Flirting with Danger (13 page)

Dancing Warriors

I
n late 1994, events drew me to back to Chechnya. In this mountainous area of southern Russia, dissent against Moscow had been bubbling for years. Although the Soviet Union’s dissolution had allowed the former republics to become independent, Chechnya was not a separate republic, but rather a part of Russia. Yeltsin felt that letting Chechnya go could threaten the integrity of the remaining Russian Federation by encouraging other ethnic populations to go their own way. While Chechnya was technically part of Russia, many Russians believed it was inhabited by an inferior race, a Muslim one at that. Chechnya was known in Russia as a bastion of gangsters, arms dealers, and thieves, and incidents like hostage taking were common. Russians still refer to Chechens as
chernoi
, or black. The capital of Chechnya is Grozny, which means “terrible” in Russian. It was aptly named: it looked medieval, with signs of modern thievery. Many of the streets were mud, and livestock jostled with
Cadillacs, while ordinary men carried knives in their belts. The arms bazaar was just down the road from the open-air vegetable stalls, and customers haggled over rocket launchers or Kalashnikovs as casually as if they were cabbages and carrots. The irony was, the Chechens were getting most of the arms from the Russian soldiers they were gearing up to fight, trading bottles of vodka or food for their Kalashnikovs. This kind of barter arrangement went on even during the height of the fighting. Desperate Russian soldiers would give their enemy arms to kill them with in exchange for a bottle of vodka.

I could understand that kind of behavior. I had handed Trevor a blueprint of my own vulnerabilities, practically an instruction manual on how to inflict hurt, in exchange for the possibility of love.

For more than three hundred years Chechnya had been a problem for Moscow. Stalin, himself from the Caucasus, felt that only ruthlessness would vanquish the Chechen spirit. After the Second World War, he accused them of being Nazi sympathizers and deported them all, banishing the entire population to Central Asia. Where there are no people, Stalin figured, there are no problems. When Nikita Khrushchev came to power after Stalin’s death in 1953, he allowed the Chechens to return to their ancestral homeland, but this did little to allay Chechen distrust of Russia. Nestled in the Caucasus Mountains, far from the capital in Moscow, Chechens retained their distinctive culture. They still lived with a medieval clan structure dictated by blood vengeance and village elders. Weapons and honor were a way of life, and there were plenty of willing martyrs ready to take up the fight against Russian soldiers. In December 1994, when rebel Chechens actually declared independence, Yeltsin reacted as the czars did throughout Russian history: with brute force. It was war, one of the messiest wars I ever saw. It was the last place I wanted to go in the dead of winter. But I went anyway, unable to say no.

•   •   •

I made my way south with a crew. Alessio, with whom I still managed to work well, was the producer. Paul, from the Berlin bureau, was the cameraman; Sergei was our Russian soundman. We flew to Dagestan, a city in a neighboring province, since the airport in Grozny was closed. We hunted for a taxi willing to drive us to Grozny, but found only one Chechen driver prepared to risk the trip in his beat-up old Volga sedan.

As we approached Grozny, we were stopped several times by ragtag bands of Chechen thugs or guerrilla freedom fighters dressed in woolly sheepskin hats and heavily armed. Sergei kept quiet, since being Russian wasn’t something to advertise. The Chechens were glad to see us, knowing that the press generally does well by underdogs. Almost instantly I felt plunged into a different century—maybe a past one, or maybe the future, like those
Mad Max
films that depict a postnuclear world. Groups of wild-eyed people were crouched around big, boiling cauldrons of foul-smelling sheep grease. There was a tolerance for brutality I had never seen before, a toughness built in by the harshness of daily life. The men would dance in a circle, chanting songs about their willingness to die a martyr. We called them the dancing warriors.

The buildings were crumbling and deserted. I turned to Alessio and asked, “Is this just usual Soviet disrepair or has there been fighting here?” We laughed nervously. In the disarray of the former Soviet Union, it was sometimes hard to tell the difference. We set up our editing equipment and work space at what was left of the hotel in the center of town. There had been no water for weeks, so one could smell the communal toilets from miles off. The windows had all been broken, and the cold and snow swept through the building. We used some gaffer tape to keep some of the icy wind from whipping through the room we shared. We might as well have
slept outdoors and lessened the aroma from the bathrooms. If the cold or the stench didn’t keep me awake, it was fear. The Chechen rebels had a big arms cache in the hotel’s conference room, making it a serious target for the Russian army. Although trying to predict who or what would be a target was always futile. Civil wars are so chaotic that you can predict nothing. It’s all about luck.

