“Look at this!” scolded another mother, brushing her hand through the filthy locks of another draftee-captor. “Lice!”
Then a group of about two dozen mothers marched squarely up to the concrete blockade and demanded to see the commander who had imposed this shocking and scandalous delay on the Mothers’ March. Writhing like a schoolboy, he heard the ladies out: “Shame on you! Have you no mother yourself? No son?”
“I cannot guarantee your safety!” he pleaded.
“What do you mean, ‘safety’?” roared an attractive, middle-aged peroxide blonde. “We already have guarantees from the Chechens! If anything should happen to us, it would be at the hands of our own sons—the officers and soldiers of the Russian army!”
It would have been almost funny had it not been growing dark and cold.
Finally, the officer could take no more of the tirade, and called in a wall of men. And they were not conscripts with lice in their hair. They were stern-faced professional soldiers of the OMON forces, the elite (and often motherless) mercenaries known as kontraktni, or “contractors.” The mothers were shoved back into the monks, and all direct contact between marchers and soldiers banned. Maxim, Sonia’s cameraman, tried to clip off a few sequences on the sly—and found himself being manhandled and slapped around by the soldiers who had seemed so friendly moments before.
“Scheisser,” said Sonia. “Shit.”
Now she was as afraid of losing her own tapes as I was afraid of losing mine.
And then it got nastier, especially for the monks.
A soldier walked up to one of the slavic Buddhists and smashed him in the face. Another monk was dragged to his feet and beaten. “Pacifist traitor, conscientious objector faggot scum!” were some of the terms we could hear in the growing darkness.[11] A flare shot up, illuminating the surrounding fields in an eerie glow—and allowing us to glimpse another beating in progress. Mothers, tired, hungry, exhausted, and now frightened, began to sob from their places on the highway. A pretty Ukrainian girl associated with the religious peaceniks was dragged away, maybe to be raped.
“I don’t like this at all,” said Sonia.
Neither did I.
Adding to the misery of the moment was the flash, grumble-growl of the seven howitzers, opening up at one-minute intervals in two directions at once: Achkoi Martan and Samashki. We became captive, long-distance witnesses to the slow, methodic destruction of both communities. Sonia Mikich remembered it this way:
“We watch fire destroy the houses where we were met so graciously but hours before. Signal flares rise red and white, expose individual people huddled on the ground. Plumes of smoke rise into the sky. For six hours, until deep into the middle of the night, the soldiers hold us in the bitter ice cold while Samashki is mercilessly bombed and strafed. A brutal tactic. They are terrorizing the civilians because they know so precisely that there are so few fighters inside. The goal is to root out all resistance. A couple of dead and wounded every day, a couple of destroyed houses—exactly enough war as is psychologically required. They are the victors, with overwhelming force. Forty thousand men in an occupied country. Forty thousand victors.
“But tonight, fear comes to the victors. We have overheard how the Russians have ordered up buses and trucks over the radio because they now truly fear that the Chechens will attempt to free the soldiers’ mothers. No one is allowed to leave the encircled camp. We are their captives. Two huge bastards beat my cameraman Maxim to the ground and forbid him to film anything more. They seize the notebooks of the other journalists present. Happily, it is so dark that no one gets very interested in the suspicious Thomas Goltz. Maxim tapes up all the red lights on his camera and continues to record what he can, motivated by fury. Myself I am so livid with rage that I have to creep over to a tank in the darkness and vomit next to its treads. Around midnight it is over. The mothers will not reach Grozny. We are shuttled away in a convoy through minefields.”[12]
I don’t have a lot to add, save a few tiny corrections and a couple of personal notes. We were not watching Samashki houses go up in flames, but those in Achkoi Martan. Samashki was out of sight five kilometers back behind the forest. And as for the business of the Russians being afraid of a Chechen operation to free us, my understanding was quite different and even more menacing (or perhaps just more paranoid). The members of the march—the monks, mothers, Mikich and me—were to be killed, with the deed blamed on Chechen fighters like Hussein and his men. The worst that occurred, however, was the continued beating of the Russian Buddhist monks before we were all trundled off in convoy out of Chechnya.
Flares lit the night.
Multiple, incidental, horrible stops in the middle of multiple nowheres.
Then finally, blissfully, a tarmac road, and then finally, blissfully, a highway—meaning we would not be killed that night. While the rest of the trucks and buses continued on to Vladikavkaz, we peeled off and drove to Sonia’s base at Nazran, arriving at three or four in the morning.
My first order of business was to say a prayer for my friends.
The second thing was to accept that drink of whiskey offered by Sonia, and then drink her bottle dry. I had not had a sip for weeks.[13]
In the morning, sitting among the chickens and turkeys while eating a breakfast of toast, eggs, bacon and cheese, all washed down by real coffee and orange juice from the ARD supply stash, I heard the motor sound of an approaching helicopter and surprised myself when I did not duck.
I was out. I was alive. I had my tapes. I had my story.
No. Our story.
That was my part of the bargain.
PART THREE
11
GETTING OUT THE NEWS BLUES
That something was sour between myself and my employers at Video News International should have been evident even before I had left Philadelphia nearly three months before. Instead of enticing me to go cover the chaos and confusion of war in the Caucasus with a wad of emergency cash and a decent flak-jacket, my producers had relied more on my reaction to the inference of cowardice when I had expressed reluctance to wander off to war without the requisite equipment—such as cash and Kevlar. The contract between us seemed fraught with legal loopholes that protected them and not me, but in the end I caved and signed it because a war correspondent is not a war correspondent without a war.
Yes, there was bad blood between us. That I knew. But when I stumbled bruised and broke into the ABC office in Moscow, I was not ready for what awaited.
The first surprise was that no one in the ABC office really expected me, mainly due to the fact that I had been declared missing and presumed dead on Russian TV. This was news to me, but of a pleasant kind in the general scheme of things. The second thoroughly unpleasant surprise was learning that there was, in fact, no institutional link or contract between ABC and VNI that obliged the Moscow bureau to do anything for me at all. The night watchman for news, Chris Gehring—later murdered in Kazakhstan—was kind enough to let me sleep on the library floor and use the international line to clear up what I hoped was just some small misunderstanding.
My first call was to the VNI office to tell them I was alive and to brief them on the story I now envisaged for Nightline. A portrait of the Chechen spirit, as seen through Hussein, the bold and no doubt doomed effort to stop the train, the attacks on my muddy little Grovers’ Corner town on the north Chechen plain, and the weird and wonderful Mothers’ March to save their sons. I even had a working title for the piece—Devotion.
11
Later I learned that I, too, had allegedly been beaten, tortured, and likely killed in the military detention center at Mozdok. Concern for me was such that Shirvani had breached the lines and traveled to Ingushetia in search of word of my whereabouts and health. Apparently, the shaven pate of one of the monks had been mistaken for my own hairless dome. By further distortion, it is likely that this is how I came to be mistaken for the doomed Fred Cuny, or vice-versa. Cf. Scott Anderson,
13
Sonia’s sole public recollection is that I ruined her beauty sleep by snoring—and thus earned the name she still calls me: