The station. The mosque. The road. The periphery. I tried to make a mental map of where and what the Russians were shooting at.
Wham! A rocket slammed into a tractor trying to make it across the street a block ahead of me, and I looked up and almost casually noted the presence of a helicopter floating in the air straight down the street from where I was standing. It was searching for people looking exactly like me—or so I concluded. I dove toward the shelter of a nearby wall and found a knot of people huddled in utter terror who were already making maximum use of the thin protection it provided. I took their picture. They looked like what they were; a bunch of very frightened people huddling in utter terror in the shadow-shelter of a wall.
Not good television. Good television was on the street. Or actually, good television was the helicopter shooting down the street at us or at least in our general direction. I had to act fast, or fail—which could be worse than dying, sometimes. I knew I was on the verge of a massive failure of nerve, so if I didn’t do it then, I never would.
I put the camera on the tripod and stepped out into the middle of the road.
Done.
I only had to turn the camera on and make sure I did not turn it off. I stuck my finger inside the hole I carved in the casing and tickled the toggle switch. The camera clicked and whirred and the timer started to count seconds shot and film left to shoot.
Done.
There was a new shudder down the street. A chopper. I was faced with a decision. I could dive back toward the wall without the camera and maybe film my own death when that chopper shot its pods at me, as it clearly would, or I could start shooting back on full automatic before the chopper blasted it and maybe me to kingdom come.
What was I doing here?
Take a step. Forward. Another. Go. Pick up the camera with your right hand; squeeze the tripod around your waist. Keep filming. Get tighter. Don’t forget you cannot refocus with your left hand because only your left-hand fingers work and you can’t get a grip on the lens without that thumb. Use your right hand for that, and I do not care if you have never used it for focusing a lens before. Learn now. Learn fast. You better learn how to focus now and fast with your right hand because that metal bird is looking down its crosshair sights at you just like you are looking down your crosshair sights at it, only the difference is you are shooting film and it is shooting rockets.
Wham!
The rocket just made a bunch of burger out of the cows fifty feet ahead.
Move.
Move in jags. Bunny right, bunny left. Don’t give them a clean shot. Make ’em blast you on the turn, on the jog, on the rabbit-run up these oh-so-straight streets.
Bunny, bunny, and it ain’t funny.
Wham! Brrt! Brrrt!
By the time I got to the mosque, the station was ablaze—and the real firefight began.
The armored train, again.
It was maybe half a mile away, spitting flame from the tanks and big guns aboard it, spraying the big, empty houses used as sniper nests on the town’s southern periphery. The problem was, I needed to film it broadside, or at least at a better angle than I had. Mixing sprinting and insanity, I got up to the crossroads beyond the bridge, beyond the mosque, and hunkered down behind some pathetically thin chunks of three-foot-thick concrete slabs of something. It was only about two feet high but at least it was three feet thick and solid.
I caught my breath and assessed the neighborhood. Guys were squirting out of nowhere, running for their lives across my lens. Really hauling ass. Others huddled in ditches, pissing in their pants, too afraid to move. Then a gate opened and out walked a man dressed all in black and wearing a black fedora and white shoes, who just sort of sauntered down the road as if nothing particular was going on. I shoot it all.
War is weird.
But my focus was the train. I had to get it broadside. I had to get in front of it. A helicopter wooooshed overhead while I rolled and then scooted out from behind my concrete-block salvation and lurched—no, I flew like the very wind!—down what I called Mosque Street. Behind me came a white car and a bus—a fucking passenger bus! —and as machine guns rattled and the larger stuff burped, the bus driver hit the gas and saaaaggged around the white car, nearly turning over during the course of that very stupid maneuver. You wanna survive the shooting, but die in a dumb accident?
Brrt, brrt, brrt!
Boom, boom, boom!
Talk about dumb accidents, I say to myself. You are stuck in a surrounded town under fire and trying to get as close to the source of that fire as you can. No, that is no accident. It is just dumb. Nuts. Suicidal, maybe. Should have tried to leave in that Doctors Without Borders vehicle the other day. Should of, would of, could of, but now nothing to be done. You are here, so catch your breath and make a career out of it. You need a stand-up, or narrative-spoken-to-camera. Actually, a squat-down. Get your sorry self in front of the lens, now, and do a little reporting for posterity in case you get killed, but your stupid camera survives and is found intact by the heirs to my job.
“The final assault has begun. We will see if the defenders of this small Chechen town in the northern plains can resist the Russian attack—and if I can get my sorry ass out of here at the end of it. Lest anyone forget, this is a surrounded town.”
I taped two takes, the first with the “sorry ass” reference that just sort of slipped out of my mouth, and the second without reference to body parts. Then I picked up the camera with my right hand, hunkered down the street shielded by barns and buildings, and headed toward the point I estimated the armored train to be firing from—and then ran into some guy who confirmed my estimation. I turned on the camera as he signaled me to follow him to the front.
Brrt, brrt, brrt!
Boom, boom, boom!
The percussive sound of shooting was a lot louder and closer, even if I was still tucked behind a wall. My guide to the front turned the near corner of that wall, and I and my camera eye followed him around to the next step in the get-to-the-front exercise.
“Fuck!”
That is my voice on camera, looking through the lens at a partially built, two-story red-brick house some two hundred yards across completely exposed, open ground. Maybe it is only one hundred yards away, but it looks more like a mile.
“Fuck,” I repeat, ruining the audio for any commercial use of this very entertaining material collected on March 27, 1995.
And then I began to run, camera blazing, capturing every stumble and jolt as I galloped toward those half-built brick walls that promised the only shelter for miles around, and the only thing between the armored train and me for several centuries. And all for the sake of Bang-bang. It was, without question, the most insane thing I have ever done in my life.