The Russians were so badly informed about the situation in Chechnya that when they carpet-bombed Grozny, they didn’t realize that they were killing other Russians, or maybe they were just indifferent. Most of the Chechen population had already fled Grozny, going up into the hills to stay with relatives. The ethnic Russians who lived in Chechnya were still in the city, without people in the hills to escape to, so when the five-hundred-pound bombs dropped indiscriminately from ten thousand feet, it was Russians killing Russians.

Russian fighter planes made daily sorties into the city, dropping bombs from a high altitude to avoid Chechen antiaircraft guns. Alessio wanted us to sleep in the city center to provide constant live reporting Edward R. Murrow–style while under bombardment. I thought that was too dangerous: better if we moved back and made our base on the outskirts of town, driving in every day to report and therefore minimizing our exposure to the bombs, which were highly inaccurate. Almost ten years older than Alessio, I had a more developed sense of my mortality.

We moved out of the dilapidated hotel and into an evacuated kindergarten outside of town for some measure of safety. It was already full of media from all over the world, and the children’s playground had been transformed into a satellite transmission station with huge dishes dwarfing the swing sets and slides. To cover the action in Grozny, we drove for two hours on icy roads in a
Soviet-made Lada car with bald tires. The ride worried me as much as the bombing raids, especially when one day we skidded into an oncoming truck. We weren’t hurt, but it was a terrifying reminder of the danger we faced. I hadn’t seen it coming because I worked during our bumpy journeys. I sat in the backseat with the camera in my lap and my eyes glued to the viewfinder. I watched our tapes and strained to hear the interviews, taking notes and trying to work out the story. I usually had the script mostly written by the time we got back to the work space so we could start editing it immediately, although the process was often slowed by power cuts. Getting a two-minute news story out to the world was generally an eighteen- to twenty-hour process between the driving, filming, editing, and electricity blackouts.

We were dependent on finding Chechens willing to drive us around in their cars, just to try to see what was going on. We lost drivers almost every day. One left us because his brother was shot. Another turned up with shrapnel wounds in his leg and I had to order him to go home. Finally we found one, Ahmed, who was fearless and reliable. Only trouble was, he couldn’t take instruction from a woman, so I had to relay all communication through Alessio or Sergei. He also snored loudly, a problem in our communal sleeping arrangements.

The kindergarten was a small refuge against the considerable danger outside. We slept in tiny cots all together in an abandoned classroom. We wrote and edited at tables and chairs meant for five-year-olds. The tiny chairs upset me. I knew that the scenes we were writing about threatened the future of their usual occupants. Their lives and their psyches would be scarred forever by what they were witnessing now. I struggled to find the right words to give meaning to what I was seeing. I hoped, mostly in vain, that reporting on this
desperate situation would somehow help improve it. Always under a deadline, I wished I had more time to craft the story in a way that might make a difference, however small.

Food was so scarce that our Moscow bureau sent a car on a treacherous thirty-six-hour drive just to bring us food. The day it was supposed to arrive, we learned that a journalist had been shot at a checkpoint. The car hadn’t slowed down quickly enough and a Russian soldier had fired at it, killing a passenger. We just heard sketchy rumors for a few hours and I feared it was our car of supplies. I couldn’t help thinking that I had helped cause a death because I was hungry. Our car arrived safely a little while later, but it was of little comfort to learn the identity of the German journalist who had died.

We lived like animals, the way most people live in a war. We didn’t wash our hair for weeks. We had to squat to relieve ourselves wherever we could in the subzero temperatures, in bombed-out buildings or on the roadside. We managed only a few hours’ sleep a day. We ate chocolate bars or crackers, or whatever we could carry with us in our pockets, surviving for days without a real meal. But we were under pressure to “feed” the network twenty-four hours a day. It seemed that there was no news to speak of in the rest of the world, so our producers were extra hungry for news from Chechnya. And our pictures were riveting. Journalists don’t often get such graphic pictures of warfare: close-up shots of helicopter gunships and tanks firing; triage on the front lines. The network’s thirst was unquenchable, never able to drink enough from the trough of human suffering.

