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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Sunday, March 23, 2003

FOCUS
Small things haunt former war correspondent

By Karen Blakeman
Advertiser Staff Writer

I saw the war break Wednesday the way most of us did, through the eyes of journalists who struggled to fit bits and pieces into a whole, working to get the story right.

Franc Josip Dörner, center, and his wife Milka Dörner lived out the war in their little cottage on the front lines. The blind, retired chimney sweep and his wife, who was born in the United States, survived on the kindness of soldiers on both sides, a rarity in Bosnia. U.S. soldiers adopted the couple during the NATO peace mission. Milka Dörner served them coffee while Franc Josip played his harmonica and sang.

Karen Blakeman • The Honolulu Advertiser

Scenes of American GIs, tense with anticipation, tinged green by night-vision lenses, gave way to a distant view of a single, airborne light. The light was too far from the television camera, blurred and tiny as it fell south of Baghdad. The significance of such a small thing, shown half an hour before the president would announce that America was at war with Iraq, may or may not have been borne out in the context of the larger story.

That didn't seem to matter; at the time, watching it felt like seeing the first drops of rain.

I'd seen similar lights flair and fall over Bosnia, American soldiers, tense with anticipation, standing next to me on the banks of the Sava River. Did we ever get close to telling that story right, I wonder? Will we get it right this time around?

As a journalist in Bosnia, I tried to write about the big things, the stories of war so large and overwhelming that even the statistics were incomprehensible.

Those things seemed important: the 7,000 Muslim and Croat men and boys missing and presumed dead after the United Nations safe area at Srebrenica fell to the Serbs. The tens of thousands of homes and mosques and churches mortared to litter and dust. The land mines — no one knows how many — that will maim and kill generations into the future. A modern culture had been ripped apart by war criminals who had yet to be arrested.

I tried to write about the big things. I was a journalist; that is what I was taught to do.

But in the quiet of the night, it is the small things that haunt me. Their voices grow stronger as war begins again, and I find myself hoping that I'll get a second chance. This time, I tell myself, I'll get the small things right.

The memory that jolts me awake at night is not of the flat-voiced rendition of the fall of Srebrenica in July 1995, told to me by a 16-year-old survivor who had found her way to a camp near Tuzla. Her mother was dead, killed early in the war. She was still hoping for word from an older brother and her uncles, who had gone missing after the fall.

If I try, I can stop remembering the way the girl's eyes went blank and wide as she talked about soldiers wrenching her younger brother away from her, telling her that a 12-year-old would grow to be a dangerous man, threatening to kill her as well until the older women wrestled her away. With a little extra effort, I can keep myself from imagining how she looked and felt as the old women cradled her and whispered to her and covered her eyes. The thing I can't stop seeing, the small thing that weaves itself into my thoughts and dreams, is the way the girl startled — just a tiny series of muscle spasms — when she told me about the gunshot.

I need to get the small things right. They beg for life beyond the big picture, and I've failed to give it to them. I keep trying. When I awaken with dregs of memories clinging to me, I rush to write them down before they fall away. I'm rarely satisfied with the effort. The small things don't always translate well from there to here.

As the story of the new war grows and I watch and read and listen to the news coverage, I get frustrated. I know the journalists are doing the best they can to preserve the small things while reporting the big, but too much of it is slipping away. Later, those small things could come back to haunt us.

"Good thing we never went through this stuff back in the States," we used to say in Bosnia as we drove from another shallow grave, a devastated neighborhood, a ravished mind or a ruined body. We'd tuck our notes and film safely away, turn up the heater in the car, swig some of the bottled water the Army had provided and say it again. It was part of a mantra we used to ward off the horror, to distance ourselves, keep our hands and voices from shaking and our minds from transplanting the unthinkable to the soil of our homeland.

"We're far too spoiled to live through something like that," we'd say.

It was a lie. Wishful thinking. A form of bragging.

If I close my eyes, I can see the faces of the young American military men and women who served in Bosnia. They can still make me laugh when I remember the outrageously on-target names they gave to the things they saw: Tripod for the three-legged dogs so common there; Purple People Beaters for the Serb special forces, Milosevic's and Radovan Karadzic's men in purple camouflage. I remember the soldiers' voices as they sang American television sitcom jingles, talked about books they'd read or quoted long sections of dialogue from Vietnam War movies.

But I can no longer hear the voice or recall the face of Sgt. 1st Class Donald Dugan, the sharp, disciplined soldier who, during a lapse of concentration in the long, dark months of that first cold winter, bent to examine something he had seen in the snow, and became a statistic.

"What did your family eat?" we asked Angelina, our young Bos-nian translator who had grown to womanhood during the war.

"Sometimes," she said, "our mother wouldn't tell us."

What do the survivors of the World Trade Center see, when sleep avoids them at night? A page from a once-important office report, swept up in an updraft? A glimpse of a co-worker's face? What will we see in the coming conflicts? How will we ever get the small things right?

Susan, a Navy reservist, a photographer and a student of classical languages who had served on a number of archaeological digs before working with me in Bosnia, held a long, thick bone on a newspaper in her lap.

"It had to have come from up here somewhere," she said.

The road was steep and narrow. I thought of mines, but the woodcutters who rode tractors up the mountain each day had left a braidwork of ruts cut deep into the mud, some of them fresh. I tried to drive in those when I thought our car wouldn't bottom out.

"Stop," Susan said when we were near the top. There was an outcropping of rubbish ahead. An old shirt was woven into the tractor ruts. A small boot stood upright beside it. We got out of the car and walked.

Susan took pictures. I wrote down names from deteriorating identification cards that littered the ground. We didn't talk much. We tried to get a count, but there were too many bodies, and the tractors had mixed them up too much. I remember one of the snapshots we saw in the young spring grass: a grainy photograph of a young man, standing with an older woman who may have been his mother, a younger woman and a boy of about 12. The lighting was bad and the faces were difficult to make out, but something bothered me about the way the older woman looked at her boy in uniform.

I don't remember where Susan left the bone she'd collected a week before, along the road to Srebrenica, where the spring rains or a tractor undercarriage had deposited it. We thought it was important to carry it back up the mountain, but maybe we were wrong. It may not have mattered. It was only a small thing.

Karen Blakeman, a reporter for The Honolulu Advertiser, covered the NATO peace mission to Bosnia for Stars & Stripes from 1995 through 1997. In 1998, she was a media rights investigator for the State Department, assigned in Sarajevo to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.