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When I turned up to collect the order a week later, I was taken aback by the sight of a half-dozen large brown boxes that would nearly fill my small office. My amateur creation had been artfully compressed into a small book with a gray cover bearing my name and the title I had landed on: Breakdown in the Balkans. When word got out that such a chronology was available, the Washington think tank, diplomatic, policy, and media communities quickly emptied the Carnegie stock. I soon heard from Fred, who called on a satellite phone from Sarajevo to congratulate me on publishing the “hugely useful” Breakdown, which he said he was passing out to government officials and aid workers.
I felt immense satisfaction—of a kind I had never experienced personally or professionally before. But now that people were actually reading it, I began obsessing about all that I had left out. “The gaps, the gaps,” I would say, deflecting compliments that came my way. Simultaneously, I chastised myself for craving the recognition I was starting to get. “Clearly, I am out, as always, for me, myself, and I,” I wrote in my journal. “I need so much to remember why the book came about in the first place.” I knew that conditions in Bosnia were deteriorating rapidly, and that if my chronology was to land in the hands of Fred’s besieged Sarajevan neighbors, they would likely burn it along with their other books to keep warm.
The war raged unabated. Four US diplomats—George Kenney, Marshall Harris, Jon Western, and Stephen Walker—had already resigned to protest what they saw as the weakness of the US response to the Bosnian war, the largest wave of resignations over US policy in State Department history. I read about these men in a lengthy Washington Post profile and was gripped by their testimonies. Jon Western, a thirty-year-old intelligence analyst, had sifted through hundreds of photos and videos of what he recalled as “human beings who look like they’ve been through meat grinders.” As he told the Post, the intelligence he needed to consume for his job described preteen girls raped in front of their parents, a sixty-five-year-old man and his thirty-five-year-old son forced at gunpoint to orally castrate each other, and Serb torturers who made Muslim prisoners carve crosses in each other’s skulls.
Western and the other US officials who resigned had initially tried to change policy from within, but having made no headway, had finally quit. They felt they could no longer be part of a US government that wasn’t doing more, reasoning that they could at least draw media attention to what they saw as America’s moral abdication.
After reading the Post profile, I grandiosely wrote in my journal: “My only regret is that I don’t work at the State Department so I can quit to protest policy. Instead, I sit impotent and incapable.”
Following my summer at CBS in Atlanta, when people had asked what I wanted to do with my life, I had begun answering that “I wanted to make a difference.” But at Carnegie I saw that this was an abstraction. Now I had a focus—a specific group of people in a specific place who were being pulverized, and I wanted to do something to support them.
As a liberal arts major who had no particular knack for foreign languages, I still worried I had little to contribute. But I had managed to assemble the chronology, and I was seeing up close the vast number of ways researchers, columnists, journalists, government officials, and aid workers were involved in the enterprise of American foreign policy. All seemed to be struggling with how to define the US role in the world now that the Cold War was over, as well as how to manage a sudden flurry of nationalist and independence movements.
I remained acutely aware of all that I lacked—I wasn’t an engineer like Fred, a trained diplomat like Mort, or a doctor like Mum and Eddie. I was focused, but I did not know how to channel my interests. A frustrated journal entry from the time ended simply: “… Act, Power.”
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RISK (#ulink_fa045192-0246-52c8-a8c0-89c641755d3e)
Ben Cohen, a British journalist and activist, was the person who gave me the idea of traveling to the Balkans. “You should see the war up close,” he told me. “And you should write something.”
After I met Ben at a Carnegie event, we struck up a fast friendship. A Sephardic Jew whose ancestors escaped to Bosnia during the Spanish Inquisition, he was more knowledgeable about the country’s politics, history, and literature than anybody I knew in Washington. Though he was devastated by all that had happened, he brought a dark humor to our discussions.
Ben arranged an invitation for me—the “author” of Breakdown in the Balkans—to attend a conference being held in peaceful Slovenia, the newly independent former Yugoslav republic. After the conference, he insisted, we should drive to Bosnia.
Given my chronic expectation that something terrible was bound to happen whenever life was going well, I feared heading into what appeared to be a blazing inferno of a war zone. I also didn’t see what I could add to the existing coverage of the war, as the experienced reporters in the region were doing phenomenal work. But Ben kept pushing. And with my internship nearing its end, I had begun considering what jobs would enable me to keep working on issues related to the conflict.
