WAR COLLEGE
PUBLISHED IN ROLLING STONE, MARCH 1993

BY JOEL BRAND


At the last Bosnian check point I stop my Walkman and change tapes. I always have one tape primed for this part of the journey. I push my headphones down around the back of my neck, pick my dark blue helmet - a gift from Newsweek - off the passenger seat next to me and put it on. I tighten the chin strap and put the ear pieces on the headphones up against my ears, under the straps. I let the seat back a little, just to have a little more of me behind the false protection of the door. I turn on the tape, tap my finger to two or three beats on the hard ceramic plate on the chest of my bullet proof jacket, and give a thumbs up to the always friendly Bosnian police. They sit in an old newspaper stand which has had huge slabs of concrete leaned up against it to stop shrapnel. We are at the end of a Sarajevo no-where industrial zone.

I let out a breath and note that once again I am sweating. Always at this point I decide that it is not worth it and I should turn back if I have any sense at all. "What am I doing here?" I think to myself. It is difficult to imagine a place more deserving of this kind of thought. "What happened to Santa Barbara, lectures three days a week, ex-girlfriends, surfing, the smelly office of my college newspaper?" But those thoughts are fleeting - recollections of a world too far away to be real. I drop the clutch, pass the tank traps made from steel girders, and make a left on to The Road.

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Strictly speaking it is called Branko Bujic alley. But to the journalists it is known as The Airport Road. Really, it is The Road to Hell. Other than a handful of satellite telephones, The Airport Road is the only thing connecting Sarajevo, a city of 400,000 people and two dozen journalists, with the other six billion people in the world. Most of the time, I have forgotten there is a connection at all. Between Sarajevo and the rest of the world are a few thousand Serb nationalists - they keep me and the rest of the press corps in business. Without those crazed Serbs Sarajevo would be only one of a long list of forgotten Olympic cities. But there would also be a lot more people who still had arms and legs - still had mothers, brothers and boyfriends.

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First gear is short in my beat-up red rented Renault 18. In Sarajevo my four-door Renault is considered "soft," meaning that it won't stop bullets or shell fragments. Most journalists who make this trip use only "hard" bullet proof vehicles. In my car Bondo fills the holes a mortar made one day while it was parked. I give the owner's family food and I use the car, I couldn't afford $100 a day for a proper Hertz. Also, the Avis-Hertz crowd want $15,000 - $20,000 deposit from journalists these days - it seems that the life span of rental cars in this little slice of heaven is particularly short.

My foot is all the way to the floor as I shift into second, 50 yards down The Road. There are a few mortar scars on the pavement that I pass on either side of the car. The crater from mortar rounds, and the shrapnel flying outward, make indentations that look like grey flowers on the road. Up ahead an overpass stretches out of sight.

To my left is Sarajevo - Bosnian held - and to my right is the front-line and more destroyed industrial buildings, towards the suburbs held by rebel Serbs. Up until the overpass, I'm relatively safe - once I start going up, everyone is pretty much fair game. There are large duct tape "TV"s on all the windows because it can't hurt, but driving as fast as physically possible is the best protection.

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Protection is an odd word here. On Christmas day I talked with my mom on the BBC satellite phone, at the bargain rate of $20 per minute. I told her about how the halls of the hotel are below freezing because there are so many artillery holes in the building, how we have electricity only sporadically, and how there is so little water that an alarm goes out among the press corps when it comes on. But she wanted to know, "Is it safe there?" What can you tell your mother on a satellite phone from a place like Sarajevo where every exit from the hotel is covered by snipers and rooms disappear during heavy barrages. I told her it was very safe inside the hotel - which itself is a lie, though if your window has not been blown out and you close your curtains, the sound of artillery in the early morning hours sounds remarkably like crashing waves. My first few mornings back in Sarajevo this last time, I woke up thinking I was camping out at the beach.

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I move the car into the center of the road - very little traffic here these last ten months - and speed past the tank traps and on to the overpass. I'm in the top of third and well on my way to the high point. There is absolutely no cover here and anyone for a half mile around has a totally clear shot with plenty of time to lead my car. Off to the side is a shot up, half blown apart, road sign advertising distances to various cities in kilometers. The sign is a throwback to a time before distances were measured in risk.

