REFLECTIONS ON HOMECOMING

By Todd Bensman

Special to The Republic

    Late one night not long ago, some soldiers in the front line Croatian village of Pakrac invited me to come watch them lob mortar rounds at the Serbs for awhile. It had been a quiet night, aside from the usual distant bursts of machine gun fire. My young hosts, all of them between the ages of 18 and 23, were out for a good time and would have had one with or without me. So I went. We were all a little bored and drunk.

    The Serbs retaliated after we’d sent a half dozen shells into the blackened valley below, as we watched The Bill Cosby Show on a gasoline-powered television back inside a bombed house that served as the local command headquarters. Like the pounding footsteps of some relentless giant, shells exploded progressively closer toward our house until, just when we were certain the very next would crush us, there was nothing. Awful silence, stretching slowly over many long seconds. None of us had moved from our seats. No one said anything. We finished watching the Cosby Show, sipping whiskey at though we’d never once lost an ounce of cool

    Back in Phoenix now, I spend a lot of waking hours reviewing such psychic outtakes from the many months I spent covering the war in Bosnia as a freelance reporter. I came home in August.

    I guess what strikes me most now, in this strange glow of retrospect, is how the absurd and the obscenely dangerous had come to seem so trivial after I’d traveled a while through the broken nations of ex-Yugoslavia. Only after my return to the domestic tranquility of Phoenix did my perspective began to realign itself - a kind of downshifting of the soul. My cold journalist’s impartiality, or whatever it was, is thawing now as seemingly forgotten snapshots and sensations from my time in the “Yugo-land,” as some in the press corps called it, intrude on me as fast food drive-throughs and crowded Phoenix shopping malls. Images stored up in the deep recesses of memory over the past year rush up periodically like bad medicine from a time-release capsule - of nights gone psychedelic from streaking or exploding ordnance, contorted faces of full grown men weeping hard like children, and permanent farewells.

    I see a morning when my only reaction to a mortar bombardment was sharp irritation that it had spoiled my breakfast. Or how I’d pull a pillow over my head to drown out the mundane sounds of battle so I could sleep, as casually as muffling out a dog’s bark. Checking the day’s battle conditions was a ho hum a thing to me as a pilot reading the weather report before takeoff. “Boom Boom?” I’d ask the locals, pointing up the road for the hundredth time. “Ahhh. Hvalah, dobra dan.” Thank you, good day.

    The whole thing is strange, and I can see no hard and fast moral in the phenomenon. The war is with me here in Phoenix as much as I am still with it in Bosnia.

    I wonder if the Lucic family is still alive in Sarajevo, or how Nermi is making out in the besieged village of Jablanica. He sheltered and fed me for the five days I was trapped there in fighting, showing me his amateur photographs during nighttime bombardments and securing typewriters, paper and interviews by day.

    I know my friend Denis’ father never escaped from Mostar with the rest of the family. Judging by military reports I see on late night CNN detailing the fighting, which restarted while I was in town, the old man is probably dead now. Denis is Okay, though. He was a radio journalist whose family hosted me whenever I was in Mostar, where all the hotels were bombed out. But now he’s just another broke refugee. I ran into him on a street in Prague in August, and after hugging each other over the pleasant surprise, we swapped stories over a few cold beers. He told me a tale of his escape from Mostar that would have seemed movie-worthy dramatic had I not heard similar ones a thousand times already.

    I wonder about all those peasant refugees I left behind after sharing floor space, bean soup and shelter from the explosions outside. I see now that most of the time I had regarded them merely as props in some lay I was reviewing - disconnectedly - from the audience. But their faces are not so different from the ones I see in Paradise Valley Mall.

    The articles I eagerly read now in the back pages of The Arizona Republic sometimes mention the names of gritty places in Bosnia where people are still getting killed months after I got out. As a journalist I can see why editors usually deem the towns too remote from Hometown, USA to bother mentioning. Turbe, Visoko, Tuzla, Ostrazic, Vitez, Knjic, Brchko, Gradacad, Kiseljak. But I had close calls in many of them and can’t so easily dismiss them.

