America’s Marriage to the Far Away
1. The Bittersweet Lightness of Superbeing
The numbers stagger and overwhelm, and thrust us far beyond weeping over the endless constellation of lives, so many many lives, brutally discontinued. Twenty-five million men and women in uniform slaughtered in two world wars; 60 million? 70 million? dead civilians. Nobody really knows the count; they are uncountable. Millions more in all the other wars of our time, our century, the American century, history’s bloodiest century. Surely the last to die will fall into a ditch or alley in some forsaken place, a bullet in his chest, shrapnel through her skull, on the very eve of the millennium as the dazzling ball of the future descends in Times Square.
For the living, the endless expanse of blood is indivisible from the blessing, Pax Americana, or so I thought, watching the Sea Harrier jets come home last May to the USS Kearsarge, on whose hot deck I stood with the flight crew of the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit, peering out over the calm blue Adriatic, here at the end of this century held too long in what Rudyard Kipling called “the whirlpools of war.”
Two fighter jets appeared out of the haze, their silhouettes no bigger to the eye than a pair of migratory geese. Where they had come from, what they had done, that they had found their way back to us—these gave weight to the moment. So it was sobering to see the Harriers circle and break their coupling, the first jet banking for its cautious approach, its landing gear extended like stubby feet, a terrible bird of prey hovering above the stern. The second Harrier blasted in a few minutes behind it, turbines winding down like sirens. Beneath the dull gray wings, the undercarriages were empty; the planes had dropped their bombs on Serbia.
Released from the colorless anonymity of his warplane, the first aviator, all business in his olive-green flight suit and helmet, shook hands with the flight crew, his manner laconic, uncomplicated, elite. The second pilot, the squadron leader, was different, though: what was apparent to me, from the moment I approached him, was that he had a soul, pure and transparent, there for all to see, should they choose to look. Not all men make such an impression, and when I say soul here, it is to remember the words of Vietnam veteran William Broyles, talking about combat survivors: “If you come back whole, you bring with you the knowledge that you have explored regions of your soul that in most men will always remain uncharted.”
The emblem screened onto the fuselage of the pilots’ jets—a knight’s armored helmet over a crossed battle-ax and sword—resonated with the second pilot’s features—long face, long Norman nose—tightly framed by his own flight helmet, which made him seem so much like the reincarnation of a medieval crusader. His fingers, too, were long and unexpectedly elegant, and on the back of one hand were inscribed target grid coordinates he had written with a ballpoint pen. His mouth was wide and elastic; smiles contorted into grimaces, toothy laughs into the pained resignation of his jaw. He was, for the few minutes he stood by his warplane, separated from its awesome glory and yet still bathed in the light and darkness of the run, a mythic figure, exalted and tortured by grave responsibility.
Today, the pilot allowed, was a good day, splendid weather, and they were able to get their ordnance off. That combination always made him feel better, less frustrated, but his eyes held the contradictions of his mission in the Balkans, or, for that matter, the role of the American military here at the end of the twentieth century. He had flown Harriers during Desert Storm too, but there was a not insignificant difference—the feeling, he said, that this was less than a conflict and more like a training mission in the States. Later, belowdecks in the officers’ mess, we would talk about the Orwellian corruption of language—NATO labeling the bombing a “humanitarian intervention”—which the pilot found distasteful, as if the bombing were the equivalent of philanthropy, one of the many illusions that contributed to the current notion that people don’t, or shouldn’t, get killed in a war or that fed the more airy delusion among politicians and the public that somehow America, here at the end of a war-saturated epoch, had achieved the immutable end of war itself.
“Is it a fair fight? No, it’s not a fair fight,” he said, asking that he not be identified by name. “I don’t bother to comfort myself with the humanitarian cloak. My job is to just attack.” But later, with his dark eyes weathered and sad, he said, “I pray that it works,” meaning the air campaign, bowing his head. “I pray that it works. We’ve got to end it soon, end the suffering.”
Maybe such humanity in one of our own warriors shouldn’t have surprised me, given the acute sensitivities of contemporary American society, but it did. Then again, humanity is a luxurious byproduct of waging yet another “war” so abstract, distant, and sanitized.
After almost a decade of America’s secular jihad against ruthless disorder, it is the sacred and profane pairing of the humane warrior—forged by the military, the Clinton administration, and the counterculture-turned-popular-culture—with the volume of inherited history that much of the nation and much of the world finds curious, puzzling, suspect in its claim to virtue. Repeatedly throughout the bloodshed in Kosovo, the punditry referred to the “new military humanism,” the defense of human rights, as a righteous, or self-righteous, form of armed conflict.