I start to weave the car and alter my speed slightly in the hopes of making it just a tiny bit more difficult for anyone trying to blow my head off my shoulders. I try to contract the vertebrae in my spine, shrinking myself into my bullet-proof flak jacket, with its heavy ceramic plates, like a frightened turtle.

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The flak jacket - another gift from Newsweek, valued at about $1,500 - is one of the more curious items in my new journalist travel kit. When I use to go surfing in Mexico for a week I would pack things like toilet paper and sunscreen. Now I carry body armor and heavy duty pain killers. The jacket, with a high "combat" collar, weighs somewhere around 25 pounds and is much like wearing a vest of armor - with a large ceramic plate on both front and back. The plates will stop AK rounds and shrapnel, but not sniper bullets or heavy machine gun fire. A pull down flap protects the testicles from shrapnel. In the end I figure my Walkman is better protection because those who do these types of activities are probably just going to shoot me through the helmet or in the face anyway. At least with Public Enemy pumping me up I feel safe.

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At the overpass' high point I have to turn a little to the right with the road. I am doing better than three times what is left of the posted speed limit and the car resists. But it is all a matter of balance here, and I regularly drive at the brink of losing control in my efforts to make shooting me as difficult as I can.

Some journalists are more afraid of car accidents and won't drive over twice the speed limit. Not me. I would always drive three times, but usually the car fails me. To my left the twisted remnants of the local newspaper building stands like a skeleton against the mountains - a seven story structure hit by so many artillery, tank and mortar shells that it is impossible to discern from looking at it what it use to be.

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I was home for the first time in nearly a year last month. I went from Thanksgiving in California with Mexican food and surfing, to New York and five days later Newsweek was sending me hell bent for leather to Sarajevo. I had one day to get in and one day to report and write - far too little time, but that is hardly unusual. My first assignment was under similar circumstances in Sarajevo last February. I had come to Croatia, late the November before, during the war there.

I was taking a quarter off my Environmental Studies and Black Studies double major at the University of California at Santa Barbara and was Euro-railing around Europe writing for the daily paper at UCSB, the Daily Nexus. I had decided to take the rest of the year off school and join some UCSB friends who had started an English language paper in Prague. But before I got started in Prague, by chance I met the Paris bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times. He told me if he was a young ambitious reporter looking to become a foreign correspondent he would go to Yugoslavia as a free-lancer, writing for anyone and anything that would publish my work. It sounded good to me, quite romantic and heroic. I pictured myself sitting, leaning against a battle-scared concrete wall, a hail of bullets sailing inches over my head, and scribbling in my notebook. On the edge of death, and writing about it.

Chalk that thought up to stupidity. Then the seasoned veteran told the young naive kid a few gruesome tales of wounded colleagues and all the hacks who have been killed and forgotten to everyone but family members and fellow correspondents. Death and maiming, when applied to me, sounded rather unromantic, not quite so much fun, and rather a long time commitment. I also realized that my scribblings in my notepad on the other side of that wall would probably read something like "I just shit my pants, I want to go home." I figured I probably would not be winning any prestigious journalism awards with such prose. (Actually, shitting one's pants, though not common, is also not unheard of. A good friend, Alfonso Rojo, a Spaniard who was in Baghdad for the entire Gulf War -- says he has shit his pants twice in his distinguished career.)

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Some of the guard rails on the bridge have been blown away to somewhere out of sight. This is the most exposed point, but not the most treacherous. I have to break a little as I start down, making my way all the way over to the left shoulder, cutting though gravel and pieces of road sign and jogging hard right around the destroyed cargo container that lays on its side over three-fourths of the road way. I slip past it on the soft shoulder at about 60 with maybe a few feet on either side, barely keeping control of the car.

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But after a few more weeks of sleeping in train stations and youth hostels I got bored and decided I was going to do something a bit more exciting. In a train station in Madrid I decided it was either the arctic circle in Norway and Sweden (this was November) or Yugoslavia. I did the arctic circle, but got bored again, and a few weeks later I was on a totally empty train for Zagreb, Croatia. It was the end of November and close to the height of the war there. Zagreb in late 1991 looked just as I imagined Saigon in the early 70's. I spent a week pretending to be a reporter, living with a family and hanging out at the Hotel Intercontinental, a 15 story hotel which housed much of the foreign press. The lobby was impressively submerged in a massive wall of sandbags. This was a place where I thought I could never get bored, and more importantly, it was a place where I could try to be a foreign correspondent.