    Once, I checked into a little inn that was - amazingly - still open just outside Kiseljak in Croatian-held turf after speeding pell mell through battles that were laying waste to the area. Having nothing else to do with the evening, I went out to the parking lot and crawled under a broken and abandoned CNN armored press jeep to witness a scorched earth policy in action. Resting my chin on a curb, I watched Croat militiamen torch one Muslim house after another just across the street by pumping phosphorescent bullets into them. The area’s formerly allied Croats and Muslims had been fighting each other for about a week by that time.

    Someone had set fire to a mountain above overlooking the valley in an effort to burn Muslim positions up there. Flames from that and the house fires in front of me filled the evening sky with a vast red-orange glow amplified by a massive fog of smoke. The sounds of wood popping and crackling next door intermingled with jarring gunshots and mortar explosions far and near. Red tracer rounds criss-crossed the skies back and forth, disappearing into the thick smoke clouds. Alone under the jeep, I watched this vast panorama of deadly pyrotechnics until it became boring to me. I sprinted back to my room to read a magazine by candlelight until the flame drew a sniper’s fire. I had to snuff it out and go to sleep. I never thought of any of this again until just now.

    While it was impossible to remain completely unmoved by the insanity playing out around me, there was always a new, more immediate problem to force it back to another day. I marvel now at how soon I was able to forget that time Muslim soldiers passing by in a car casually leaned out a window and riddled a passing pack of dogs with bullets. One died right in front of my car, writhing in agony on the bloody snow with its intestines hanging out one of its sides. But I was too busy moving with a column of Canadian tanks to pay it much mind. One morning, eating breakfast with colleagues around an outdoor patio table of a Bosnian inn, a heavily armed soldier came sprinting toward us in a classic evasive zig zag, looking over a shoulder. Clutching his weapon, he swirled onto the patio to take cover behind one of the brick columns supporting the awning over us. Our egg-filled spoons paused midway between plates and mouths, as we waited for whatever to happen. Breathing heavily from fear and exertion, the soldier girded himself, looked at us, took a peek at the direction from which he had just come, and re-launched his zig zig sprint past us. We just smirked at one another and finished breakfast.

    It was the same with close calls. There was never time to dwell for long on those brushes with death. But the remembrance of them today drives me to ponder the nature of fate, destiny and odds. A quick whirr of shrapnel and we’d move on without second guessing How Things Might Have Been. Like the time a sniper round passed six inches to the left of my ear. Or the day our speeding car was ambushed in Vitez by machine gunners on either side of the road. We found a bullet hole in the chasse of the car later, praised our luck and had lunch. There were several mornings when shell blasts woke me from deep slumbers, and I instinctively threw my body from the bed to the floor, then crawled back under the covers to finish the sleep.

    But then, what’s a close call anyway? I haggled once with my interpreter over what constituted hazard pay as we prepared to enter a dangerous town. I actually found myself arguing that one or two mortar rounds does not a hazard make. He offered a few sniper shots. I low-balled the artillery and we settled on an hourly wage based solely on the rate of potential incoming. Reasonable then; absurd now.

    That’s not to say my adrenal glands didn’t get pumping from time to time. I’ve felt fear in Bosnia so paralyzing I couldn’t move. It was guttural, churning, stomach-twisting demon that inexplicably was forgotten soon after the danger had passed. I still can’t remember accurately what that degree of fright - or relief - feels like. But I remember once being completely unable to hold my camera steady enough even to push the shutter button.

    One winter day I was driving to a town to send some film when four scraggly Muslim soldiers, bandits, really, bolted out of the snowy tree-line and forced me to a stop at gunpoint, emphasizing their demand by locking and loading. With machine guns aimed at my head through either window, my knees and arms shook uncontrollably as I tried reasoning with my could-be executioners. The front lines had shifted since the last time I’d driven through the area but no one knew. Somehow, for the price of only a few packs of Marlboros, I made it safely to the next checkpoint. A couple of hours later, I too busy writing and filing an unrelated story to one of my clients to even think of the true peril in what had just happened. After all, deadlines are deadlines.