In the mostly illusionary void created by the end of the Cold War, America, too, like nature, reflexively abhors the relative emptiness of a vacuum, filling it with bursts of policy, another type of gas, and not necessarily inert, but more often than not perfumed with what the nation chooses to believe are good intentions: free markets, democracy, international order, the shining light of moral crusades. Applied to the United States, however, the phrase “military humanism” seems oxymoronic and dangerously unrealistic. Better to sort out the confusion generated by the de facto intertwining of military operations and humanitarian operations. How to distinguish between each entity? Where does the persona of soldier as samaritan end and his identity as killer begin? Can the so-called end of ideology really be extrapolated to mean the end of war, or has it merely afflicted the military and its operational doctrine with paradox, ambiguity, and ad hoc missions? Have we turned our military into a force of steroid-bloated cops stationed at the door of a reform school for regional delinquents, or has America truly evolved into the supreme do-gooder, “the ultimate benign superpower,” in the words of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, “and reluctant enforcer” of an imperial but enlightened globalism? In other words, here at the triumphant end of the Cold War, if we have regained the military and economic superiority that characterized America at the end of World War II, have we also regained the moral stature that accrued to us after the defeat of fascism, or has the subsequent defeat of Communism somehow muddled our collective value system, leaving us inspired but directionless in the absence of an apocalyptic pairing of good and evil?
Oh, the bittersweet lightness of superbeing, alone in the world in our greatness, alone with the imperfect mirror of our ideals. Our power both ends grief and begins it. Against great harm we enact greater harm, preventative or corrective or sometimes even punitive, in the name of hope and abiding decency and the beckoning future. While history will perhaps measure our good intentions with approbation, our conspicuous goodness, as writer and World War II combat infantryman Paul Fussell has suggested, might be part of the trouble, allowing us to mislead ourselves and others into believing an ancient, terrible lie: that somehow war can be something less than “the very quintessence of immoral activity.” Immodesty of purpose and certainty of belief—two aspects of America’s vaunted optimism but otherwise known as sanctimony—never have been a particularly wise or holy mix.
But if, as Fussell insists, all war is a crime, what then are OTW—military operations Other Than War? Can war itself be decriminalized by separating it from ideology and vital interests and instead hitching it to moral imperatives and parceling it out as humanitarian actions? Or, as one of the Marine captains guarding a refugee camp in Albania put it to me, “If we go to war for economic reasons, why not for moral reasons? I don’t want to get emotional about it, but for Christ’s sake, man, is NEVER AGAIN just a bumper sticker?”
Both answers, the affirmative and the negative, seem applicable to the historical moment.
2. Slouching Toward Clintonism
In a Kosovo Liberation Army training camp in the foothills of northern Albania’s mountains, I ask Ilir, a young officer back from the front, the question du jour: Had he lost any family members in the ethnic cleansing? “Everybody who’s a victim in Kosovo is my relative,” he said emphatically, providing perhaps the only answer that could justify the existence of an insurgent army and its steady resolve against charges of terrorism.
One might be forgiven for thinking that Bill Clinton and the NATO leaders had reached the same impassioned conclusion about their own relationship with the Kosovars. Select crops of the administration’s “relatives” have sprung up near and far across the planet, while other tribes of victims have been, either ruefully or cynically, shamelessly or pragmatically, disowned. The selective motto I FEEL YOUR PAIN, embroidered over a scarlet background of apologies, is one of the more fickle pennants overflying America’s currently chivalrous foreign policy. But however freshly restyled its overt sentimentality, the philosophy of virtuous compassion urging us as a nation toward a higher calling has been seeded into the American experience since Day One.
Great powers always cast their actions as demonstrations of moral superiority. Our sense of exceptionalism arrives in nascent, quasi-mystical form with the New England Puritans, who believed they would supply a “moral example to all the world,” and flows, contracting and expanding but mostly unbroken, to the Vietnam War. Thomas Paine wanted America to begin the world over again. John Adams brazenly declared that the United States “will last forever, govern the globe and introduce the perfection of man.”
At the dawn of the American century, following the United States’ brief but ugly flirtation with colonial acquisition during the Spanish-American War (Mark Twain did not hesitate to call American soldiers terrorists for the atrocities they committed in the Philippines), it was Woodrow Wilson who imagined that America would provide “a positive moral example to all the world” by refusing to join Europe’s continental war and the insupportable callousness of its ruling classes. But Wilson failed even to persuade his own countrymen that his crusade was worth it. The naïveté and hubris of his sense of American moral superiority, compounded by the venal self-interests and ethnic hatreds of European politics, resulted in a peace badly made. Thus the first world war begat the second—the clear-eyed commitment to destroy Hitler and the Japanese, the Jehovah-like wrath of Dresden and Hiroshima—and the second, its intemperate sequel—the rise of the Soviet Empire and Maoist China, and postcolonial mayhem on three continents. After the tens of millions slaughtered, saving the world now meant saving it for democracy, which really meant defeating, or at the very least, stalemating, Marxism-Leninism in any of its various incarnations.
