometer. Finally, we ran into a cluster of French vehicles on the road, including a medical vehicle that had, by chance, been coming up the road. They were grouped at the spot, we now realized, where the APC had bounced over the road and continued to somersault down the mountain. Below us trees had been flattened as if by a giant plow.

  The shooting died down and rain began to fall. In addition to five Americans, four French soldiers—the driver and three other men who had been in the APC—were missing. We established a weak radio contact with the Embassy in Sarajevo through the Embassy radio net, but because we did not know exactly what had happened, we asked Sarajevo to hold off reporting anything to Washington. I
t was not quite 4:00 A.M. in Washington, and whatever had happened, there was nothing for them to do until we knew more.

  Since I was the only person on the mountain who spoke both French and English, I stayed on the road to work with the French while Wes descended. We anchored a rope around a tree stump so that he could rappel toward the vehicle, which French and Bosnian soldiers had already reached. Huge plumes of smoke rose from somewhere below us. We could hear Clark yelling through his walkie-talkie that he needed a fire extinguisher urgently. I looked around frantically; there was none.

  A French jeep drove up and stopped. A solitary figure was seated upright in the backseat, covered in blood and bandages. His face was unrecognizable. I asked him who he was. He mumbled something unintelligible. “Who?” I asked again. “Hargreaves … your … security … officer … sir,” he said, very slowly, talking in a daze. I climbed into the jeep and asked him if he wanted to lie down. He said he didn’t know if he could make it. He thought his back was broken. Two French soldiers helped me ease Hargreaves out of the jeep and lay him on a cot on the road. I got down on my knees next to him. He was having great difficulty speaking. I understood him to be saying that he should have saved people, that it was his fault, that his back was broken. I tried to calm him down. Desperate for information, I started asking him, one by one, about our team.

  “Frasure. Where is Ambassador Frasure?” I almost shouted.

  “Died.” He could barely say the word.

  I stood up. Three years as a civilian in Vietnam had exposed me to occasional combat and its awful consequences, but this was different. This was my team, and my deputy was apparently dead. But there was no time to grieve. Wes Clark was still far below us on the mountainside, and the only thing I knew was that Hargreaves believed that Bob Frasure was dead.

  I got back on my knees. “Joe Kruzel,” I said. “What about Kruzel?”

  “Don’t know. Think he made it.”

  “Nelson Drew?”

  “Gone. Didn’t make it.” Hargreaves started to cry. “I tried …”

  “It’s not your fault,” I said hopelessly. “There was nothing you could have done.” It was a refrain we would repeat regularly to Hargreaves over the next three days. His first reaction—typical of a highly committed security officer—was guilt for his failure to protect those for whom he was responsible.

  Clark struggled up the hillside, using the ropes. He looked ten years older. “It’s the worst thing you’ve ever seen down there,” he said. By the time he reached the APC, he said, it was already on fire, apparently from live ammunition it was carrying that had “cooked off” and exploded. Bosnian soldiers in the area had reached the APC first, and had taken two Americans, tentatively identified as Joe Kruzel and Dan Gerstein, to the nearest field hospital. Wes had seen charred remains of two other bodies, probably Bob and Nelson.

  As we stood on the road absorbing this unbearable news, a jeep drove up and stopped. A tall, thin French officer stepped out, introduced himself as General René Bachelet, the commander of Sarajevo Sector, and began issuing instructions to his troops. Behind him came another French medical unit and the first Americans, three security officers from the embassy.

  By now, journalists in Sarajevo had picked up some conversations about the accident on the internal radio network of the French military and had begun to report a confused and inaccurate version of the accident around the world. It was time to talk to Washington. Asking the American Embassy security unit to take their orders from General Clark, I left for Sarajevo with General Bachelet. On the road we passed the wreckage of several other vehicles that had been hit or had slid off the mountain; one had gone down only a week earlier, killing two British aid workers.

  The American Embassy in Sarajevo had recently moved out of crowded and vulnerable rooms in the Holiday Inn. It now occupied a small villa next to the U.N. military headquarters. The communications equipment—secure telephone lines, radio links, and telegraph facilities—were crammed into one tiny, windowless room. It was from there that we now attempted to coordinate our activities. John Menzies, a brave young career diplomat from the United States Information Agency who was awaiting final Senate confirmation to become Ambassador to Bosnia, had already alerted Washington to the tragedy. Shortly after 2:00 P.M. in Sarajevo (8:00 A.M. in Washington) the State Department Operations Center—the indispensable nerve center that keeps all senior State Department and other officials around the world linked to one another twenty-four hours a day—set up, in its usual efficient manner, a conference call with the National Security Advisor, Tony Lake, and his deputy, Sandy Berger; Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott; and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Shalikashvili. (Both Secretary of State Christopher and Secretary of Defense William Perry were on vacation.) I described the scene, stressing that our information was incomplete and that General Clark was still on the mountain.

