The Blue Helmet (12 page)

By August Cutter was only a couple of months away from being sent home. He was looking forward to decent meals and peaceful university classrooms. Then his company was ordered to pack up and prepare to move out. The Croats were gearing up for a major offensive in the south. The Serbs had rearmed and reinforced in response.

In a “cleansed” village called Tamomir, Cutter’s squad moved into in another abandoned house, its walls gouged by bullets and blackened by smoke. The village’s name meant Over There is Peace. “Must be over there,” Cutter scribbled. “Certainly isn’t here!”

During a break on the second day, Cutter sat in the shade of the house studying his map. Sweat dripped from his forehead onto the plastic cover. The battlefront stretched roughly northeast–south-west. The Canadians, the only peacekeepers in the
area, were near the Serb line. But between Tamomir, the Serb headquarters, and Gospic, the Croat centre of operations, the front ballooned like a weak spot in a blood vessel into Croat-held territory to the west. Inside this “Tamomir Bulge,” were many ethnic Serb villages, and the Croats’ objective was to capture the Bulge and “straighten out” the front. Everyone knew what that meant for the villagers.

There were rumours that Croats detained by
UNPROFOR
had been carrying satellite maps that could only have come from U.S. sources, that Germany was secretly supplying arms and even tanks to the Croat forces. And Russia was backing the Serbs.

“The Big Powers aren’t fighting this war,” Cutter wrote, “they’re
catering
it!”

From Cutter’s diary, volume two

The Croats pushed into the villages of the Bulge and began looting, destroying, and killing. On September 9, Cutter’s squad moved into a field and dug in, close to the Croat line, which was hidden in the forest at the edge of the field. By placing themselves between the Serbs and Croats, the peacekeepers hoped to enforce a ceasefire. Then the Serb force drifted away. Cutter was checking his ammo when the lip of the berm at the edge of his trench seemed to explode and the rattle of machinegun fire rolled over him. His helmet was whacked by a shell and snatched away just as he ducked below ground. Up and down the Canadian line, fountains of dirt and mud sprang into the air. The
peacekeepers were allowed to return fire if they were directly attacked. To his left and right, Cutter’s mates opened up. Machineguns chattered, men yelled, calling out to each other, “Get them! Give it to ‘em.”

Cutter was in his first real firefight. Adrenaline buzzed through his veins. A hollowness socked his bowels. His hands shook on his rifle. He had been trained to kill the enemy, but had never had any intention of doing it. I’m a peacekeeper, he told himself as the air around him bloomed with smoke and cordite and rang with gunfire.

He sighted down his rifle barrel at the line of trees. Gun muzzles sparkled like camera flashes at a football game. Cutter fired into the trees, high above the flashes. I won’t shoot at them unless they come out of the trees, he told himself. At the same time, he was conscious of his comrades. Were they as scared as he was? By failing to fire at the muzzle flashes as he had been trained to do, wasn’t he letting them down? He knew some who would be excited. Bursting with dammed-up frustration, they had been aching for a chance to fight.

The firefight raged through the night. Men scrabbled to and fro around Cutter, delivering
ammunition and water. He heard the screams of Croats who had been hit. Torn by indecision, he found himself firing for effect one minute, shooting high the next, tears streaming down his face.

When dawn came, the Croat line fell silent, and as the light rose Cutter realized that they had melted away. During the night-long battle, no U.N. soldiers died, but almost three dozen Croats were killed. Cutter was sick with guilt.

As the peacekeepers moved into the Tamomir Bulge behind the retreating Croats, their mission changed again. First, they would distribute food, water, and blankets to the Serb civilians in the Bulge and gather them up so the U.N. could help them find somewhere else to live. Second, dead bodies were to be collected and transported to a temporary morgue for examination. Third, Cutter’s platoon was ordered to help “gather and record” evidence of war crimes. RCMP officers had been brought from Canada to help.