For this we were presented with a one-size-fits-all strategic tool, the Truman Doctrine. “It must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. . . . ,” the president informed Congress in 1947, creating a foreign-policy environment of endless interests (containment of the Reds, which often meant active support for such thugocracies as Duvalier’s Haiti or Mobutu’s Zaire, Somoza’s Nicaragua or Suharto’s Indonesia), endless entanglements (Korea, the Persian Gulf, Cambodia, Cuba, Taiwan), and dishonorable intrigues (Guatemala in 1954, Iran in 1953, Chile in 1973). The Truman Doctrine committed the United States to the defense of legitimate governments against insurgencies. Legitimate simply described the immediate postwar status quo and its effete colonial handovers, before the Soviet Union launched its international juggernaut in its ascent as a superpower and a supercolonizer. America the missionary battled or subverted or boxed in the godless menace around the world, sometimes directly but more often clandestinely, through proxy wars of increasing intensity.
But just as Wilson’s crusade for globalism had recoiled back into isolationism, the Truman Doctrine’s global embrace vanished in the jungles of Indochina. Vietnam imploded not just our sense of exceptionalism; the damage went beyond that. Americans started to believe there was something essentially wrong with our vision of the world. If there was such a thing as a national destiny vis-a-vis the world, we were fairly sick of it.
In 1975, after the humiliation in Southeast Asia and the angst of Watergate, sociologist Daniel Bell, one of the many voices announcing the nation’s descent into self-doubt, proclaimed the End of American Exceptionalism. Americans could no longer believe that their country had a uniquely moral role in world affairs, he wrote. We were, Bell concluded, “a nation like all other nations.” The idea sprang open a trapdoor in the American psyche, leading to the upwelling of malaise that Jimmy Carter dared to acknowledge. But a scant twelve years after Bell’s eulogy, Ronald Reagan had resold America to Americans, repaired the national spirit, rediscovered the nation’s place in the world, and set the stage for a new era of “crusading interventionism” despite the public’s indifference to or shallow understanding of America’s international role. The Iran hostage crisis not only demanded that Reagan seduce us back from self-induced impotence into proactive foreign affairs but spurred the extraordinary technological advance, professional competence, and increasingly unconventional shape of today’s military.
“In dealing with such Third World issues,” wrote Simon Serfaty, the director of the Johns Hopkins Foreign Policy Institute, in 1987, “the Nixon-Kissinger-Ford foreign-policy administration had attempted to introduce the country to the imperatives of history—a predilection for might over right. . . . Next, the Carter administration sought to return the country to its historical right of birth—a predilection . . . for right over might. . . . Thus the Reagan administration’s opportunity was to attempt to develop a blend of right and might.”
Late in Reagan’s second term, political scientists noticed that he combined Carter’s vision of a virtuous American foreign policy with an image of strength and confidence, resurrecting the messianic idealism of Wilson. Whereas his predecessor had declared “our policy is designed to serve mankind,” Reagan upped the ante, echoing America is “the last best hope of man on earth,” and his ensuing call for a “crusade for Freedom” became known as the Reagan Doctrine, in which the president declared the legitimacy of active American military support for guerrilla insurgencies on three continents.
America then anointed teams of rebel surrogates in Nicaragua, Angola, and Afghanistan, avoiding the direct use of our own military forces except in Beirut and Grenada in 1983—the first a “peacekeeping” catastrophe, the second akin to a local 911 call. America was kept free from war until history could play Santa Claus for Reagan—the collapse of the Soviet Union, peace in Central America—and Reagan’s Cold War rebel surrogates would morph into Bush’s blue-helmeted UN surrogates in Bosnia.
It is more than a little ironic that whereas Reagan saw the globe through the eyes of a crusading liberal, drawing comparisons to himself with his Democratic predecessors in the White House and their robust rhetoric directed toward “saving” the world, Clinton sees it like the moderate, cautiously realistic Republican he appears to actually be. Still, the advocacy of human rights is a fundamentally interventionist posture. Human rights, the liberal cri de coeur during the Cold War’s final decades of realpolitik, have become a geopolitical beachhead for the rapidly evolving activism of international law and the apparently noble motivation for a steady deployment of battle-ready American troops—peacekeepers, we are told to call them.
