Still, I took my new fireman assignment seriously—or at least took advantage of the assignment to be serious about the war.
I was there at the newly set up Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe housed in Grozny, where the American diplomat Phillip Remler had been tasked with finding out anything he could about the missing American aid worker, Fred Cuny. The Cuny corpse had developed the unique function of being found anywhere the Chechens were under bombardment. The phenomenon was due to the belief that a Cuny sighting, even as a corpse, would result in Washington putting heavy pressure on Moscow to suspend hostilities in the vicinity while a forensic investigation team was sent in to identify dental records and other telltale signs about the identity of the cadaver.
“I have become an expert in the dentals of the dead,” smirked Remler, relating his most recent visit to a Cuny “corpse site.” “But unless Fred grew two gold teeth recently and sprouted a metal thigh implant like the body I saw today, it was not him.”
I was there, too, in Shamil Basayev’s hometown of Vedeno when the Chechens shot down a Russian fighter-bomber, killing the pilot. The smoldering wreck of the plane proved that Yeltsin was in clear violation of his own unilateral cease-fire that he had announced for VE-Day. I was in Shatoi with the BBC’s Andrew Harding after Russian missiles hit the town, deep in the mountains and way out of any area that could have been explained away as incidental “localized” violations of the cease-fire accord. Ours was a gut-wrenching, two-wheeling ride around blind corners carved into cliff sides, with me hanging out the passenger window using my arm as a pole and an old laundry bag as a white flag, just in case some distant attack helicopter chose to distinguish between our car and the trucks shuttling Chechen fighters up and down the gutted mountain road.
“Allah ul Akbar!” they shouted as they roared by, as if trying to draw fire. “God is the Greatest!”
Checking for casualties among the strangely casual population—women selling fruit and Polaroid film in the market, a kid teaching himself how to walk on stilts, men boiling vast vats of beef to celebrate the Muslim Feast Of The Sacrifice—we got to the hospital just in time to record the awful, literal moment of expiration of a local man lying in a pool of blood, as a team of truly courageous Belgian doctors desperately tried to punch the man’s heart back to life, only to reach despair right in front of the family.
And then I was in Grozny on VE-Day, as per my assignment, hunting for one camera-friendly ancient veteran from the Great War against fascism, as the forefathers (and mothers) of the conquerors of Grozny turned out in their post-Soviet splendor on parade at the Khankale airport, vests dripping with medals. A brass band blared, and all the ancients were treated to a remembrance shot of vodka at the Khankale canteen, before a bus came to take them home under escort, due to the dangers of the night—and thus whisk away my personal, ancient veteran before I ever learned his name or address. How was I going to find another talkative old codger at this hour to record a day in his miserable life? It actually did not make much difference, because Victory Day was over and there was no way I could send the material to Moscow, even if it had been the purest gold.
The greater issue, in fact, was how was I going to record another day in my miserable life with no place to stay in a shattered city with a shoot-on-sight curfew about to go into effect. An armored personnel carrier came roaring down the road carrying a dozen soldiers on top, rifles at the ready. I flagged it down and climbed aboard for a ride into town. A couple of shots rang out at a crossroads and the patrol threw me off, racing in the general direction of the gunfire and leaving me to my own devices. The city administration was not far away, so I trudged over, negotiating my way through the barbed wire and sandbag guard posts with the aid of my press pass, only to discover that the only people on the premises were a knot of burly, nasty guards celebrating VE-Day in a nearby bunker-cum-sauna the old-fashioned way, namely by getting totally smashed on warm vodka.
I joined them. I had no choice. Their names were Vitali and Sasha and Igor and Misha and several others too drunk to talk or pronounce their names. They were all kontraktini, or mercenaries, a mixture of policemen from the provinces who wanted to quadruple their salaries, and criminals let out of jail to serve on the front for freedom and loot. They were not nice men, but jolly or drunk enough to tolerate the presence of an American in their midst in memory of the Allies who had together with them brought Hitler to his knees exactly fifty years before. Rounding out the party was a very quiet officer who wore the FSB (renamed KGB) badge on his shoulder, and a local cossack Ataman, or clan leader, along with his daughter (or a “working girl”; it was not clear) for a night on the town with the front-line drunks.
“To us, to you, to victory!” roared Vitali, a cop from the Siberian city of Perm, lifting yet another toast.
“You are the son of a whore and a coward,” belch-mumbled a mountain of fat in the far corner, a fellow cop/mercenary, apparently. “Let’s go at it again.”
The pair had been arm wrestling the day away when not knocking back shots. Vitali won right and then won left and then won right again, and the mountain of fat collapsed back into his corner.
“You Western journalists have much more access to the other side than we do.”
It was the FSB/KGB major, quietly inquiring and assessing.
“Often,” I carefully replied.
“Do you think you could set up a meeting?”
“With whom?”
“Dudayev.”
“Why?”
“Peace.”
Was this a serious spook? And even if he were, why was he assuming that a mere Western hack like me could get him up and into the mountains and the bear-lair of the Chechen president and back out again, without him getting both himself and me executed as spies like Fred Cuny? Or was the conversation nothing but a nonsensical bluff made on the fiftieth anniversary of VE-Day in the surreal setting of bombed and shattered Grozny? I do not know and never will, because there was then another toast and then another and then a third, and as midnight neared in the bunker-cum-sauna, my new pals among the legal mercenaries in the new Russian Army loaded their guns and joined others from other bunkers emerging from their drunken dungeons, and then, with a last nasdarovia, began blasting the firearms against vacant buildings, shattered walls, and remnants of trees.
Brrrrrrrt!!!! Bam Bam Bam! Brrrrrt! WamBamBammmmmm!!!
The international press reported an intense firefight in Grozny that night; I can report with assurance that it was merely my new pals having fun with AK-47s and RPGs.
I slept in another bunker that night with a bunch of stinking, farting, snoring, and terrified Russian conscript soldiers. Maybe I was the stinking, farting, snoring, and terrified one. I was up at dawn, sharing my cowboy coffee with another early bird, a sullen kontraktni who went by the name of Kiril. He was sitting in the middle of a brick-and-sandbag bunker, guarding some chunk of the administrative building compound, cleaning his gun in the early morning light, and was grateful for the brew. I asked if I could film and he allowed me to shoot the sort of weapons-cleaning-instruction class that you don’t see everyday. When he had wiped away all the oil and made sure everything was just fine, Kiril and another monster grunt named Igor then took me on a tour of Grozny’s shattered skyline.