I woke up each morning with dread. I was exhausted. My clothes were filthy. I knew I smelled. When Christmas Eve came, I was depressed. It was my worst Christmas ever. That night I felt determined to do something mad to remind me that there was a sane
world outside this one. I hooked up one of our suitcase-sized satellite phones, generally used for news emergencies, and called L.L. Bean. At twenty dollars a minute, the American operator put me on hold and then wanted me to call back because the line was bad. I yelled at her, fumbling in the dark for a flashlight to read off my credit card number so that I could order a teddy bear as a present for my first nephew, Alexandra’s son. I needed to feel some connection to this new life, however distant.

One day during our drive into Grozny, we came upon a grisly scene: a shopping street had just been hit by Russian bombers. It was next to a bridge, which must have been what the planes had been aiming at. The bombers might have missed their target but they succeeded in their general mission of causing terror and panic. Several civilians were killed and everyone was running away, searching for shelter. But when bombs fall from above, nowhere feels like shelter, and you feel as vulnerable as a scurrying ant. It is a helpless feeling, much worse than being fired on from the ground. By now our cameraman had gone back to Berlin, and had been replaced by a woman, Mary. She was about five-foot-two, skinny, and fearless. We went closer to survey the damage. Bodies were scattered in the packed snow, which was stained with blood and soot. Life had stopped in an instant. A woman still clutching her shopping bag lay motionless, her head no longer attached. A burly, mustached man was slumped over the wheel of his car, no longer hearing the wail of the horn. Fires raged in the snowy wreckage of people’s homes nearby. If I survived this day, I promised myself, I would never sleepwalk through another day in my life.

I told Mary that if we had enough footage, we should leave. The Russian bombers had missed the bridge the first time, but they might come back. Just then we heard the sound of planes headed for us. My camerawoman was still thinking about getting that perfect
shot, and did not want to move. I knew what was going on. A strange thing happens when you look through a camera lens. The images so vivid to the naked eye are in fact black-and-white to the cameraman, somehow muting their impact. Just as we are numbed by the violence we see on television nightly, the photographers, intent on collecting their images, are severed emotionally from what they see. When they look through their viewfinders, they forget that they are just as vulnerable as their subjects. I could see the blood. In an instant, I imagined my own body lying like a husk, shucked of its life. I pictured my hair matted with blood, and my family’s horror when they got news of my death. I yelled at Mary to leave, but still she was reluctant; the pull of those dramatic pictures was too strong. Finally, I yanked on her arm and we ran for cover in a nearby building. The planes flew by, firing at other targets. Life-and-death decisions over a picture. We made them all the time. It seemed crazy. I was relieved to get out of there, thinking that I had beaten the odds one more time.

On that day, unbeknownst to me, my family came close to hearing of my death, as did my colleagues at CNN. A young American freelance photographer named Cynthia Elbaum was killed as she took pictures of a bombing at another bridge. She was in her early twenties, experiencing her first war. As the news spread that an American woman had been killed, some Chechens who knew me and knew I was in the area guessed that I was the victim. They informed CNN in Moscow that I had been killed. The entire bureau went into shock and relayed the news to our headquarters in Atlanta. In addition to the horror of losing a colleague, our producers were in a dilemma. They were already reporting that a female TV correspondent had been killed, but they did not want to identify the victim as
me until they informed my family in New Jersey. They called repeatedly but my mother was out. Meanwhile, as they reported that an unidentified American female journalist had been killed in Chechnya, any viewer who had been watching my daily reports from there could only guess that it was me, since I was not appearing on-air. After several hours of being out of touch, I called in from the satellite phone, and my producers were so ecstatic they put me on the air immediately, so that viewers would hear my voice and know I was alive. It was a strange feeling knowing that all my colleagues thought I was dead. But I had little time to contemplate, as we rushed back to the kindergarten to write and edit our story for the day.