Thanks to Ben, I already had one published article. Not long after we first met, he had proposed collaborating on an op-ed critiquing the direction of international diplomacy on Bosnia. Joined by George Stamkoski, a Macedonian friend of Ben’s who became our third co-author, we produced what in retrospect seems a rather pedestrian essay and began “shopping” it to various newspapers.
We tried every mainstream publication in the United States, and when each one turned us down, we sent it to outlets in the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada for which we could find fax numbers. Eventually, Ben called me with “good news and less good news.” Our piece had finally been accepted, he said. “But it might be hard to find.” The essay would be appearing in Pakistan’s Daily Jang, but he wasn’t yet sure if it would be in the Urdu or English edition.
I didn’t care: I faxed an illegible copy of the op-ed (in English!) to Mum’s office, and stuffed it into Mort’s mailbox.
When I called Fred Cuny in Sarajevo to get his advice about traveling to Bosnia, he agreed with Ben: I should experience what was happening myself. He also invited me to watch his team in Croatia preparing for the water restoration mission he was planning to undertake in Sarajevo.
“I will explain more when I see you,” he said cryptically, not wanting to reveal on the phone how he intended to sneak the necessary machinery past trigger-happy Bosnian Serb soldiers.
Fred’s encouragement was all the motivation I needed. I worked at a think tank. I was published in a widely read newspaper. Well, okay: I interned at a think tank, and the paper was read widely in Karachi. But I was already going to be in the region, so I decided to add two stops after the conference in Slovenia: Bosnia, where Ben promised we would visit someplace safe, and neighboring Croatia, to see Fred in action.
As it happened, Carnegie’s offices were located in the same building as U.S. News & World Report, a weekly magazine with a circulation of more than two million readers. I asked a journalist friend to introduce me to Carey English, the magazine’s chief of correspondents. Three days later, I found myself entering his small cockpit of an office with a copy of my Balkans chronology in hand. As he thumbed through it, revealing little, I asked whether U.S. News would consider running an article from me once I got to the region.
Carey was tough but patient—far more patient than I would have been in his shoes. He asked me about my past journalistic experience, and I pulled out the Daily Jang op-ed and several sports clips from the Yale Daily News. He shook his head. “You are going to a war zone, you know.” I assured him I understood and would not take dumb risks.
“Define a smart risk,” he said.
I blanched, but he continued. “Look, I’m skeptical,” he said as he handed me his business card. “But see what you come up with when you’re over there, and call me collect on this number if you have a story.”
I thanked him and soberly shook his hand. When I left the U.S. News office and the doors to the elevator closed behind me, however, I let out a joyful scream.
“Whoo-hooo, I’m going to be a foreign correspondent!”
Ben was elated at the news and immediately began filling me in on the practicalities, including that I would need a UN press badge in order to pass through checkpoints and enter Bosnia. This meant that a news organization had to sponsor me. He suggested I head back downstairs to U.S. News to procure a letter vouching that I would be reporting for them.
But this was an impossible ask. Carey had said he would take my call if I had a story to propose; that was a far cry from U.S. News sponsoring me as its correspondent. The magazine had a regular freelance contributor in the region already, and Carey was not about to undermine him by adding an untested second.
Crestfallen by the realization that our fledgling plan might already be falling apart, I sat at my desk staring at the ceiling, unsure what to do next. But when two of my fellow interns who worked at Foreign Policy walked by, an idea popped into my head. Back then, the Foreign Policy journal mostly published work for academics and policy scholars.[fn1] (#litres_trial_promo) Its content was nothing like that of newsmagazines like Time, U.S. News, or Newsweek—and it certainly did not employ foreign correspondents. But I doubted the UN knew that.
I waited until the Foreign Policy editorial staff had headed home and the cleaners had completed their nighttime rounds on the floor. Once the suite was completely deserted, I walked into the office of Charles William Maynes, the journal’s editor, picked up several sheets of his stationery, and then hurried back to my desk.