“First assignment—easy,” Cutter scrawled. “Second task—hard. The Croats left almost no one alive.” Cutter’s platoon started to move through the valleys, collecting evidence of atrocities and war crimes. On one farm they found a
chicken coop still standing. Cutter wondered why it had not been destroyed along with the other buildings. He ducked into the low doorway and, in the dim light, made out the shadowy forms of two people sitting on chairs in the corner, facing him.
“Ne pla#x0161;i se. Ja sam tu da ti pomognem,”
he called out. “Don’t be afraid. I’m here to help you.” When his eyes had adjusted to the dimness, he stepped nearer.

Then he gasped and vomited onto the straw.

Blackened skulls, hung with strips of burned flesh, grinned at him. The two women had been tied to the chairs and set on fire.

Through the next week, hour by hour, Cutter’s sanity slipped away. He found the corpse of an old woman lying in a field. She had been tortured and then shot in the head. On another farm, seven uniformed Serbs had been executed, dragged into a barn, covered with straw, and doused with gasoline. The straw had been too damp to burn properly. Further on, an old man, his face a pulp of bloody flesh, had been shot twenty-four times. Bodies of men and women were found. They had been tortured by knife and fire, then shot in the head.

And one warm autumn afternoon, when the sun lit up the red and gold oak forests on the
mountains, Cutter and three other troops approached another smashed village. On the outskirts, somebody called a halt, pointing to an area of freshly churned-up ground. Cutter came upon a man’s workboot lying on the ground and bent to pick it up. It was stuck in the dirt. He pulled harder, then realized the boot was still attached to a body. He called for the RCMP officer.

“Dig,” he told them. “Looks like a mass grave.”

They worked for hours but didn’t find any more bodies, only a large number of bloody surgery gloves.

The Croats had dug up a bunch of corpses and moved them. To hide the evidence, the cop figured. Cutter, his stomach churning, folded his spade and turned away, glad to be finished with the job. Then he noticed something lying at his feet. It was a small shoe, the toe and one side stained with dried blood. He snatched it up and stuffed it inside his tunic, as if, in saving the shoe, he could bring the murdered kid back to life.

The next morning, Cutter didn’t respond to reveille. When spoken to, he showed no awareness. His eyes stared into a distance only he could see. He was flown back to Canada,
declared unfit for duty, and ignored by the Department of National Defense for nearly ten years.

One day, after Cutter had fought his way closer to a normal life in spite of the voices in his head and messages beamed from Buffalo, a letter arrived. I realized that I had probably retrieved it from the locked mailbox on his porch for him. The letter invited regulars and reservists who had served with the 2nd Battalion of the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry in Croatia in September 1993 to a ceremony where the battalion would receive a Governor General’s Citation “for courageous and professional execution of duty.” The new parade formation would be called “The Tamomir Guard.”

There was no reason given for the fact that Canada had pretty much ignored the achievements of Cutter and his mates for nine years. The letter explained that Cutter would have to pay his own way to the ceremony.

I wondered, sitting in his now brightly lit office, his blue, bullet-creased peacekeeper’s helmet on the desk beside the bloodstained shoe, if Cutter had decided to end his life even before
the Defense Department contacted him. Or had the letter pushed him to the bedroom across the hall and the container of pills? Or had he always, since coming home with his sanity in shreds, kept that option open, like a plane ticket tucked in a drawer, ready to be used when the time came?

And where did I come in? I thought I understood now what he had wanted me find out. “Now you know,” I saw him saying, a crooked smile on his thin lips, “why I’m batty.” He had travelled into the centre of a terrible darkness, he had seen what nobody should ever have to see, and he had never really made it back.

I
T TOOK ME MORE
than a month to put Cutter’s story together, working at his desk, his files and journals close at hand. To understand the background better, I ransacked a few history books and printed off articles from the Net. More than once, as I found and fitted together bits of the puzzle, I told myself that I must look exactly like Cutter, obsessed by my quest. Reena and Abe Krantz held back their curiosity and tried not to badger me with questions.