Enter, then, William Jefferson Clinton onto the chaotic streets of world affairs, lungs full with the legacy of precedent, his eyes illumined by the exceptionalist light of hope, pockets heavy with the fervent globalism of the corporate class, all the while enjoying the most powerful military ever offered by history to back him up. The Clinton Doctrine, such as it is, is not quite a “new Wilsonianism.” These days America is not trying to save the world. Rather, we operate a sloppy triage, trying to keep the neighborhood from hemorrhaging in too many places at once; or we administrate a postnatal ward, indifferently or arrogantly baby-sitting the planet’s infant democracies. In zones of conflict, Clinton feels the compulsion neither to support existing governments (Truman) nor to undermine them (Reagan) but to Americanize them. The old “moral equivalency” of the American and European radical left (the United States and the Soviet Union said to represent two sides of the same evil coin) has been replaced by the new moral equivalency of the Anthony Lakes and Sandy Bergers and Madeleine Albrights (sans Slobodan Milošević): treat the terrorists and the pro-democracy coalitionists as equally legitimate forces in Haitian society; ditto Croats and Muslims in Bosnia, Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo, Palestinians and Jews in Israel—thereby avoiding the Somalia syndrome, where taking sides proved politically disastrous and cost the lives of American soldiers. What the president most seems to desire is the removal of images of atrocity (at the top of that list, scenes of lifeless American GIs dragged through the streets of some Third World dump like Mogadishu) and their substitution with images of virtue (soldiers helping hurricane victims in Honduras)—to replace war with operations other than war, an empty space in an army’s traditional reality, where there are no friends and no enemies, no front or rear, no victories and, likewise, no defeats, and no true endings. At the beginning of 1999 the United States had seven engaged deployments of its army somewhere around the world. Last year the Army’s Special Operations Forces alone deployed 35,500 personnel on 2,500 missions into 112 countries. Altogether there have been twenty-seven large military deployments to date, costing at least $20 billion, during Clinton’s deceptively maximalist administration. On average, he has ordered one cruise missile fired every three days of his administration. As the century ends, and the millennium with it, so ends a distinct epoch in the role of the American military—its identity, its use, its own worldview, the public’s perception of it.
And yet, until some unforseen day, the military’s culture is war, will always and must be war, not peace. Kill, win. Upon these roots only can be grafted the fruit of humanitarianism. Society’s responsibility here is to ask the questions: Kill whom? Win what?
3. War, the Rock Concert
Man-made humanitarian disasters—famines caused by civil wars as much as by ethnic cleansings or religious persecution—are directly wired to political meltdowns and spiritual bankruptcy. Outlaw states, failed states, lost states, self-murdering states, leaderless states; name the collective psychosis, and somewhere on the globe it is raging through a formerly stable society. Humanity has come this far only to look back into the future at its oldest archetype, its savage, predatory face. Heart-wrenching imagery, the pornography of violence, flashes into our living rooms from cameramen in the field but, as U.S. Army Captain Dave Johnson asked me during the annual Special Forces Conference and Exposition at Ft. Bragg last April, “A picture’s worth a thousand words, but what if every one of those words is irrational?”
The captain had a point. The Powell Doctrine required that the deployment of troops be contingent upon the support of the American people, but irrationality—impulse buying, obsession with lotteries, addiction to sensational entertainments—often describes the unreliable emotions within the consumerist soul. The increasingly preferred answer, I suppose, to the captain’s question is this: Pack your ruck, show up at the airstrip in the morning, get the bloodbath off the networks and cable by tomorrow afternoon.
The conference’s theme, Regional Engagement and the Future, had the high command wrangling over what the Army was going to look like in the year 2020—the Army After Next, as it had been formally titled and gamed. “There are still men in uniform wed to the past,” groused the towering chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Henry Shelton, who flew in from Washington after a night spent reviewing the Belgrade bombing target list with the Pentagon’s lawyers. At least the conference nailed the basics, unveiling quality-of-life improvements for soldiers in the field, including the next generation of gourmet MREs (meals ready to eat): seafood tortellini, black-bean burritos, and Hooah! energy bars. But the bigger issues—Who are we? Where are we headed? What are we supposed to do when we get there?—were still unresolved.
The conference’s most repeated slogans—EQUIP THE MAN, NOT MAN THE EQUIPMENT, and HUMANS ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN HARDWARE—signaled the cause of the confusion. In the next fifteen or twenty years, the development of on-the-ground technology, the battlefield immersion into virtual reality, and the real-time communications network, both visual and auditory via personal satellite hookups wired into helmets and headsets, means soldiering will finally be transformed into the much prophesized ultimate video game, with targets—people, machines, buildings—zapped off microscreens like so many bloodless clumps of electrons. Way cool, the next iteration of extreme sport, and only the bad guys eat it.
In the language of pop culture, it’s no-pain, high-gain Baby Boomer warfare, executed by Generation X technokillers who, because of the increased lethality and precision of evolving weapons systems, can close down the rock and roll in a time frame more associated with dance marathons and spring break—weeks, days, hours—unless the politicians screw things up. This is not the vernacular the military thinks in, however. Pointing with laser pens to high-tech graphics projected ubiquitously throughout the conference hall, the brass spoke of politicians or chiefs of state as “clients”; they talked about “what sells”; about “how to guarantee the product”; about “zero defects” (translation: everyone on our side comes back alive); and made knowledgeable references—“the holistic approach,” “our core ideology”—to a professional-development book entitled Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies. They talked, as you might expect from the largest politically correct institution in the galaxy, about “enabling” and “empowering” their men and women to explore their own capabilities to be all that any locked and loaded human being could possibly be.