Hands shaking, I began typing a letter impersonating the unwitting Maynes. I was committing a fireable offense, but to me it felt like a felony. All these years later, I still feel terrible for having violated the trust of a program that was giving me so much. But determined to get to Bosnia, I went ahead and wrote to the head of the UN Press Office, asking that the UN provide Samantha Power, Foreign Policy’s “Balkan Correspondent,” with “all necessary access.”
I had a guilty conscience, but I also had what I needed to obtain my press pass.
IN AUGUST OF 1993, Ben, his friend George, and I met up in peaceful Slovenia. After participating in the conference, we made our way to the Avis car rental agency. Knowing that Avis would prohibit us from taking one of its vehicles into a combat zone, Ben told the salesclerk that he and I were planning a romantic getaway to nearby Venice, Italy. He threw himself into the part, describing our courtship and love of the coast.
Our route to Bosnia took us through Croatia, and when we arrived in Zagreb, the capital, we headed to the Bosnian embassy to collect our visas. We found a grim scene. Dozens of Bosnian refugee families huddled in a long line around the block. Several of the men and women waiting had shaved heads and crosses etched into their faces. One of them told us that they were Muslims whom the Serbs had tortured and marked.
None of my graphic late-night reading at Carnegie had prepared me to see scars cut into human flesh. I asked a man whose right leg had been amputated above the knee what he thought of the current UN peace plan, and he put his thumb down to signal his disapproval. For good measure, he directed the only English words he seemed to know at the Western negotiators: “FUCK OFF.”
A proper journalist would have asked him and the other Bosnians to recount what they had gone through, but I could not bring myself to probe for details. Forcing them to rehash what had happened seemed cruelly voyeuristic. Instead, after George (who spoke Serbo-Croatian) translated some small talk, we shuffled inside to get the visas we would need in order to cross into Bosnia.
Our next stop was the local UN headquarters, where the press official told us that he did not have the passes for which we had applied. My imagination began running wild. I visualized a vast team of forensic specialists conducting an exhaustive verification process—including a call to Foreign Policy asking Maynes to confirm the contents of “his” letter. In reality, the UN official responsible for laminating the badges had simply taken an extra-long lunch break.
With our visas and paperwork finally in hand, we drove our rental car several hours in the direction of Bihać, a small Muslim enclave in the northwest corner of Bosnia that was surrounded on all sides by Serb militants. Ben had sold me on this destination by reminding me that Bihać was the only one of six UN-declared “safe areas” actually living up to its name. But while Bihać was not experiencing the brutal fighting going on elsewhere, the risks of visiting were real. The UN press officer had explicitly warned us not to travel there and had cautioned that many of the roads along the way were mined.
We placed a handwritten “PRESS” placard in our car window as a precaution, but it offered uncertain protection. Many Serb rebels believed they were being unfairly villainized by Western journalists—all it would take for our trip to turn deadly was one renegade soldier deciding to seek revenge. I was scared for my physical safety and knew that the trip was placing great stress on Mum and Eddie.
After passing through Croatian army and Croatian Serb rebel checkpoints, we saw the royal blue, white, and gold flag of Bosnia. A minute later, a group of very thin Bosnian soldiers welcomed us with smiles and high fives. Most of them looked no older than twenty. We drove further, into a landscape of bucolic green hills. So far, Bosnia looked nothing like the bombed-out ruins for which I had prepared myself. Around every bend I half expected the summer cheer to be shattered by gunfire, but the only sounds of war we heard were a comfortable distance away.
Over the course of our three-day stay in the Bihać area, we learned that the relative calm had a great deal to do with a wealthy Bosnian Muslim businessman named Fikret Abdić. Abdić ran a food-processing company that was the region’s chief employer, which gave him bargaining power with the Serbs encircling Bihać. If they let supplies in and didn’t attack, Abdić agreed to provide continued access to the food his company produced.
Because Abdić’s main focus was his own profits, and because Bosnian Serb forces were killing Muslims and Croats elsewhere in the country, the Bosnian government denounced him as a traitor. He was also wanted in Austria for allegedly pilfering money intended for refugees. But the civilians we met, who had been able to keep working and sending their children to school, described Abdić as a hero. I interviewed a young pharmacology student named Nedzara Midzic who had lost twenty-two pounds when she had lived in besieged Sarajevo earlier in the war. In Bihać, she was no longer scrounging for food. “He may profit,” she said of Abdić, “but at least we profit too.”