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From here it is a straight run to a UN check point set up along what is probably the most dangerous regularly travelled road in the universe. It is perfect UN logic as I have come to understand it - making people stop on a road like this to have their ID card checked. I approach the white French armored personnel carrier, accelerating until the very last possible moment, before slamming on my breaks. On either side of me is the most devastated moonscape of a battlefield to be found anywhere. It is not like these buildings and cars were blown to pieces by bombers, they have been chipped away and taken apart chunk by chunk with tens of thousands of bullets, mortars, and artillery shells. The Serbs have put a lot of work into this and you have to admire them for their determination.

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After a 6-week trip back to the States, through a combination of name dropping, luck and perseverance I managed to convince Newsweek that they should let me call them from Zagreb and offer them a story. The editor in New York, whose name I was given by a guy who had been a free-lancer in Korea, didn't ask me if I was a junior in college and I neglected to mention it.

The first thing I wrote in Yugoslavia was a story for Newsweek's international edition about a referendum in a former-Yugoslav republic that no one had ever heard about before, and whose name I could not pronounce or spell - Bosnia-Hercegovina. In selling the idea I had told the Newsweek correspondent in Bonn that there could be a war there, or something along those lines. But other than that I didn't know anything except for what I read in a British newspaper story I had found. Three days later I had a story in Newsweek and was having ten or so drunken Serbs pointing guns at me from behind a barricade at five in the morning. I told my translator to yell that we - I was with another green reporter from UPI - were journalists and that we just wanted to talk. That's what journalists in the movies I had seen did in similar situations and I saw no reason why it shouldn't work here. The Serbs, apparently, had seen different movies and started making all kinds of menacing sounds and movements. The translator then said something to the effect that they were going to kill us if we didn't leave. There is a unique feeling about long walks in front of drunken murderers pointing assault rifles at ones back.

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Nothing on either side of this quarter mile of road is not completely destroyed. The road is littered with spent bullet and tank shell casings. During the summer there were a couple of bodies laying in the high grass to one side of the road. Neither the reporters or the UN staff knows if they are still there or not. This is real no man's land. The spot where a journalist can lose a leg because a gunman of unknown affiliation opens up on the car from the road side, or one can die because a sniper fires through the rear of a car and into his back.

At the armored personnel carrier, I am forced to come to a complete stop while the French UN soldier with his baby blue helmet gets out and checks that I have the proper UN identity card. I am forced to zigzag through the UN check point, running the engine up as high as it will go, trying to build up enough speed to make it a challenge to hit me.

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Tuna is dead. There are six or seven of us - grown men aside from me, between 30 and 48 - standing around in a dark Holiday Inn hallway. The only light is from one dim emergency light, the kind that goes on when there is a power failure. We are on the 10th and top floor of one of the city's tallest buildings and most attractive targets - the green and yellow Sarajevo Holiday Inn. Conveniently located on sniper alley and just a few hundred yards north of an active hillside battlefield, the Holiday Inn makes covering a war easy for its guests. When the fighting is heavy we don't even need to leave the building except to count dead civilians.

Because the Serbs control the hill across from the hotel, their positions are just about even with the Holiday Inn's top floors. They could hit it with a good wrist rocket. But when you have mortars, tanks, howitzers and sniper rifles, who needs wrist rockets. Only hacks who've never been to Sarajevo take rooms on the south side.

The lobby and the hallways of the hotel are always below freezing now. There are too many artillery holes in the building and too little fuel to keep it warm. Electricity is sporadic, and heating is less than adequate. Water is a few gallons every week, when we are lucky. I flush my toilet every two or three days or find a destroyed room with an intact bathroom. The one reassuring thing about the hotel is that all the waiters still wear tuxedos with green Holiday Inn name tags. Recently the management opened a customer service desk in the sub-zero temperatures of the lobby. I called once and complained about the racket the boys across the street were making, but nothing was done.