It did indeed sound brilliant and farseeing. But there was a sense at the conference–as the cruise missiles slammed into Belgrade from Navy ships and Air Force bombers, as the Marines lashed out at Serbia from their floating platforms in the Adriatic, as Special Forces forward observers ripped off their American flag shoulder patches and slipped into Kosovo (a KLA colonel told me), and as the 1st Infantry hunkered red-faced in Macedonia minus three POWs—that maybe the conventional army itself was lagging toward a form of obsolescence, a big, brawny scarecrow, overmuscled, risk-averse, and not so productive, the last ones interpreting the Powell Doctrine’s criterion of marshaling overwhelming force against an enemy to mean a whole bunch of people with a lot of heavy equipment but nothing much to do. There wasn’t even a demand for 155mm howitzer rounds anymore. In the new tactical environment, in which the Gulf War was more of an aberration than a foreshadowing, one last spectacular hurrah for conventional infantry and artillery, the Army could at least take comfort in the fact that it was no longer being fielded as cannon fodder. “No casualties” by definition meant, first and foremost, no ground wars. The Air Force didn’t shape the battlefield in Iraq, it destroyed it, and all the Army had to do was sweep up. In the absence of monolithic threats, the soldiers were going to be occupiers, the folks who drag ass into town after the pilots and Marines and Special Operations snake-eaters had taken care of dirty business. Well, it’s a job.
Any understanding of the Army’s fin de siècle thought process begins with its perception of the changing nature of the enemies on the horizon, described in military-speak as asymmetric threats: terrorism, guerrilla warfare, information warfare, enemies taking sanctuary in inaccessible and urban terrains, theater missile defenses, the byzantine relationships forming between terrorists, criminals, failed states and non-states, and of course the spread of weapons of mass destruction, biological, chemical, nuclear. The Pentagon, closely examining the decade’s operations other than war to determine what the dimensions might be for real warfare, noticed a trend: the bad guys were paying attention, learning from our mistakes as well as our successes. Compounding the problem was the accelerated exportation of state-of-the-art technology that the military would rather keep for itself. “The operational edge—owning the night [with night-vision equipment]—is not as decisive as it once was because of the international market,” lamented General John Abrams, who runs the US Army Training and Doctrine Command, a lesson the Russians barely lived to regret in Chechnya. In Albania, at Task Force Hawk, I’d hear another Army officer shrug and say, on background, “There’s very little we can hold on to. All technology gains are temporary.” For the past fifty years, the central tenet of the United States military strategy has been to make war far too expensive a proposition for anyone who might dare to challenge us, which has worked on the macro level, superpower to superpower. But history’s Goliaths have trouble remembering that stones are free and slingshots easily stolen.
The Cold War monolithic threats spawned fixed patterns of response based on military doctrine, but now the decision-making process had to be rethought for asymmetric threats—adaptability takes precedence over traditional models. Abrams, whose presentation was academic and abstract, high on reasoned solutions, loved to talk about “transcending the dogma,” refining the uncertainty factor “so the enemy can never predict our actions,” and more than once he genuflected before the blinking altar of information technology. The general was, as were so many of the officers in the room, a warrior-scholar, ornamented with postgraduate degrees alongside combat medals. Cerebral and flinty, eggheads with guns, as overeducated in theoretics, I sometimes felt, listening to their esoteric badinage, as the Modern Language Association. Not that they didn’t exist, but you had to go out of your way to find a certified idiot in this crowd.
The idea was to balance the dynamic of war—coercion—with the dynamic of peace—influence. Simple enough, but it meant a radical shift in the military’s approach to non-war-fighting tasks. In order to avoid war, the Army’s Special Operations wanted to build professional regional engagement forces (REFs) for dealing with operations other than war—counterproliferation, combating terrorism, foreign internal defense, pyschological operations, civil affairs, direct action, unconventional warfare, combat search and rescue, counterdrug activities, humanitarian assistance—in recognition “that the military was continuously on an operational footing.” But the regional engagement concept was not without its troubling aspects. For one thing, it reflected, as the head of the US Army Special Operations Command, Lieutenant General William Tangney, explained, constant presence; that is, military globalization by any other name, but with a lighter footprint than the massive worldwide encampments of the recent past.