Listening to Bosnians express their gratitude to Abdić was a reminder of how little I actually knew about the country’s complex dynamics. I wasn’t sure how I would get to the bottom of what was really happening. But at a minimum, I knew I would need to spend much more time in the region and take greater risks.
When we left Bosnia and crossed back into Croatian territory, I was immensely relieved. We had not been attacked and I had managed to interview civilians, soldiers, and government officials as if I were an actual reporter. Back at our hotel in Zagreb, I telephoned Mum at her Brooklyn hospital to let her know that everything had turned out all right.
Ben and George then took me to the Zagreb home of Richard Carruthers, a BBC correspondent with whom they were acquainted. Richard’s smoke-filled flat was everything I had ever associated with the romantic life of a foreign correspondent. Several rugged-looking reporters in cargo pants were drinking whiskey and playing poker at a coffee table. Carruthers himself was thumbing through a vast collection of LPs in search of just the right jazz record for the steamy afternoon. And Richard’s girlfriend, Laura Pitter—an American from Laguna Beach, California, whose byline I knew from Time magazine and the Christian Science Monitor—was on the porch in a red bikini, cooling off in a paddle pool and drinking a margarita.
Sitting among these journalists, I was mesmerized by their lively back-and-forth on Balkan politics. After inquiring about the Serbs’ territorial ambitions, I asked them which news outlets they worked for. They told me that they all filed stories for multiple publications and networks. Because most American and British outlets did not have full-time correspondents permanently based in the region, they often relied on “stringers,” regular contributors who were not on salary but were paid for each article or broadcast piece that was accepted.
When I asked whether a newcomer like me would be able to find work, though, they quickly shot me down. “The strings are all taken,” one said definitively.
Laura, the only woman in the group, did not contradict her colleagues in the moment, but she pulled me aside before I left. “I don’t know what these guys are talking about,” she said. “There is plenty of work to go around. You should move here and give it a try.” Looking around, she grabbed a cardboard coaster out from under a beer and wrote down her email and phone number.
“You can totally do this,” she said as she handed me the coaster. “Write me if you’re coming back. I’ll show you around.”
MY LAST STOP BEFORE RETURNING to the United States was to see Fred. I took a cab out to Zagreb Airport, where he and his engineering team were staging dry runs to prepare for their upcoming mission in Sarajevo. The plan called for landing C-130 transport planes in the besieged city, quickly unloading mammoth water purification modules from the cargo bays, and then whisking the modules into the city before the Serbs realized what was transpiring.
The lives of those on Fred’s team—and the survival of the equipment—depended on being able to maneuver the freight onto trucks with lightning speed at Sarajevo Airport. Since the Serb soldiers manning artillery around the airport were using the siege—and the cut-off of water—to try to force the Bosnian government to surrender, they were expected to try to prevent the water equipment from being delivered, including by barraging Fred and his team with shellfire.
Watching Fred in action, I was struck not by the grandness of the enterprise, but by the tedium and the minutiae necessary to coordinate the pilots, the crewmen, the forklift operators, the engineers, and the drivers. The orchestration of every movement consumed him—any lapse in the assembly line could spell disaster.
“If we don’t get the details right,” he observed to me when a mix-up brought the exercise to a halt, “people are going to die.”
The offloading did not go well in the trial runs I watched. Fred had calculated that the contractors would need to land the plane and unload in ten minutes or less, but the first attempt I watched took a whopping thirty-five minutes. The temperature on the Zagreb tarmac was scorching; tempers seemed to be flaring. I was worried. Fred insisted he was not.
He planned to travel to Sarajevo the next day. “You should come with me,” he said offhandedly. My heart leaped. Now that I had made it to Bihać and back, I had crossed the Rubicon and visited a war zone. Though it was irrational, I was now less afraid. If I were to accompany Fred, I thought, I could give readers back home the inside story of America’s humanitarian “MacGyver.” I would have full access, and in showing what just one person could do, I could show how much more the United States could be doing.