Soon the Christmas season was blasting away, with carols on the radio day and night, warbling about peace on earth and pre-Christmas blowout sales. Reena had put up a sickly little plastic evergreen tree in the window of the café and hung a
sign above the coffee bar saying
HAPPY WHATEVER YOU CELEBRATE AT THIS TIME OF YEAR
. She pretended to be a grinch or a scrooge, muttering about the Christmas hype as she worked and smoked in the kitchen, but she set out extra muffins and cookies for the street people and let them hang around in the café’s warmth longer than usual.

After the new year had rolled around, I left my bedroom one night and found Reena doing a crossword puzzle at the kitchen table. I sat down and, over a cup of tea, filled her in on Cutter’s story. She listened intently, and when I was finished she said, “I wish I had known him better.”

“Me, too,” I replied.

January plodded along. The third week barrelled in on a blizzard that left the city paralyzed for three days. Abe had predicted it, telling me confidently, “It will last three days, not two, like they’re saying on the radio.” Once the snowplows had made a few swipes at the streets, I carried on as normal. At the beginning of December I had fitted the tank with new heavy-duty tires, so the snow didn’t affect the Lee Mercer Courier Service. It melted off pretty fast, anyway.

Abe was a different kind of listener. Where Reena sat in silence, he interrupted a lot and
questioned me on details, as if I was being interviewed. “Boy, you sure know your stuff,” he said more than once before I finished.

“I learned a lot,” I said.

“Is your mind resting a little easier now?”

“I don’t know. I have to think some more.”

“That’s good,” he said. “Thinking is good.”

“The only name on the black wall I couldn’t chase down was ‘Kurtz.’”

“What did it say again?”

“‘Mistah Kurtz, he in Kijevo.’”

“Well, we both know about Kijevo. Mistah like
M-I-S-T-A-H?”

“Yeah.”

“Hmm. I think that’s in a poem. ‘We are the hollow men/We are …’—No, wait. Originally, Kurtz is from a book.”

Abe puffed a few times, head back in his chair, then took a sip of scotch. “Got it. Kurtz is a character in a novel. Long story short, he’s a trader in central Africa and he learns that he’s capable of extreme, almost total, evil and the knowledge drives him mad.”

“That fits,” I said. “‘Kurtz is in Kijevo.’ What happened there was certainly evil. What’s the book’s title?”

“Heart of Darkness.”

I nodded. “That fits, too. How come you know all this? I thought you were an accountant.”

“Yes, but a literary accountant,” Abe laughed.

“Not exactly normal,” I commented. “Er, I mean ordinary.”

“True. And, before you ask, no offense taken.”

“Come to think of it, nobody I know is ordinary—you, me, Cutter. Reena isn’t exactly typical, either.”

“Maybe nobody is,” Abe said.

After a while I said, “There was a time when I would have called a guy like Cutter a coward and a weakling.”

Abe nodded and took a pull from his drink, but didn’t say anything.

“Not any more,” I said.

I pumped hard against a damp, chilly wind on my way home from an evening movie on Bloor Street, my front and rear safety lights blipping, tires shushing on the damp pavement. It was about 11:30, not a moon or a star in the sky. The traffic was light on 18th Street. I powered up the bridge over the Queen Elizabeth Way, and spun the pedals fast going down the other side, timing my
approach to the traffic lights so I’d get a green, sailing through the intersection, coasting as far as I could before using my legs again. I made the lights at Horner, and at Birmingham, too.

When I swooped into the alley behind the café it was nearly midnight. I unlocked the back gate, pushed the tank ahead of me into the courtyard, and re-locked the gate, wishing that, just once, I could look at a lock and not think of Cutter.

I let myself in through the door as quietly as I could. Reena would likely be asleep by now. I hung my coat on the peg, slid off my wet boots, felt my way through the dark kitchen without turning on the lights, and crept up the stairs. From Reena’s room I heard a thump, like a dresser drawer being closed, and when I saw the oblong of yellow light on the floor of the upstairs hall I knew she was still up. If her door was closed at night, it meant she was in bed. If not, she was watching
TV
or reading. On my way past her door, I popped my head in to say goodnight.