I shot, they shot—I shot them shooting. The big guns on the train roared. The sniper rifles in our attic roost snapped and snarled. The unfinished red brick walls of the two-story house were exactly the thickness of form-cast, red bricks. Their bullets were bigger than ours.
Boom!
A tank shell of some sort erupted from a muzzle we could see.
Whiiizzz!
The shell passed overhead, missing.
They really knew we were there; it was really time to go.
Down that ladder, down—no—jump! And bam the second shell shattered the wall of the room in which we just sat, splattering red dust down our necks as we tumbled out the unbuilt grand hallway entrance into the yard.
Don’t even wait. Don’t even turn on the fucking camera. just suck it up. One—two—Three and—sprint….
Back across that killing space, that two hundred yards that was probably only one hundred but felt like a fucking mile. My lungs were bursting, heart popping, legs dying, brain seizing—and I sllliddd in safe behind that street wall and gagged.
The street was filled with folks. Literally. They were sitting in the street behind their own periphery walls, taking casual cover. Some played cards. Others just sat. I recognized a few from Alkhazur’s nightclub.
“How’s tricks, Toms?” asked Vakha, a local wag I saw everywhere, but never with a gun. And he didn’t have one then.
Another was Bekhist, a grandmotherly woman of about forty, maybe fifty. It was hard to tell. All she could do was laugh. Actually, almost everyone was smiling. Smiles painted on their faces. Laugh, laugh, laugh.
I scuttled down the street in the general direction of the gun pit and Hussein. I ran into Xamid and Sultan or Seylah. Maybe both, I forget. They were not laughing. Ali had been hit. I backtracked and ran to the hospital dispensary and burst in, camera blazing.
“No filming in the hospital!” shrieked a nurse.
“No problem, he is with us.”
It was Ali, lying on a bloodstained bed with Ussam tending him.
He was flesh-wounded and laughing.
I took my usual series of ducks and dodges back to the front lines, working my way toward the bramble forest and Hussein’s ambush pit via the farmhouse sniper’s nest. It was completely smashed. Beyond it, the armored train continued to pour withering fire at whatever it was shooting at.
Broadside.
Then the shooting slowed. Then it slacked. Then it ceased.
And then the armored train started moving back down the tracks, away from Samashki.
I was now in the bramble forest, exchanging God is Great passwords with guards.
“We are repositioning because of all the women on the road,” said one.
Women on the road?
I changed direction, moving out of the familiar bramble gullies and up to the pasture apron between the forest and the Samashki-Sernavodsk road.
Did I see it or hear it first?
A tinkle of distant cymbals, or maybe the ethereal hum of chanting, a distant visual snatch of men in orange robes and shaven heads—the shock troops at the head of a column marching under a banner declaring the words Ne Ubitz!, meaning “Don’t Kill”?!
The vision of this extraordinary column out on the road that should by rights have been filled with tanks and troop carriers was—well, extraordinary, and I started sprinting across the open pasture to intercept the marchers. I got to the highway, and breathlessly set up my camera to capture the moment, whatever and whoever they were.
Nam yoho renge kyo, Nam yoho renge kyo, chanted the dozen bald men, all dressed in yellow robes and tapping cymbals and drums. Nam yoho renge kyo, Nam yoho renge kyo.
La illahi il Allah! La illahi il Allah! wailed a chorus of Chechen women, following in the Buddhists’ wake. There is no God but The God!!!
Was I hallucinating?
Was I going mad?
And, at that moment, a dark green Toyota—or maybe Mitsubishi sport-utility vehicle—wheeled up out of the ditch and stopped right in front of me. A door opened and a man with a camera got out smack-dab in front of mine, and I started adding my own audio to the extraordinary scene that spoke much more about my state of mind than the mood and intent of the marchers, which was peace.
10
MARCHING MOTHERS, MONKS—AND MIKICH
From Planet Moskau, by Sonia Mikich:
And then a discovery, one of those little, ridiculous comic moments that allowed us to breathe for just a moment during the course of this war. Among the fighters, I see a tallish, bearded man carrying a Hi-8 camera. Beneath a fantastic khaki uniform he is wearing body armor, and on his head a filthy, Uzbek-style cotton prayer cap. He glares at me with bloodshot eyes and shouts:
“Tell your fucking cameraman to get out of my fucking frame or I will fucking kill him!” It is the familiar voice of my friend and colleague, Thomas Goltz—a journalist, madman, and adventurer. My Russian cameraman, Maxim, has walked through his frame—unconscionable! I have not seen Thomas for months. He smuggled himself into Chechnya from Azerbaijan and has been existing on noodles and garlic sauce. Stinking and sprinting, he has been filming the story of Samashki.
“Thomas, it’s me—Sonia!”
“Sorry, didn’t recognize you. Say, by the way, you don’t happen to have any Hi-8 tapes, now do you? I am nearly out, and everything here is going downhill pretty fast.”
Without taking a second to excuse himself for the appalling greeting, and after having nicked me for some mineral water and chocolate, he manages to extract the promise from me to make him a member of my team in order to slip through checkpoint control.
“The Russians are after me.”
“Why?”
“They think I have been helping the Chechens blow up the train tracks.”
“Well, have you?
“No, not really. I just filmed it all and sort of encouraged them by my presence”
Thomas uses up the rest of his film. His documentary on Samashki will win prizes in the U.S.A. the next year. Filmed under life-threatening conditions, with passion.[9]
Sonia got a couple of the details wrong. I was not wearing a khaki uniform, my beard was gone, and the cap on my head was actually a gift from a Kurdish general in northern Iraq. I did win a runner-up prize for my work, but it was in Europe and not the U.S.A. But there is no question about her capturing the essence of the moment. I was crazed and about to attack her cameraman, and I did manage to impose myself on her team as my one chance to get out of town. God bless her for recognizing me. And for the chocolate.
Sonia’s presence on the road outside Samashki was due to her part in—one might better use the word devotion to—one of the most extraordinary events of the Chechen war: the Soldiers’ Mothers’ March on Grozny.[10]
Drawn from all over Russia, and representing every class of woman in the vast land, from collective farm peasant to university instructor, some two hundred ladies had gathered in the Ingush capital of Nazran to march on Grozny and, presumably, end the war by demanding information about their sons who were either missing, captured, or simply conscripted and sent to cesspool Chechnya. Reinforced by a component of Quakers, a contingent of ethnic Russian converts to a Japanese Buddhist order, and other antiwar activists, ranging from religious Jews to Eastern Orthodox Christians (and even a gaggle of Chechen and Ingush lady zikr-chanters), the pacifist protestors numbered perhaps four hundred when they turned the corner toward Samashki on the morning of March 27.
9
Sonia Mikich,
10
The Mothers’ Movement was organized on a shoestring budget by Maria Iva nova Kirbasova from the Turkic/Buddhist Russian subrepublic of Kalmukia.