But as I listened to the conference’s three days of symposia, it was apparent to me that the REF concept wasn’t going to propel the Army into the twenty-first century anytime soon. As General Shelton warned, the hierarchy of the conventional Army still didn’t quite grasp what its own Special Operations Forces did, though many of the officers in attendance believed the entire force was going to become more SOF-like in the future. “Only a small group in SOF are trying to make the concept of regional engagement happen,” said another general, Sidney Shachnow. “The majority couldn’t care less.” Another panelist worried that REF, because of its focus on global scouts and information, would precipitate significant changes in the law that, without proper vigilance, would “break the firewall between intelligence gathering and operations that has been there for thirty-five years.” Another speaker was even more pessimistic: “With every passing decade, the media and the international community’s sensitivities are more attuned to what you’re doing. We didn’t invent Special Forces to do peacetime engagement. SF is not going to be used as Mother Teresa. The SF pulls off the humanitarian mask and is suddenly doing covert operations.”
The discussion turned frequently toward the role of the individual soldier. Major General William Boykin, head of the Army Special Forces Command (Airborne), was not happy with the SF recruiting ads, which focused on humanitarian assistance rather than warrior skills. “Train warriors,” he said, “and everything else will fall into place. This nation needs warriors.”
Major General Shachnow: “There are two extremes of soldiers—the warrior door-kickers and the great humanitarians. The SF doesn’t emphasize one or the other but operates across the full spectrum . . . whether they’re dealing with a waitress or a guerrilla leader.”
General Peter Schoomaker, commander of US Special Operations: “We have a fundamental problem in the well-resourced Western world dealing with warrior-class cultures. Sometimes I wonder if anybody’s been in a fistfight, deep down within that logic.”
From a military point of view, Schoomaker was right: the bombing campaign was a coercive political tool, really designed to affect the morale of civilians and soldiers, a textbook Clausewitzian extension of policy meant to persuade Milošević that he couldn’t afford the political cost of keeping his forces in Kosovo. From the perspective of a senior Army officer deeply involved in combat operations at Task Force Hawk on the ground in Albania, this political reliance on the Air Force, which the Air Force eagerly embraced, in effect deep-sixed the Powell Doctrine, allowing politicians to underresource the military without accountability, and that path was booby-trapped with familiar hazards.
“The Air Force preaches you don’t need all the tools,” said the officer, but then you regressed back to a Lyndon Johnson scenario, signaling the key to your enemy’s eventual success. The polar extremes of the US military, labor (the Army) and technology (the Air Force), were tumbling out of their correct proportions. The thinking, called Halt Phase Strategy, was that you didn’t need a big army, or even an active army; you just needed reserves, because the Air Force was so good. “But if you run across a completely committed foe”—say, for instance, the Somalians, rather than the Serbians—“if you use technology, all you do is drive the conflict down the scale to guerrilla warfare. If the question is, How do you want your armed forces structured in twenty-five years? your determination to advance technology and forget labor will always be for naught.”
Well, maybe. This is an ongoing argument in which the Air Force will likely persevere, but the ironies generated by the clash of operational doctrines are profound riddles. Unlike Kosovo, the Battle of the Black Sea in Mogadishu was a military victory for the United States, but it was a political disaster exploding through American society, and so no victory at all. The political victory in the Balkans, though it took ten years and cost hundreds of thousands of civilian lives, was, as an example of American military power, something along the order of a grand nonevent—a steely gesture of morality. It’s not unfair to say that the military wasn’t even looking for a “victory” in Kosovo.
The ambiguity of the relationship between the Kosovo Liberation Army and the United States and NATO underscores the paradox at the core of the post-Cold War doctrine of humanitarian intervention: we do not deploy our military with belligerence in our hearts. Instead, we merely choose to believe we have no enemy, just countries we deal with when their behavior crosses the line of what we find acceptable. With such an absence of long-term strategy or a consistent foreign policy, tactical operations applied to the moment—bombing Serb positions in Bosnia, protecting Kurdish refugees in northern Iraq, removing a tyrant in Haiti—create the illusion of a genuine, coherent, and extended political commitment to justice, democracy, and nation building. In fact, the post–Cold War interventions have been mostly marked by futility, a lack of resolution, and a lingering sense of betrayal, because what we ultimately seem most willing to invest in is the status quo—Iraq out of Kuwait, a weak Aristide returned to his palace, the refugees back in Kosovo. Beyond that threshold, the costs mount, the risks escalate, the political will falters, and our good intentions are met with skepticism. In such an environment, the Army’s concepts of constant presence and perpetual operations dwindle toward hollow self-justification.
4. Singing Songs with the Refugee Girls
The smallest female officer in Marine history, four-foot-ten-inch Captain Gabrielle Chapin, insisted on lending me her sleeping bag. “It’s clean,” she wanted me to know, though I would have been equally grateful if it were not. I was being choppered ashore from the USS Kearsarge with a platoon of reinforcements to Camp Hope, a refugee camp in central Albania, where the 3rd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment, provided external security.
