“Let us see if we can interview Khadjiev,” Lawrence suggested, and we made our way through the rubble-filled streets to a compound housing the Grozny city administration that served as the seat of government for the Moscow-appointed administration.
Security was high. The outer streets were lined with APCs, the entrance was strung with barbed wire between concrete sentry posts, manned by shaven-faced Russian youths in alligator-plate flak jackets holding back vicious guard dogs. All windows were draped with anti-grenade netting, and snipers prowled the roof.
“We have an interview with Comrade Salman,” Uncle Larry told the guards, lying. Remarkably, we were escorted inside. Word passed from secretary to secretary and even more remarkably, we were soon escorted into the presence of the man regarded by virtually all nationalists as the ultimate predatl, or traitor, a man who had accepted the mantle of Chechen leadership from the blood-tainted Russian hand—Salman Khadjiev.
In the flesh, however, the former Minister of Chemical Industry in the Russian Federation was a surprisingly frank and friendly individual whose main motivation for assuming the unsavory position of Russian-appointed interim leader of Chechnya was his deep and personal loathing of General Djohar Dudayev, whom he repeatedly compared with Hitler. While Lawrence’s questions were wide-ranging indeed, I only had one, and I saved it for the end of the interview. It concerned what was happening at Samashki.
“I don’t know,” he said after a long silence. “No one knows. They will not tell us.”
Back along the Trasa, or main Grozny-Mozdok highway, Lawrence told me he wanted to file the Khadjiev interview as a television news feed, backed up by the generic pictures of wanton destruction in Grozny. None of it was really news, but it was better than nothing, and somehow it justified his presence in the region.
“Post 13,” I pleaded, as we started our descent into Sernovodsk.
“It’s a waste of time,” said Sheets.
“Five minutes,” I begged.
Uncle Larry relented and told Nodar to turn left and not right at the Sernovodsk Friday Mosque, and we trundled out the four or five miles to the Post 13 checkpoint blocking access to Samashki. The crowd on our side of the APC had grown, augmented by even more Canadian reporters, who seemed to take a greater interest in the Samashki story than all the American publications with Moscow-based correspondents combined. They were led by Elizabeth Ward of the Toronto Star, and also included Geoffrey York of the Globe and Mail, as well as Jennifer Gould, a Canadian writing about the disappearance of Fred Cuny for the Village Voice. There were more Russians gathered at Post 13, too. The yellow bus of Old Jesus had been augmented by a couple of cars festooned with the markings of the Russian Emergency Services Ministry, an institution with strong military links that still serves as a sort of local Red Cross, as well as a vehicle very clearly marked with the logo of the International Committee for the Red Cross itself. A French, or perhaps Belgian woman sitting in the front seat was having an animated discussion through a translator with our baby-faced sergeant with blonde hair and Nike sneakers. The subject was Russia’s obligations as a member and signatory of the Geneva Conventions, and subsequent protocols, to allow the ICRC access to anywhere it wanted to go. But the sergeant just smiled and shook his head and evoked his mantra about “orders from Mozdok.”
Then the situation got a lot nastier.
A cropped-haired man named Alexandr Guryanov, representing the Russian human rights group Memorial, an organization founded in the hallowed name of Andrei Sakharov, announced his presence with a speech.
“Let me say this quite clearly, in front of these young Russian soldiers,” Guryanov intoned. “Events in Samashki, a defenseless town and surrounded by the overwhelming force of the Russian Army, can only be described as an attempted genocide.”
The words were no sooner out of his mouth than the blond Special Forces kid in the black flak jacket and Reebok or Nike sneakers was in Guryanov’s face.
“The genocide is of the Russian soldiers who fought for our country!” he snarled. “You want to talk genocide, that is your genocide!”
I pulled out my camera to document a little tension at the checkpoint, but then felt a hand on my arm.
“You foreign correspondents all seem to like wearing your fancy flak jackets, as if you were afraid we were going to shoot you,” smirked a wiry gentleman with officer bars on his arms—captain, major, or colonel, I really couldn’t say. “Why are you so concerned? But just for fun, let’s see what your Western, NATO stuff really absorbs, shock-wise.”
All the Russian grunts chortled. Their commander was looking at us all, everyone sporting a blue flak jacket. Then he was looking at me and raising his gun.
Keep cool, I said to myself, flipping. Dance on thin ice, now…
“Point blank?” I said, scoffing. “Let’s see what you can do from one hundred meters.”
One, two, three, four, five… I started counting off steps, stripping the Velcro snaps off the blue flak jacket as I went. Just get it off and let him shoot it out of my hand!
At one hundred paces, I propped the jacket up in the weeds like a target, relieved—and furious with myself, the gunman, and the world.
One, two, three, four, five…
“Are you insane? That shock plate is worth five hundred dollars!” hissed Sheets.
He was furious and had a right to be. I left my ABC-owned body armor in Moscow, and I was wearing Reuters’ flak gear.
Plung!
The officer whacked my flak jacket from one hundred yards, then sent a grunt to collect it for our inspection. The bullet had smashed into the lower left-hand area of the chest plate. A liver shot. Fatal, perhaps, had it not been for the ceramic Kevlar plate. It actually had stopped the slug, although anyone wearing the jacket during impact would have been extremely uncomfortable, with shattered ribs, bruised guts, and likely internal bleeding. At the very least, the wearer would have become temporarily incapacitated in the way that folks get immobilized when punched in the solar plexus.
More to the point, the five hundred dollar ceramic shock plate was ruined. Hairline cracks emanated from the impact hole, reaching at least into the center. Its integrity had been destroyed with one relatively low-impact round from an AK-47 at one hundred yards. The next bullet would have just gone straight through. Stop the war, I want to get off.[17]
17
Years later, at a Special Forces school in Florida, I was treated to a shooting display, including a demonstration of what types of shock plate in the modern American flak jacket can withstand what kind of shot from what kind of range. At the end of the program, we guests were invited to inspect the target vests, and most folks were mightily impressed with the absorptive powers of the fancy Kevlar ceramic plates. Not wanting to ruin everyone’s fun, I took one of the SF guys aside and asked about second-shot integrity. “We don’t use this shit in the field,” he admitted. “It’s too heavy and limits your ability to roll out of the way when you need to. The only folks we think need to wear it are Secret Service guys guarding the president, so they can leap in the way and take that one shot. After that, the vest is toast.”