The Education of an Idealist

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.

8

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HEARTS OF DARKNESS (#ulink_33fcd15c-f56e-5012-b85b-aa2fd38c9faf)

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.