I telephoned Mort with excitement, but he was having none of it. “You’re coming home,” he said. “You work for me.” I was twenty-three years old and hardly indispensable at Carnegie, so his adamancy surprised me. Only when I got back did Mort’s devoted secretary share why he had been so firm. “He was worried sick about you,” she said. While my boss had introduced me to a humanitarian cowboy, he did not want me to become one.
I PITCHED U.S. News a story on Bihać—the moral complexity of Fikret Abdić and “why one Bosnian safe area is actually safe.” Carey told me the foreign editor was intrigued. “Give it a try,” he said, asking for six hundred words.
Back in Washington, I read through my notebooks dozens of times, circling and recircling the most vivid quotes from my reporting. For days, I stared at my desktop screen at work, unable to settle on the right beginning. I joked with Eddie that I felt like the character Grand in Albert Camus’s The Plague, who, for the duration of the novel, obsessively tries to craft the “perfect” sentence, as the plague kills off his neighbors.
After trying hundreds of alternatives, I finally settled upon, “The most jarring sound in Bihać, a Muslim enclave of 300,000 in the northwest corner of Bosnia, is not the reverberation of machine-gun fire, but the splashing and chatter of children playing in the Una River.”
Two weeks later, attending the US Open tennis tournament with Mum, I called U.S. News from a pay phone at a prearranged time. The foreign editor told me that he planned to run the piece. I pumped my fist and gave Mum a thumbs-up. During the call, her expression had been as tense as it was when she was watching her favorite tennis players during their final set tiebreakers, but at my signal, her whole bearing relaxed.
When U.S. News faxed me the edited draft, however, I was horrified by their changes, which I felt misled readers. “They oversimplified my oversimplification!” I complained to Mum and Eddie that night. The next day, I delivered a long exposition contesting what the editor had “done” to my prose. I was surprised to discover that he was not wedded to his edits.
“I just didn’t have space for what you gave me,” he said curtly. “Make it right. But I need it quickly.” In the end, U.S. News ran my 478-word article in a box alongside a much longer piece by their regular stringer.
Seeing my name in print in a mainstream newsmagazine felt like the greatest triumph of my life. The experience also gave me a burst of confidence. I had proven to myself that I could learn about a foreign crisis and get paid to write about it. I sent my clips—the Daily Jang op-ed and the newly published U.S. News article—to Bam Bam, then ninety-eight years old and still a prolific pen pal. “My future is very uncertain. I love working at Carnegie, and I love my boss, Morton Abramowitz. But I feel I’ve expired here,” I wrote in an accompanying letter.
Although I didn’t say so to Bam Bam, I also realized that I had picked up some unappealing habits. I had never been without opinions, but my certitude previously had to do with seemingly trivial issues like an umpire’s bad call in a baseball game. Now, as I researched and reflected on real-world events, I seemed unable to contain my emotions or modulate my judgments. If the subject of Bosnia came up and someone innocently described the conflict as a civil war, I would erupt: “It is genocide!”
While I made an effort to divest myself of sanctimony—among my least favorite qualities in others—I tried to look at the upside: in the span of less than a year, I had gone from hardly thinking about serving others to constantly thinking about what I could do to be “useful”—the quality Mort, Fred, and my mother valued most.
Since the summer, I had also begun marking my place in whatever I was reading with a new bookmark: the coaster on which Laura Pitter, the war correspondent, had written her phone number.
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My mother supported everything I had ever done—until I decided to become a war correspondent.
“Journalism is a fiercely competitive business,” she told me in late 1993 when I called to inform her that I planned to move to Croatia. “Very few people who try actually make it.”
Her conservative counsel was out of character for someone whose every major life choice—from becoming a doctor to running away with Eddie to America—had defied the odds. “Mum, since when have you ever decided whether or not to do something based on an assumption that you will fail?” I asked. “If I think everyone else will be better than me, then you’re right, I shouldn’t try. But if that is my approach, maybe I should just preemptively admit defeat and retire now.”
The back-and-forth grew heated and unpleasant, and the conversation finally ended when one of us hung up on the other.
I knew that the real source of her worry was my safety. But I thought I could bring her around if she could see my growing interest in US foreign policy as something resembling the passion she had for medicine. Thirty years into her career, though her hours remained punishing, Mum seemed almost to skip to work—such was her love of caring for patients. I had always longed to find a job that would likewise allow me to find joy in the task itself. Before working for Mort, I wasn’t sure I was capable of such dedication. But now I was beginning to feel differently.
