Short Century (27 page)

And I had come here, I had to admit, thinking that I would see the first great triumph of the New World Order—thinking that the Europeans and the Americans would be able to sort things out. Would be
willing
to sort things out. Instead I was seeing the sort of things that make you gouge out your eyes with a corkscrew simply for being a member of the same species as the people who were doing this.

Should I have felt more implicated than most? A facile idea. I fucked my sister, so now I must listen to the story of this young girl whose brother was forced to rape her? This girl who probably looks nothing like Emily, but to me looks exactly like her, just as all seventeen-year-old girls do? Faced with this story, it would be awfully easy for me to say that what I had done wasn't bad at all. I had fully consensual sex with my sister? Maybe she was a little young? At least I didn't murder her parents while she looked on. At least I didn't force her to stand naked in front of men with machine guns. At least I did not murder her brother while he was still inside of her. Though perhaps she would have liked it if I had.

If Liljana's story had tied me to the Huntingtons in any way, it had done so by making me love death and want it for the entire human race. Just like my father.

In what way was what I had done at all similar to what had happened to Liljana?
At all similar?
The Serbs wanted to destroy the families of their enemies; I wanted to destroy my own family. Genocide, as many have noted, is a form of community-building. No one has ever accused me of building a community.

But then maybe this was the point. Or it might just as well be the point, given that there was no point at all. What I had done was horrible, and I could atone for it by working to end something much worse. Stay in Bosnia and tell people what is going on, keep telling them until they do something, and in that way love life.

Start with Liljana. Do not look to this to ratify any abstract theories of history. Do not look for some coded message about yourself. You and the world are not the same, however much you would like to forget that. Pay attention to Liljana and treat her as an individual. And don't talk to her like a reporter, talk to her like a human being. That is the way you might do some good right now.

As I walked back I had to struggle with the feeling that I was about to start calling something by the wrong name.

“You could still get an abortion,” I told Liljana. “If that's what you want.”

“I'm going to have the baby,” she said.

“You realize that it could have birth defects if it's your brother's.”

“So I should hope I was impregnated by one of the Serbs?”

“That's not what I meant.”

“If the baby has birth defects,” she said, “then I guess it will have a hard life.”

“All right,” I said. “You're going to have the baby because you love it. You don't care who the father is. If you want, you can move somewhere and never tell your child about the war. Or you could stay here and you and your child can rebuild.”

“Rebuild what? I don't know how to build anything. I don't know about bricks or concrete or wood.”

“I was speaking metaphorically.”

“I have no idea what you're talking about. I am going to tell my baby exactly what it is.”

“Good. And you and your child will live happily. It will be the ultimate revenge against the Serbs.”

“I want this baby to be miserable, so I want it to live,” she said. “If anything deserves this world, it's this baby.”

“You'll feel differently once you see the child.”

“I don't want to see the child. That is the worst thing about having it. I would like to put a sheet over it. That way I could tell it how awful it is but I would not have to look at it. I hate it enough without having to see it. I would like to put a sheet over myself and pretend that I don't have a body. I wish I could just talk and talk and not have a body anymore.”

“This is what the Chetniks wanted,” I said, using the derogatory term for the Bosnian Serbs. “Let her know I said Chetniks,” I told the translator. “They wanted to make you hate your family, your baby, your own body.”

“War is a good way of getting what you want,” she said. “Isn't that why people do it?”

f

The Serb television stations
all carried images of atrocities committed against the Serbs, some of them actually committed against the Serbs, some of them committed by the Serbs. Most likely, there were times when the people running the television stations thought that they were lying, when they thought that bodies they announced as Serb bodies were actually Muslim bodies, but the bodies were in fact Serb bodies. A pile of corpses is a pile of corpses.

The Serbs showed atrocities against Serbs, and the Croats showed atrocities against Croats, and the Muslims against Muslims. This is the problem with thinking that you'll be safe if you concentrate on the suffering of individuals, with thinking that the burning of a particular body tells its own story.

For the first time since I left home I started desiring Emily sexually again. If the Serbs were going to kill the Muslims and Croats because of fractional, probably fictional differences in their blood, then I was going to lock myself up in my Sarajevo hotel room with someone who shared enough of my blood to make any racial purist happy. I didn't have sex with Emily, of course, but I did have sex with many other women, more one-night stands than I'd ever had in my life. It's something of a cliché, at least among war correspondents, that war makes people unusually horny; what it actually does is make you want to touch as much flesh as you can get your hands on.

It is difficult for me to articulate how ardently I wanted the Americans to bomb the Serbs. Milosevic's regime was the clearest example of evil I had seen. For years I was in the Balkans almost without interruption, hoping for intervention first from the administration of my old friend's father, then from Clinton. That Bush did not bomb did not especially surprise me. Of course there would be no help for Muslims in the middle of the mountains of Europe; just like the Serbs, the Bush family only cared about the preservation of people like them. But then Clinton did nothing for years. And really, bombing their artillery and their tanks would have been so easy,
incapacitating them militarily would have been so easy
in '91 or '92 or '93, well before NATO did any bombing, and hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved. Yes, this is all speculation. As always, we don't know how it would have been otherwise. This is one of the worst things that victors do to losers: to starve their dreams into speculation. Never will you know if the way you wanted things would have been better or worse than the way they turned out.

Often I would sit in my room in the Sarajevo Holiday Inn, imagining the bombing of the Serbs. I imagined Serbs being burned. I imagined the men I had imagined as the men who raped Liljana burning, their faces shredded by American shrapnel.