  The Associated Press, Reuters, and UPI had all reported that the French APC had hit a Serb land mine. It was important to correct this as quickly as possible, in order to prevent runaway journalistic speculation and pressure for a military response. I asked Washington to include in its initial announcement a flat statement that the tragedy had been caused by a road accident. We agreed that the officials designated to tell Mrs. Frasure and Mrs. Drew the news prepare them for the worst, but not confirm their husbands’ deaths yet. Finally, I asked that someone call my wife, Kati—we had been married for less than three months—and tell her the news personally, so that she would not hear an incomplete version when she woke up.

  Clark soon arrived with a vivid description of his efforts to retrieve the remains of the two men, who he was now certain were Bob and Nelson. We called General Shalikashvili again to discuss arrangements for bringing the bodies and the injured home through the American Army hospital in Germany. As I was talking to Shalikashvili, Menzies came into the tiny communications room. “Kruzel is dead,” he said quietly, his long arms hanging motionless at his side. “Didn’t make it to the hospital. Massive head injuries.”

  This was, in some ways, the worst moment of the day for us. We had barely absorbed the terrible news about Bob and Nelson, but we thought Joe and Dan Gerstein had made it. Now all three of our senior colleagues were dead. And the thought of Joe—funny, sardonic, wise Joe—dying helplessly as he was driven to the field hospital was simply too much. I asked General Shalikashvili to tell the others in Washington and turned the telephone over to Clark.

  A short time later President Clinton called from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where he was taking a short vacation. I did not realize then that it was his forty-ninth birthday. “Mr. President,” I began, rather formally, “we have the sad duty to report that three members of your negotiating team died this morning in a vehicle accident on Mount Igman …”

  With Strobe Talbott listening in silently, the President made some comments about the terrible nature of the loss, both personally and for the nation. I told him that he could be especially proud of the actions of his fellow Arkansan, and put General Clark on. Wes gave the President a sense of what he had found at the site of the APC, and said it was “like the Boston Road” in Arkansas, a steep and dangerous route both men knew well.

  The President asked what effect the tragedy would have on the negotiations, and when we would be ready to continue the mission. “You sent us here as a team, Mr. President,” I replied, “and we want to come home as a team. Then we will be ready to resume our mission.”

  “That’s fine,” the President said. “Come home as soon as you can, but make it clear publicly that our commitment to the peace effort will continue and that you will lead it. And see Izetbegovic before you leave.” Knowing we were focused on our loss, the President was thinking ahead for us. He wanted to show publicly that the tragedy would not stop the peace effort.

  “All of us, including Bob and Joe and Nelson, would want to continue,” I replied. The President, in reporting
to the nation from Jackson Hole a few minutes later, said publicly, “What they would want us to do is to press ahead, and that is what we intend to do.”

  The next few hours were a blur of action that felt meaningless; we kept thinking of how the smallest changes might have prevented the accident, yet it was already permanently imprinted on our lives. We found Gerstein alive in the makeshift French hospital in the basement of the Sarajevo Post Office Building; he was banged up but in surprisingly good shape. He told us a little about the terrible scene inside the APC: how it had slowly started to slide over the edge, how no one had time to speak or get out, how he had grabbed a metal pole above his head and pressed his face hard against the outer walls of the APC as it tumbled—he estimated twenty to thirty times—four hundred meters down the mountain; how it had come to a stop and he had climbed out the top hatch, then, hearing Pete Hargreaves moaning, had gone back to help him escape.

  Then, Gerstein said, he and Hargreaves went back to the APC one more time and pulled Joe Kruzel out through the hatch just before the ammunition exploded. He last saw Joe as the Bosnians took him to the field hospital. It was his impression that the others had been knocked unconscious in the violent initial bouncing and tumbling of the APC, and that they never had a chance. Hargreaves himself had survived by wedging himself under his seat, after almost being thrown out the back doors as the APC fell.