I snuck out of Victor’s home, leaving the old man alone with his memories, catching the evening plane back to Moscow with little hope that World News Tonight with Peter Jennings would have any room for Viktor and Chechnya and me.
They did not.
“The story has moved on,” said ABC.
I was not surprised or even disappointed. They had been friendly enough to give me a camera and pay me decent money to go down and hang as the emergency ABC video news asset in Chechnya, and that was good enough. But I also had a pretty good idea of another channel that might be interested in my new war archives.
“Let us take a look at what you shot,” asked Yevgenii Kisilov over at NTV’s Itogi. Five minutes later he went into conference with his producers and then came back to me.
“Write me a script. Four or five minutes. We are using this tonight.”
“Script?” I asked. “On what?”
“The front.”
“There is no front.”
“Then call it just that. Gdeje Front?—‘Where’s the Front?’”
And so I did. About fifteen minutes or a half hour later I was in the sound studio voicing a short piece that meditated on the inanity, weirdness, and wickedness of war in the Caucasus, with a series of video images arbitrarily culled from the material I had shot for ABC. It began with Belgian doctors in Shatoi desperately trying to pump the heart of a blood-stained victim back to life following a rocket attack that had officially never happened, a two-meter-tall basketball player in better times strumming a guitar and singing a lament about Chechnya in Russian, a triumphant young guerilla standing on the shattered tail of the crashed fighter-bomber at Vedeno, the negotiations between Asian Maskhadov and General Trochev at Novi Atagi, and the subsequent double cross at the Chiri Yurt cement factory. Then there was the funeral for eight and the dirge circle at Stari Atagi, the collision between the Captain Artur Kinjaliyan’s APC and the rogue T-82 battle tank driven by drunks, the wild night in Grozny celebrating VE Day in Europe by firing AK-47 tracers and RPG grenades against the walls of gutted buildings next to Salman Khadjiev’s administration office, morning coffee with Kiril and his pals cleaning their guns for another day of shooting after a brief break to sun their buns at The Beach atop the shattered central post office, and, finally, the VE-Day parade in Grozny and the slow walk home with a stooped old man named Viktor, hero of the Great War, reading from his personal scrapbook that might be regarded as his Book of the Dead.
In the television trade, throwing images together like this is called “wallpapering,” and is frowned on by Western television (and particularly American-network) stylists.
“It was beautiful,” said Steve Coppen, the ABC bureau boss the next day, as I stopped by to square the circle and say good-bye. “I only wish I could pitch something like that to the desk—but they would never go for it. There is no American involved.”
Where’s The Front?
It was no longer Samashki.
I had not even bothered to stop by there.
PART FOUR
15
THE CONSOLATION PRIZE IS LIFE
For a guy who does not own a television set, it was a little overwhelming.
Everyone who was anyone in international TV was there, coiffed and perfumed and dressed in tuxedo or gown. John Simpson, Michael Ignatieff, Tira Shubart, Sue Inglish of Channel Four, Peter Jouvenal, Mark Foley and the entire ABC London office, Ron McCullough of Insight News, and blocks of producers, reporters, editors, and camera-people from CNN, ITN, WTN, and APTV, to name just a few of the alphabet soup of acronyms standing for the International This and World That agencies and production houses specializing in foreign television news.
The presenter was Nik Gowing, the anchor of the BBC’s Evening News Division, but the focus of the evening was Rory’s widow, Juliette, an iron lady with an aristocrat’s accent and a black patch over one eye.
Rory, of course, was the late, great Rory Peck.
A swashbuckling cameraman extraordinaire who had worked every hellhole from Afghanistan to Abkhazia, Rory had given the concept of “freelance” such new and profound meaning in the way of devotion to duty that he had become an icon long before his death. On that awful day of October 3, 1993, in Moscow, when Boris Yeltsin “reestablished” democratic order in the “New Russia” by turning tanks first on the White House, or Russian parliament. Not satisfied with that, he then turned his attention to the Ostankino Television tower, allegedly because discontents were about to seize control of Russian broadcasting and announce a coup, or maybe a revolution against Yeltsin’s revulsions. Rory was there with his camera as soldiers and snipers began shooting into the crowd, and he caught a sniper’s bullet through the brain as he filmed footage for Sonia Mikich and her ARD bureau. We had been together in Tbilisi only two or three days before, laughing and drinking after my escape from Sukhumi. For Rory, the consolation prize for not living longer took the form of an annual award in his name, presented to the freelance cameraman who had shown most gumption in any given year.
The first year, the Rory Peck Prize was awarded posthumously to Farhad Karimov, a cameraman from Azerbaijan. He had worked with Lawrence Sheets in diverse Caucasus conflict zones, such as the siege and fall of Sukhumi in 1993, but most notably during the siege and fall of Grozny in the winter of 1994-1995, when he had established a reputation for himself as someone willing to take the most insane risks imaginable just to capture a particular shot. I had last seen Farhad at the Reuters office at the Raddison-Slavanskaya hotel in Moscow in March of that year, when he was desperately trying to check out reports that another Reuters cameraman, Adil Bunyadov, had just been killed in Baku during the course of a confusing counter-coup melee. I noted that Farhad’s attitude toward frontline camerawork had begun to change.
“All we are doing is risking our lives and those of the people around us for the sake of entertainment,” he had said at the time. He then said he was so sick of war reporting that he had hung up his camera and “returned to the mosque,” meaning he had quit smoking and drinking and had turned to prayer, urging me to do the same.
That is what Farhad had said then. But within a week or two he had changed his mind. Either the compulsion to cover war or the compulsion to cover debt had led him to cast his pacific vows aside and take on a new combat camera job with the Associated Press. Camera in hand, he had come up the same Azerbaijan-Dagestan-Chechnya pipeline that I had traveled scant months before, when he was murdered in the mountains before he could record a moment of his journey.
For his money? His camera? His smile?
Farhad, like Rory, was now lionized as the epitome of selfless news-serving, a legend deserving posthumous awards. Accolades, instead of a longer life.
Ours was the second year of the Rory Peck prize, and a wide field of entries had been culled down to four finalists, whose work, in the words of the chairman of judges, met the Rory Peck criteria of being as human, stylish, and eccentric as the man the prize was named after. We were also, most notably, all still alive.