Within a few weeks, I found myself standing beside her at a Manhattan electronics store as she handed her credit card to the clerk to buy me my first laptop computer. “I can’t believe I am facilitating this,” she mumbled.
Part of my strategy to wear Mum down had been projecting an air of inevitability about the entire endeavor. But as I exited the store, toting my new Toshiba laptop, I was racked with self-doubt. Was she right? Would I fall flat on my face, run out of money, and return home in defeat? Worse, would I allow myself to get sucked into life as a war correspondent and end up getting killed?
Mort was initially skeptical of the move, but knowing he didn’t have a job to offer me after my internship ended, he came around; indeed, he dedicated an entire afternoon to telephoning all the newspaper editors he knew to tell them I was going. He also connected me to the foreign editor of National Public Radio (NPR), who told me, as U.S. News had done, that she would take my calls if I had a story idea.
Working for Mort had made me realize just how American I had become. Beyond my accent, which no longer bore traces of a lilt, I now thought like an American, reacting to problems in the world—like the Bosnia war—by asking myself, “What, if anything, can we, America, do about it?” I also wanted to vote, which, still an Irish citizen, I had been unable to do in the 1992 presidential election.
During high school, I had failed the driver’s test several times (hitting various cones), and I still felt the sting of humiliation from admitting to my classmates what had happened. I was determined to avoid a similar embarrassment on my citizenship test, and wildly overprepared, using a Barron’s citizenship guide to create flash cards with every conceivable question I might be asked about American government and civics. Unlike many of those applying, English was my first language, and I had the benefit of learning US history in school. Still, I felt relieved when, in the fall of 1993, I learned I had passed.
Mum and Eddie had been sworn in as Americans the previous year, and, because they had made no fuss about their naturalization ceremony, I didn’t think to invite them to the courthouse in Brooklyn to see mine. However, the other new Americans participating treated the day like the momentous event that it was, donning their finest suits and dresses and surrounding themselves with family.
During our collective Oath of Allegiance, we pledged, “I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Looking around the courtroom, seeing emotion ripple across the faces of those whose hands were raised, I was struck by what America meant as a refuge, and as an idea. All of us gathered that morning had reached the modern Promised Land. We weren’t giving up who we were or where we came from; we were making it American. I hugged an elderly woman from Central America on my left, and a tall man from Russia to my right. We were all Americans now.
AS MY DOUBTS about whether to move to the Balkans lingered, I devised a test for myself that I have used many times since. The test, as I put it then, was as follows: If I end up not making it as a journalist, will something else I learn in the process make it worth trying? I would come to call this the “in trying for Y, the most I accomplish is X” test, or the “X test.” This was a kind of self-protective exercise—designed to minimize my sense of risk by preemptively establishing a positive spin on even a negligible potential outcome.
Since I was fascinated by Balkan history, I had my answer. If the most I achieved by moving to the former Yugoslavia was to learn the history and language of the region, I thought, it will have been worth it (provided I did not die).
The Irish people are a famously emotional bunch, but tend to avoid displays of sentimentality. Frank McCourt, who spent his childhood in Ireland, wrote in his magnificent memoir Angela’s Ashes:
If I were in America I could say, I love you, Dad, the way they do in the films, but you can’t say that in Limerick for fear you might be laughed at. You’re allowed to say you love God and babies and horses that win but anything else is a softness in the head.
When I read this passage a few years after my move to the Balkans, I dog-eared the page, as I felt it unlocked one of the mysteries of my childhood in which love was tacitly communicated but almost never directly expressed.
Nonetheless, at the airport with Mum and Eddie before I boarded my flight to Europe, we all teared up as we said goodbye. In the back of our minds, we knew that relatively peaceful Zagreb would not hold me long. The human toll of the Bosnian war—and the possibility of being able to do something to draw more attention to it—would be too great a gravitational pull.
I DECIDED NOT TO DIVE IN as a freelance journalist from the start, but instead to sign up for an intensive Croatian language and culture program. I would pay a small fee to live with a host family in Zagreb rather than immediately having to find an apartment of my own. If I could get a handle on the language, I thought, I would need to spend less on expensive interpreters when I started actual reporting.