    The one time my veneer of cold impartiality did break was in the tiny central Bosnia village of Tarcin, where 12,000 “ethnically cleansed” Muslim refugees living on bread and water had holed up. The Serbs routinely sent huge artillery rounds at them, for whatever reason. One of those barrages caught me and my two Italian colleagues off guard one quiet evening as we cruised through town in our rental car. We bailed out the doors on all fours and scurried around to the trunk on stomachs, pulling out bullet-proof vests and gear while dozens of refugee pedestrians all around us went into sudden panicked flight. Still trying to tear into our body armor while laying down, we got up, dove, got up, dove, screamed conflicting directions at each other. We huddled on top of one another in pitched terror as the ground heaved under the massive explosions.

    We finally made it into the thick-walled hallway of an aid cafeteria that smelled of urine and crowded in among two dozen wailing refugee people. My arms were scraped and bleeding from diving at some point onto a twisted pile of scrap metal outside. As the shells continued to whine in and explode outside, I remember making a point of looking into their sagging, watery eyes, one by one. In them I saw the essence of the war. Simple farming folk of no military consequence whatsoever, whose pastoral lives had been brutally exchanged for endless squalor and unspeakable obituaries. As if that weren’t enough, these lice-ridden peasant people were still having to suffer the indignities of being reduced to scurrying animals to avoid being blasted to bits by artillery. Old crinkled men with nothing but the filthy rags they wore and patched shoes. Exhausted mothers and grandmothers wearied to death of endless worry. Skinny children on flour diets. My heart really went out to them. I remember reaching down to a weeping little boy and tousling his hair, and then I just wept with them in that filthy hallway.

    During one of my six trips to Sarajevo, I came upon a massacre on my way to an interview. Women were dead, their skin rent by shell shrapnel of some kind. I had seen casualties of the war but never so much blood. My revulsion and fear was so complete I had to look away and keep walking. But it was too late. The scene was committed to memory in an instant. The dead seemed yellow. One was a child, a little girl I think. The wounded just lay there bleeding among the water jugs they’d been carrying and randomly scattered articles of shredded clothing. Passersby tended them. Everyone in Sarajevo at one time or another has had to clean up massacres on their way to find food or water. It’s an expected civic duty that no one shirks.

    Sarajevo. I think of the starving city and its courageous people now with a deep emotion capable of causing a lump to form in my throat. The Serbs had the city surrounded by constantly-firing guns, rocket launchers and trigger-happy snipers, cutting off all food. The Serbs were trying to starve and beat the civilian population into surrender. I’ve never seen anything more horrendous up close and personal. Yet, somehow despite the abject misery everyone suffered, helping hands always extended my way. When thinking of Sarajevo, even then, I struggle with pangs of guilt for possessing a supreme privilege. Unlike those trapped and damned people, I was able to leave aboard a UN cargo plane whenever my own filth, hunger and fear reached critical mass. I could always detect a powerful envy as they said their goodbyes.

    I met the Lucic family on my first trip - 21-year-old Alan, his 16-year-old sister Irena and their parents Jasna and Zlatko. Whatever their sufferings, they always took me in when I showed up unexpectedly at their doorstep on the second floor of 52 Marshall Tito Street. Each time I saw them, they were thinner, more pale and more despairing than the last time. Alan was fainting from malnutrition during my last visit and there wasn’t much I could do about it. They were contacts, sources, guides and friends to me. As a shoestring freelancer, I had little to give in return. I brought in as much food as the UN would let me carry on the C-130s. I gave them what little cash I could spare and ran messages for them to the precious Outside.