Daily life was almost too welcoming, wholesome, and affluent aboard the Kearsarge, which at times seemed nothing so much as the military’s version of Lake Wobegon—the women strong, the men good-looking. “Our Marines are motivated, and the food is good,” Captain Chapin would say in a self-mocking tone, parodying her assignment as the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit’s public affairs officer, responsible for coddling the visiting press, invariably bored with the Kearsarge’s insularity and unnewsworthy narratives until they discovered the ship’s ATM machines.
And the food, as she wryly advertised, was good. In the four mess halls, the ship’s nutritionists had carefully labeled each slice of cake or serving of fried shrimp with its caloric count. The cappuccino machine was appreciated, the salad bar outstanding—unless you knew about the 1st Infantry’s salad bar in Macedonia, extravagantly supplemented by an individual pizza bar, a burger bar, a taco and burrito bar, a fruit bar, and a tantalizing dessert bar stacked with locally made pies and tortes, all this bounty in addition to a full-service cafeteria line, the feast wolfed down beneath the flickering images of the mess hall’s big-screen TV and then worked off in Task Force Sabre’s warehouse-size gym.
Here on the ship life was mellow, almost festive at times. Occasionally there’d be a barbeque on deck, or tuna fishing off the belowdecks stern with the crew in charge of the air defense guns, or even romance. Of the approximately 850 personnel on the ship, about a third of them were women. (At Task Force Hawk’s vast compound ashore, plenty of the troop tents were coed.) Belowdecks, when the ship went to red lights in the early evening, there was easy laughter, archipelagos of music, brash flirting, only infrequently punctuated by the far-above whoosh of Harriers taking off, the noise punching down through the decks like a massive airlock being secured. College instructors traveled with the MEU, so you could work on your degree. The ship had centralized television, its own channel stocked with a thousand movie titles. And for anybody who still felt, as at times everyone did, that he or she was in a faraway place, engaged in a faraway war, and that this wasn’t real life, or a real family, homesickness had been diluted by e-mail.
“It’s very deceiving,” said a female sailor, an African American from Philadelphia, as we stood in the forecastle the morning I left the ship, looking at the sun rise over the mountainous Albanian coastline. “It’s all so beautiful out here, and there’s so much horror on shore.”
She wished she could go in and do something to help, cook for the Marines, hand out blankets to the refugees, anything to feel she was more a part of it. “It’s surreal to be out here, everything so calm, on such a beautiful day.” Above our heads, there was a sudden crack of M-16s—live fire practice up on the flight deck, the bullets slapping into the water about a quarter-mile off the port side. The Marines practiced every day: marksmanship on the deck, or, down below in the ground transport cargo hold filled with hovercrafts and armored Humvees, they learned a few phrases in Serbian and Albanian—Drop your weapon! Lie down now!—and rehearsed detention and arrest techniques, or practiced how fast they could drop to one knee and jam a fresh clip into their rifles. Unlike the conventional Army, they actively trained for humanitarian ops too, to prepare for what the Marine Commandant General Charles Krulak called the corps’ three-block model—feeding people in the morning, house-to-house fighting in the afternoon, low-intensity conflict in the evening.
The beauty of the day remained by the time I walked off the Sea Knight helicopter into the blazing heat of the Albanian plain; what had changed was the feeling that you were getting closer to war, somebody’s war. Every night, in the hayfields surrounding the refugee camp, you heard AK47 fire and unnerving bursts from machine guns, standard nighttime fare, the entire population toting assault rifles after the nation disassembled in 1997. Several nights before I moved in, the company of Marines guarding Camp Hope had come under direct fire, bullets impacting in the dirt throughout their wide-open compound, whizzing over their new Eureka! tents. The gunnery sergeant had brought forward a Humvee-mounted TOW antitank missile launcher and used its thermal sights to locate the gunmen out in the pastures, then sent a stream of illumination rounds streaking past their heads.
Nights grew considerably quieter after that, but force protection, so abused by the conventional Army in Haiti, had become a legitimate obsession. Backhoes had clawed out firing positions, berms of sandbags were stacked waist-high, battle-ready Marines in full body armor manned checkpoints and snipe positions throughout the area twenty-four hours a day. In the irrigation canals that bordered the camp, frog gigging was locally popular after dark, and the Marines had given villagers chemical lightsticks to keep them from getting shot.
“There ain’t no business as usual around here. Period,” drawled Major Bill Jurney, an amiable, squint-eyed, fearless gentleman from North Carolina. He had been to Liberia, the Gulf, Cuba, Haiti, Panama, and now this, commanding the first Marines ashore in Albania, tacked on to the first Joint Task Force Shining Hope mission. The 160 men, the major explained as he showed me to my quarters—a piece of cardboard covering the bare ground in an open-walled supply tent—had come up against “a good dozen shoot/don’t shoot situations” since they arrived on Easter Sunday. Jurney was continuously, persistently, reevaluating his security measures, in dogged adherence to Patton’s growling axiom: Plans should be made by the people who are going to execute them. “You create your own picture of what’s going on in your area,” said the major. “You don’t rely on national agencies.” When he first came ashore he walked around with a digital camera, filling a disc with images of the site, which were then taken back to the Kearsarge and made into a cyberlandscape to train the troops who would be rotating into the camp.
Force protection—a doctrine that includes morale-boosting quality-of-life comforts such as movies, hot meals, barbells, phone service—had its contemporary roots in Southeast Asia and the bombing deaths of 241 Marines in Lebanon during an ill-fated, ill-conceived, and politically foolish peacekeeping mission in 1983. For the Marines, Vietnam and Beirut were the big lessons, maximum comeuppance. “Now we don’t deploy unless we can be self-protected, the rules of engagement have to be decisively clear, and we don’t like to stay anyplace too long,” said one of the Kearsarge’s Cobra pilots, Captain “Bull” Marro. Force protection, however, had been taken to preposterous extremes in Haiti, the 10th Mountain Division apparently believing it had been sent to the island only to guard itself, and although it was miraculously true that no American soldier had been killed by hostile fire since the peacekeeping forces arrived five years ago in Bosnia, it was also true that no French or British soldiers had been killed either, yet the Americans were “turtled up”—required to wear full body armor—and the Europeans weren’t. Madeleine Albright’s conceit of an “indispensable nation” had trickled down to produce the individually indispensable GI sheltered by a society that expected its military to be not only omnipotent but immortal. Civilians, aid workers, journalists—these are the ones killed in today’s war zones, not soldiers.
At the Special Forces conference in April, Brigadier General William Boykin was one of the few top-ranking officers I heard address the issue straightforwardly. “As for force protection,” said the general, “we’ve gone too far with it. It can’t be a mission. If you let soldiers believe that their job is to not get hurt and that’s how you measure success, then we’ve made a mistake. . . . We don’t want anybody hurt, but we’re breeding a generation of young officers that believe that way, and that’s a problem.”
Many of the commanding officers of infantry units I spoke with in Albania and Macedonia believed that American troops presented a “higher-value target” than troops from other NATO nations, which necessitated not just a more aggressive posture but greater prudence. And as you moved closer to the “front,” force protection was a logic few felt the need to question. Task Force Hawk, at the Rinas airfield outside of Tirana, was vulnerable to attack from shoulder-held missiles fired from the surrounding hills, surface-to-surface missiles launched from Yugoslavia, or Serbian MiGs stationed in Montenegro, five minutes’ strike time away. Hawk lived on high alert under camouflage netting and walls of stackable bastions; its men turtled up round the clock with armored vests, sweaty helmets, gas masks bouncing on hips as they ran for cover during air raid drills.
“What’s interesting to me,” said Lieutenant Colonel Paul Brygider, senior commander of the MEU troops, “is the American public’s acceptance of civilian casualties [here in the Balkans]. When we start taking military casualties, I wonder if they will accept them any better.” “I hate to say it,” Lieutenant Colonel Bruce Gandy told me out on the Kearsarge, “but there seems to be a parting of the ways between society and the military. We’re citizen soldiers, but we’re used to getting on ships and sailing away from society, taking care of ourselves. We’ve asked nothing from our country but to be allowed to go to the forefront and fight, without complaint. The DOD used to be hawkish, State used to be pacifist. Now it’s switched. You have to understand the human cost of deploying for fuzzy principles.”
Until the day in mid-June when they crossed the border into Kosovo, though, there would be nothing overtly fuzzy about the Marines’ immediate mission. When the Kosovars were cruelly herded toward the borders after the bombing commenced on March 24, over twenty nations mobilized assistance to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, the organization ultimately responsible for managing the welfare of 900,000 displaced people. Israel came as well as Saudi Arabia, the Germans, the Japanese. US Air Force Major Tom Dolney described the scene as kind of like a pickup game on a school lot—“It’s not countries getting along, it’s a whole bunch of helicopter pilots getting along.” Within three months, twenty nations grew to fifty.
In the middle of April, NATO, belatedly, created Operation Allied Harbor, expanding its humanitarian effort, so far limited to hauling cargo and replenishing stocks, to actually building camps and shuttling refugees. Joint Task Force Shining Hawk, commanded by an Air Force three-star general, was conceived by the American military to organize a framework for the United States’ humanitarian relief effort but not actually to do the work. The Air Force subcontracted the Bechtel Corporation to build Camp Hope, someone from the Defense Department oversaw quality control, CARE ran the camp, US Army Civil-Military Operations Center (CMOC) orchestrated the contractors and non-governmental organizations such as ADRA (food distribution), Merlin (medical emergency unit), and Save the Children. The French were there, the Turks, dozens of Albanian workers, and about 3,000 refugees.
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. Lugging 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)