When the fighting is very heavy around the hotel, a few of the hacks who are able to climb the stairs to the 10th floor. It is an incredible vantage point. It is also terrifying. Wandering around in a partially destroyed hotel in complete darkness, listening to the sounds of a not-so-distant battle, is an eerie experience.

Bob Simpson from BBC Radio and I are in room 1025 arguing on this particular night. The room's window was blown out during some previous performance and it is cold inside. We, along with a half-dozen other journalists in neighboring rooms are watching the fighting on a hill a quarter mile away. Bob, 48 or so, is the archetype of the jaded foreign correspondent. (He got very angry with me later that night, after dinner, when everyone else had gone to bed, except the two of us and Yervant Der Parthogh, a World Television News cameraman. I had called him a war correspondent. "I'm not here to get killed like the rest of you," Bob's words stumbled across the table at me. He took Tuna's death rather hard.)

Bob is another bombing-of-Baghdad hand. Most of the Baghdad crew, in addition to most of the rest of the world's "war correspondents" won't come to Sarajevo. On this particular night Bob and I are arguing about whether or not the Serb snipers have infra-red scopes. I don't buy it, but it is an unsettling possibility for two cowards standing in a big picture window just a few hundred yards from an area frequented by Serb snipers.

Outside, the small arms fire is dying down and the flash-boom of artillery has almost ceased so Bob and I decide we should go back into the hall. Bob mumbles something about my being a young fool - we are good friends - when a flash of light blinds me and something explodes so close it seems to be in the room. I jump backwards and almost out the open window. In panic I mentally check to see if I have been hit. Then Bob starts laughing. I'm in shock and I can't figure out why he is laughing. I calm a bit and tells me he stepped on a loose light bulb. Scaring the living shit out of me is the funniest thing he has done in quite some time apparently.

I recover my senses, curse his mother, and we go out into the hallway. The others are coming out of neighboring rooms. A conversation starts and I listen for a few minutes when suddenly I realize I am standing in a darkened Holiday Inn hallway just shooting the shit with a bunch of grown men wearing body armor and helmets like we were in a bar after work. I am not sure how exactly I got to this point in my life and I lose myself, mentally re-tracing my path to make sure this is not some big mistake. I come back into the conversation when I hear Kurt Schork, the resident Reuter correspondent diplomatically ask Yervant, "Did you know this guy who was hurt today?" Kurt knows Tuna is more than dead, chewed up, actually, but takes a slow approach to avoid upsetting Yervant if he was close to him.

Tuna was a 25 year-old BBC cameraman whose name sounded like Tuna. His real name was Tihomir Tunukovic, but no one could ever pronounce it. That afternoon he was killed by a couple of anti-aircraft rounds in central Bosnia by Serbs. A soldier once explained to me that an anti-aircraft bullet in the center of my torso would make a hole big enough to pass a watermelon through. Tuna was in a clearly marked "hard" BBC Land Rover, but it didn't do him much good. I never met the guy and don't want to ride the fame of knowing yet another dead journalist. "Who?" Yervant says, turning to face Kurt. The tension of the moment is interrupted from the darkness down the hall. "Tuna is dead," an unseen voice blurts out from down the darkened hall. Pause. "And we can't find his fucking fiancee to tell her," the approaching hack says angrily. There is another pause while David Mills, a free-lance ABC producer emerges into the dim light and Yervant turns his head toward the floor letting out, "Bummer, man." For a few moments we all just stand around in silence, shifting our feet, waiting for what is next. Then one person changes the subject completely, the talk resumes, more subdued than before, and we all troop back down the darkened stairs to the restaurant to eat dinner and drink wine.

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To my left are two destroyed tanks pushed off into the ditch on the side of the road. One faces up and on to the road, its barrel pointing skyward. Around them lay the enormous brass shell casings of the last rounds they were able to send off. Straight ahead and to the right, just past where the road drifts left 50 yards further on is the dark narrow slits of a Serbian bunker with olive green ammunition crates strewn about. This is the spot where we are shot at most often, the hottest part of the road. Just a few more seconds and I am almost safe. Just a few more seconds.


COPYRIGHT JOEL BRAND 1993