I would imagine, also, Clinton sitting in the Oval Office, weighing the fate of a people, deciding whether or not to bomb the Serbs, deciding whether or not to lift the arms embargo that
allowed the Serbs to keep all the weapons for themselves
. He had the reports, thousands dead. All he would need would be one anecdote, one story that would make the war vivid for him, that would make it clear to him that he would have to act. What would it take? The story about Liljana? A story about a doughy, ambitious forty-six-year-old beaten almost to death in his own home? More photographs? There were plenty of photographs. Take more! Show as many emaciated bodies as you can find. Choose a prisoner at random from the Serb concentration camp at Trnopolje, put him in a cardboard box, and mail him to the White House, if that's what it takes. Find a way to package the smell of dead bodies piled on top of each other, and make him smell it.

Instead Clinton read a fucking book, one that said that ethnic hatreds in the Balkans were eternal. As though anything is eternal.

Every day I was in Sarajevo, there was the constant thud of mortar fire, like a car alarm that won't shut off. Every day I was outside of the city, there were new massacre sites to see. It got to the point where if I went a few days without seeing a dead body, I missed it. It was boring but I needed it. Once you've gotten used to a certain kind of smell from a certain kind of flesh, whether it's a lover or a rotting corpse, you long for it when it's not around. Or maybe it's just me.

Milosevic's parents both killed themselves after he was well into his adulthood, which, many of us liked to joke, was not nearly soon enough. Ana Mladiç, the daughter of Ratko Mladiç (the Bosnian Serb war criminal) killed herself in 1994, at the age of twenty-three, with her father's favorite pistol. Of all the suicides I have ever encountered, this was my favorite.

The American bombs did not come until after eight thousand men and boys were murdered in Srebreniça. By then I did not feel a great deal of bloodlust. I felt sure that I would be killed by American bombs. I even drove down mountain paths that made this more likely. A fitting end to several years of what I had seen and smelled. At the very least I hoped some shrapnel would hit my eyes and nose. I would lose my senses of sight and smell. And yes, touch and taste and hearing as well. Take them all away. Stay in the sensual world, Rothstein had advised me, give up your abstractions. Well, give me back my abstractions.

But I continued my as-yet-unbroken streak of surviving every situation in which I find myself. All my senses were intact, and there were more bodies for them. After Dayton there were revenge attacks by Muslims against the Serbs. Old Serbian women were harassed and killed. The Chetniks got what was coming to them, I would say after some whiskey. It was racist and awful of me to say it, and the worst thing is that I didn't even believe it at the time. I just wanted to believe that there was finally some sort of justice.

f

Some sort of justice:
this was what I wanted to believe America could deliver. What I consoled myself with, after leaving Bosnia, was reading about the latest military advances. It had come too late in Bosnia, but it could come on time in the future. What had happened in Bosnia had happened because the Americans were too timid about using American power. American power was the only thing that could save the world. My mission now was to coax the United States into dropping bombs where dropping bombs would do some good. Everywhere there were artillery installations targeted at civilians, I wanted American planes to drop bombs on them. Everywhere a man with a machine gun on his lap was driving a truckload of his compatriots to a town where they would line up young children and old women and healthy young men and shoot them all, I wanted a precision bomb to shatter that man's windshield and pierce his eyeball before blowing his friends to hell.

The American people no longer had any stomach for protracted ground wars, and there would no longer be any need for them. We had planes and bombs, bombs so exact as to more closely resemble scalpels than axes. No longer would there be any need to convince our soldiers that we thought they were heroes as we sent them to die, the way we might give a dog a pat on the head before putting it to sleep. No longer would we need to think of our soldiers as anything other than technicians, technicians who would do their job and then come home, and not expect stories to be told about them or expect politicians to pretend to mistake them for saints. No ideas of individual greatness or national glory would be necessary. Computers would do the work of defending the innocent, and computers don't create myths about themselves, computers don't find war erotic. The men in the planes would be more or less irrelevant, in uniforms that announced their humility, uniforms that hid their faces like burqas. (Now, of course, the men in the planes don't exist, and the plane itself is like an empty burqa.)

And so it was in Kosovo. When Milosevic sent troops in, I was reluctant to cover it, because I thought it would all but certainly simply be a repeat of Bosnia, where we would do nothing until it was too late. And for the first several months it looked like this was exactly what it would be. But finally Clinton decided to launch an air war, and all of my dreams came true. Yes, there were mistakes—no dream is very far from a nightmare. There was the accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy and a Serb passenger train, mistakes of intelligence. There was the excessive bombing of Belgrade, Milosevic's home city and of course the home city of many, many civilians—a mistake of zeal, though if I was being honest with myself, I did not truly regard it as a mistake at all. Overall it was a wonderful war, as wars go. We won ugly, sure, but we won. And through most of it I felt that where I should have been, where the real action was, was not in freezing Kosovo, inspecting haystacks where Serb soldiers had tied old men and burned them. I should not have been in Kosovo, but above it.

But I was in Kosovo, adding to the list of the horrible things I have seen. There were infants dying in the mountains after their families were thrown out of their homes, and of course there were massacres upon massacres. But now the people were being rescued, the people felt pride in their cause and loved the Americans, and it was impossible not to feel differently. It was impossible not to think that what the Americans were doing was wonderful.

I returned home to New York after Milosevic surrendered. I remember thinking in the cab ride home how much uglier the skyline was now than it had been when I was a child, now that there were these two giant, faceless towers. Soon enough the towers were removed and New York looked as it did when I was young.

f

So there it is.
Are you happy with what you have sown, Mr. Reaper? What was the point of making me write all that? Does the fact that I did something wrong and arguably evil mean that my thoughts on wars of liberation are somehow invalid? The best ideas often come from the worst people. Haven't you ever heard of the tragic view of history? For that matter, hasn't it ever occurred to you that history itself should be history? Who would have truly been harmed if everything that I have just written down had been forgotten forever? The Owl of Minerva flies at dusk: that's why we should clip that motherfucker's wings while there's still enough light to see.