My arrival in Zagreb was not unlike that of an American college student in a study abroad program. My Croatian host family greeted me at the airport. They encouraged me to try out my rudimentary Croatian,[fn1] (#litres_trial_promo) and I went out for drinks with their daughter, a vivacious university student who offered tips for exploring the city. But within no time, I found myself put off by the family’s nationalism and the way the parents denigrated Serbs. This was not the first time I had seen how kindness toward a favored “in-group” (I was Catholic like them) could coexist with bigotry toward those who were not included. The situation reminded me of my experience as a new Lakeside student when the parents of a few of my white high school friends had generously embraced me while disparaging the other newcomers, the African Americans who were bused to school.
I soon learned that expressions of anti-Serb animus were fairly commonplace around Croatia. Croatians had felt subjugated by Serbs in the former Yugoslavia and had very recently suffered ruthless Yugoslav Army bombardments. When I tried to argue that the whole ethnic group could not be blamed, several said out loud, “The only good Serb is a dead Serb.” I eventually dropped out of my Croatian language class because my teacher refused to use words that originated in Serbia, and I began the familiar practice of building my own flash-card library. Luckily, I would later find a wonderful teacher in Bosnia.
Laura Pitter was the person who most eased my transition. She proved every bit as bighearted as she had seemed when we first met the previous summer. She immediately invited me to accompany her to interviews. “You are going to do great here,” she said, as if reading my doubts. “Remember, you know the story.”
After I had been in Croatia for two weeks, I telephoned NPR, using the number the foreign editor had given me before I left Washington. I tentatively asked the person who answered if she would be interested in “something” on a cease-fire between Bosnia’s Muslims and Croats that had just been brokered by US diplomats. The voice on the other end seemed practiced in fielding calls from strangers. “Sure,” she said, to my shock. “How about a forty-five-second spot? We will call you back from the studio within the hour.”
Before I had a chance to inquire about specifics, I heard a dial tone.
I turned to Laura, who was sitting cross-legged on her couch, writing her own story on a laptop. “What’s a spot?” I asked.
When NPR called back, Laura said, they would conduct a sound check and then would expect me to do three things: get listeners’ attention with my opening, describe my nugget of news, and efficiently conclude.
I practiced and practiced, ducking into the bathroom so Laura wouldn’t hear my affected inflections. I found the sign-off the most difficult: “For NPR, this is Samantha Power reporting from Zagreb.” I just could not believe that NPR would want me to say this; they barely knew me! But Laura insisted it was standard. When the phone rang, I tried not to let my nervousness show and successfully delivered the “spot” on my third try.
I telephoned my mother later that evening, but she beat me to my news. “I nearly crashed my car on the way home!” she told me, clearly overjoyed and amazed by the speed with which I seemed to have gotten settled. Whatever her misgivings, she had never strayed from my corner. Eddie, meanwhile, had already contacted NPR to secure a copy of the tape. “They said your name twice!” he declared.
Not long after, Fred Cuny passed through Zagreb and welcomed me to the region by inviting me to dinner with a few of his friends. He told us that his team had completed the dangerous operation at Sarajevo Airport. “We got our time down to seven minutes!” he boasted, explaining that the specially designed equipment they had snuck into the city was already filtering and chlorinating previously undrinkable river water. When he and his team opened the pipes for the first time, he recalled, they were accidentally doused in five hundred gallons of water. He described a jubilant scene of soaked engineers, arm in arm with Bosnian staff who laughed merrily as they imagined what running water would mean for their families and neighbors.
I was in awe of what Fred had done. By improvising a water system, he had helped blunt the impact of one of the cruelest tactics in the Bosnian Serb siege. He had also enhanced his relevance in Washington, giving him more sway in the ongoing debate about whether the United States should use military force to try to end the carnage. Because of the Bosnian Serb Army’s terror tactics and what he saw as the minimal risk to US forces, Fred believed it should. He seemed to know more than most US officials about the location and capabilities of Bosnian Serb heavy weapons. While other humanitarians avoided contact with the US government in order to show their independence and neutrality, he relished sharing all he knew.
