Dispatches From the Edge_ A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival - Anderson Cooper [18]
Every reporter likes to believe that what they’re seeing and feeling is unique, that it hasn’t already been seen and felt a thousand times in other places, other conflicts. I try to keep the stories separate, not allow what I’ve seen in one country to change how I see things someplace else. It’s not always easy. I set up barriers in my head, my heart, but blood flows right through them. A corpse I see in Baghdad will remind me of a body back in Bosnia. Sometimes I can’t even remember where I was or why. I just remember the moment, the look, a sudden snap of a synapse, a blink of an eye, and I’m in another conflict, another year. Every war is different, every war the same.
SARAJEVO. MARCH 1993. Bosnia wasn’t my first war, but at the time, it was the deadliest one I’d seen. It had taken me nearly a year after Burma, but Channel One had finally hired me as a correspondent. I was twenty-five, still shooting my stories on a home video camera, and traveling all alone, but at least now they were picking up the bills.
It was the first year of the war in Bosnia, and Sarajevo was under siege. Serbs in surrounding mountains lobbed shells into the city, mortaring the marketplace where old men sold their broken watches and tried to hold onto their dignity. A shell would land, blood splattered the street. You could feel the impact blocks away. There were snipers as well. Their bullets cut through the air, silent, spinning. No tracer fire, no warning. Just snap, crackle, pop, and a body would crumple to the ground.
Anyone who tells you they aren’t scared in a war zone is a fool or a liar, and probably both. The more places you’ve been, the more you know just how easy it is to get killed. It’s not like in the movies. There are no slow-motion falls, no crying out the names of your loved ones. People die, and the world keeps spinning.
I flew into Sarajevo from Zagreb, Croatia, on a UN charter. Channel One had just given me a brand-new flak jacket, but I hadn’t bothered to take it out of its plastic wrapping until the plane was just about to land. When I did, I noticed something sewn inside. It was a warning label: THIS VEST DOES NOT PROTECT AGAINST ARMOR-PIERCING PROJECTILES, RIFLE FIRE, SHARP OR POINTED INSTRUMENTS.
It was useless against snipers, effective only against pistols, close-range stuff. In Sarajevo, they killed you from far away.
I put the vest on anyway and walked alone into the sandbag maze of Sarajevo’s airport. On the flight, there had been only one other passenger: a young German kid with a camera. He looked more scared than I did, and seemed to have even less of a clue about what he was getting himself into. He never even left the airport. I heard he flew back to Zagreb that same day.
I was afraid to sleep in the bed in my room at the Holiday Inn. I kept thinking some shrapnel might kill me during the night. So I’d lay on the floor, trying to sleep, listening to the dull thud of mortars landing on nearby buildings. Like a mangy dog, the Holiday Inn had sunk its teeth into Sarajevo, and wasn’t letting go. Most of the glass in the hotel was already cracked or broken. It had been replaced with heavy plastic sheeting. During the winter, the wind whipped and whistled down the darkened corridors.
Everyone still called it the Holiday Inn, though I heard that the chain had revoked its franchise. Given the constraints imposed by the Serbian stranglehold on Sarajevo, the hotel just couldn’t maintain the high standards demanded by the parent corporation. The bed mints had run out a long time ago.
During the 1984 Winter Olympics, the location of the hotel was ideal; it was in the heart of the city, near the river, with views of the mountains. During the war, however, the location couldn’t have been worse. The ski slopes that once hosted competitors from around the world were now home to snipers. The boxy Holiday Inn was a top-heavy target. It faced the front line, and at night, tracer fire whipped past the windows