    But in hindsight I feel I didn’t help as much as I could have. I failed to get Alan a UN press pass that could have enabled him to get through Serb checkpoints to relative safety. I admit now it was partly because I just didn’t want the unnecessary risk of running the gauntlet of shelling while making possibly fruitless arrangements that had nothing to do with publishing stories. I didn’t fulfill a dozen vows to the Lucic family, telling myself it was because of journalism ethics, you know, crossing the line, getting personally involved in the story. I did not try as hard as I could have to relieve the Lucic family suffering. Alan certainly never displayed any similar reluctance whenever he took on the mortal unnecessary risk of exposing himself to the shelling while guiding me around town or to the front lines. Maybe he was motivated by merely the slim prospect of possibly gaining my life-altering help. That was the dynamic. If he ever has a chance to read this: Alan, I am so sorry.

    I think of my final trip to Sarajevo in June and my final goodbye to Alan. I had a severe case of short-timer’s jitters. I’d lost my heart for the war by then. Most reporters pass through for a few days or weeks. But after so many months I’d become obsessed with surviving it. The snipers were busy that day as Alan and I made our way to the Holiday Inn, the jump-off point for UN armored personnel carrier rides to the airport, and then home for me to a safe apartment on the peaceful Adriatic coast town of Split. Alan had insisted on coming with me as far as the final strike zone of a 75-yard dash to the hotel, through the last open space. We sprinted from cover to cover, shots being fired all along the way. There was a lot more shooting as we huddled under the cover of an apartment hallway, looking at that empty, detrius-strewn 75 yards I would have to cross, knowing the snipers probably had it bracketed. When it came time for me to do the zig-zag sprint with my heavy backpack, I lost my nerve.

    Until that trip I’d always ignored the persistent rumor that Serb snipers won a 500 deutchmark reward for killing a journalist. In frustration, I screamed at Alan, “I hate this! I hate this! I hate this!” He just stared at me, implacably, and said nothing. But the unspoken thought I clearly picked up in his tired black eyes is with me to this day: he was going to have to stay and live with it, if he even could, every day to come, while I was on my way home to America -  complaining.

    Safe in a bedroom of my mother’s north Phoenix home, I try to reassure myself, to rationalize why I took way more than I gave. It doesn’t help very much to re-read the inside cover of a Bosnia-Herzegovina photo book Alan gave me as a going away gift. The inscription he wrote reads: “In this hell time, in this bloody city, I met only light in this war. It was Todd Bensman, my American friend. He helps me that I don’t lose hope in future and good life. He Help my family when nobody help us. I like this man, and I never could forget him. Thanks a lot and I hope we shall meet in better time. Your friend, Alan Lucic, Sarajevo. 6-11-93.”

    I often try to remind myself that, although the people I wrote about lived lives of constant pain and loss, this was still their war, not mine. At least I risked enough telling their story, I say to myself, wondering at the same time if I exploited them for my career. I tell myself I shouldn’t feel so bad about the inherent inequities in these relationships with the Bosnians. Like wearing a bullet proof vest and kevlar helmet as a matter of course - in front of everyone, an unintended fashion statement that I see now must have constantly highlighted the mortal vulnerability of their unprotected children, grandparents and loved ones.

    I concentrate on sorting out the incongruities of living here with the recent memory of Bosnia, cliches like the lingering smell of cordite, decaying corpses or drinking a Coke in sight of tank shells systematically demolishing a neighborhood near the airport. The sight of old familiar Squaw Peak seems to heighten a general sense of disconnection and alienation I’m told will ease up over time. I suspect it’s not a Vietnam-type post-traumatic stress thing so much as the slow fading of intensely vivid experience, or at least I hope so.

    I care about Bosnia. I am sure of it. I look around my room at the souvenirs - pieces of mortar shells, a live .50 caliber machine gun bullet someone gave me, the cast iron tip of a spent artillery round. A shoebox full of photographs. And I think that soon it will be time to box it all up and stove it in the closet next to my still-muddy bullet-proof vest and worn-out backpack.

This essay has been slightly modified from its original published form.