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By Root 814 0

describing the closeness they feel in combat as friendship, are, as J. Glenn Gray wrote, probably deceived. The battlefield, with its ecstasy of destruction, its constant temptation of self-sacrifice, its evil bliss, is more about comradeship. The closeness of a unit, and even as a reporter one enters into that fraternity once you have been together under fire, is possible only with the wolf of death banging at the door. The feeling is genuine, but without the threat of violence and death it cannot be sustained.

There are few individual relationships—the only possible way to form friendships—in war. There are not the demands on us that there are in friendships. Veterans try to regain such feelings, but they fall short. Gray wrote that the “essential difference between comradeship and friendship consists, it seems to me, in a heightened awareness of the self in friendship and in the suppression of self-awareness in comradeship.”20

Comrades seek to lose their identities in the relationship. Friends do not. “On the contrary,” Gray wrote, “friends find themselves in each other and thereby gain greater self-knowledge and self-possession. They discover in their own breasts, as a consequence of their friendship, hitherto unknown potentialities for joy and understanding.”21

The struggle to remain friends, the struggle to explore the often painful recesses of two hearts, to reach the deepest parts of another’s being, to integrate our own emotions and desires with the needs of the friend, are challenged by the collective rush of war. There are fewer demands if we join the crowd and give our emotions over to the communal crusade.

The only solace comes from simple acts of kindness. They are the tiny, flickering candles in a cavern of darkness that sustain our common humanity.

There is a spiritual collapse after war. Societies struggle with the wanton destruction not only of property and cities but of those they loved. The erosion of morality and social responsibility becomes painfully evident in war’s wake. Many feel used. By then it is too late. Those who drained the society flee, are killed, or live on in luxury from the profits of modern wars. Lethargy and passivity plague the populace that no longer has the energy or the moral fortitude to reconstitute society or fight back.

In the wake of war comes a normalization that levels victims and perpetrators. Victims and survivors are an awkward reminder of the collective complicity. Their presence inspires discomfort. So too with perpetrators, whose crimes were witnessed and even supported by many. But it is often the victims who suffer the worst bouts of guilt and remorse. They feel in debt to those who died. They know that it is not the best who survive war but often the selfish, the brutal, and the violent. Those who abandoned their humanity, betrayed their neighbors and friends, turned their back on their family, stole, cheated, killed, and stomped on the weak and infirm were often those who made it out alive. Many victims grasp, in a way the perpetrators do not, the inverted moral hierarchy. They see this inversion in their own struggle to survive. They realize, in a way that the perpetrators again do not, that the difference between the oppressed and the oppressors is not absolute. And they often wonder if they could have done more to save those who were lost around them.

“I might be alive in the place of another, at the expense of another; I might have usurped, that is, in fact killed,” wrote Primo Levi, himself a survivor of the Holocaust.22

The physical marks of war are nearly erased from Sarajevo. Sheets of glass have been fitted into the high-rises, and the shell holes have been plastered over. The newly painted trolleys rumble noisily down the tracks of the central boulevard Zmaja od Bosne, known during the war as Snipers’ Alley. Water, a commodity once so precious that mothers dashed under artillery fire to reach water trucks, gushes miraculously from the taps.

But the Bosnian capital, which once held together a blend of Muslims, Croats, and Serbs and hung on to