This could not be said for Rory, Farhad, and a number of other freelancers who appeared within the context of the warmup film shown to kick off the gala affair. The extreme case was an overly aggressive Bosnian who had managed to film his own death, which we all got to see in extended form on the screen in front of us.
The list of dead and missing was extensive, but there was equal focus on the parallel issue of the surviving wives and children of killed cameramen, who, through the lack of combat or danger insurance, had been flung into debt and destitution. The frustration and plight of freelancers collecting bang-bang material that was simply too awful and brutal to be shown in anything other than snuff movies was another theme. Why bother to collect such material at all?
Then Nik Gowing, a face more known and respected in the U.K. and the larger BBC world than Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw, and Dan Rather combined, appeared behind the lectern to formally introduce each of the four finalists for the 1996 Rory Peck Award, and show a short, representative clip of the work that had brought each candidate to the hall.
The first was a three- or four-minute segment of a feature piece by Canadian producer and camerawoman Jane Kokan that had appeared on Channel Four’s Dispatches program. It was entitled “Sanski Most,” or “The Bridge at Sanski,” and detailed with humor and brutality the activities of a Bosnian battalion in the final paroxysm of violence of the Bosnia-Serbia war. The next was a news story from Hedley Trigge, a BBC stringer in the Middle East who had been traveling with a UN relief convoy in Lebanon when it was bombed by precision-placed Israeli artillery, an attack designed not so much to kill or maim the Blue Berets as scare the shit out of them. The third candidate was a dark piece on beleaguered journalists in Algeria by Shane Teehan, but it could have been on Colombian drug wars, or Sri Lanka strife for all I cared, because my piece was next, and quite frankly I was not watching anything else by anybody any longer.
“Thomas Goltz, one of the finalists tonight, spent six months among the Chechens with no guarantee that he would make a farthing until his reportage was purchased by ABC,” Gowing solemnly intoned.
This was not exactly correct, but close enough to tickle. I had spent perhaps six weeks in Samashki, and ABC had only really been interested in the sixty seconds of massacre footage broadcast more than a year and a half before, and not in the material that had gone into the ten-minute piece that had brought me to the Peck Awards, but no matter.
The lights dimmed, and on the huge screen in that packed auditorium came images that had me traveling back in time.
Hussein, spinning that waterwheel at the pump station he had previously wanted to buy, when oblivious to the fact that said station had been made out of the tombstones of his ancestors; Hussein, single-loading shells in that front-line gun pit against amazingly overwhelming odds; Hussein, the defender of Samashki against the Russian Bear; the first storming of the town, the mothers and monks march, and then corpses being lowered into graves as Samashki put its dead to rest. “When shall the bloodshed cease in the mountains?” came my recorded voice, quoting a Chechen proverb. “When sugarcane grows in the snow.”
And then the clip was over and Nik Gowing was calling us to mount the stage.
“Good luck,” we said to each other, smiling and lying to each other the way all finalists have done for all time and will continue to do.
We all wanted ourselves to win and hoped the rest were losers.
It had been a long march to the Rory Peck Awards.
Following an assignment from the New York Times to cover the great earthquake on the far eastern Russian island of Sakhalin, I had returned to Montana via Istanbul to lick my wounds of war. A swing band was playing at the Murray Bar, a swimmer was lost in the Yellowstone flood, and Walter and Maggie Kirn had gotten married. I nearly burned down the barn because my hillbilly welfare tenants wouldn’t leave and let me back in my house, and Senate leader Newt Gingrich had launched his Contract With America. I did not quite understand all the excitement and buzz about e-mail and the Internet because I did not yet know what e-mail and the Internet were. I guess I had been out of the technological loop for a spell, with war raging all around me.
Or without me.
In June 1995, the Chechen field commander Shamil Basayev and a crowd of suicide commandoes had bribed their way across Russian lines and penetrated some two hundred kilometers outside Chechnya’s border to take over a hospital in the Russian town of Budyanovsk, and were using over one hundred patients as human shields.
This was hot! This was news!
But I could not get an assignment to send me back over to my war. The reason for my unemployed state, I was sure, was directly connected to a fax I had received upon my return from Moscow to Montana.
The line quality was bad, but it was still very identifiably a mug shot of me wearing a beard and staring at a camera for a passport photo. Someone had inked in the word “(Un) Wanted!” in bold letters over the portrait, in the spirit of the words Dead or Alive that used to adorn hanging trees throughout the Old West. The more modern symbol of undesirability—a large “X” similar to No Smoking, No Radios, and No Skateboards—crossed out my face. Beneath this image, also written in bold type, were the words “VNI Hall of Heroes,” but with a “Z” written over the “H” of the last word, converting the sentence to “VNI Hall of Zeroes.”
Video News International, the people who had left me in the lurch in Chechnya, had been having some fun at my expense. But what was written at the bottom of the one-page poster was not very humorous at all. It read:
Tomas Stalinsky Goltzkoi: Leader of Russian forces in the assault on Chechnya, he attempted the ultimate spin-doctor maneuver by trying to pass off badly shot home video of same as a journalist’s account of stubborn Chechen resistance to superior fire power.
The poster.
I had sent dozens of copies of my rough-cut Samashki film to dozens of production houses, but with no result. Thanks, but no thanks, was the nicest reply I received.
True, the war in Chechnya had moved so far off the American news radar that it had literally disappeared from view—but I was increasingly convinced that the reason I could not get an assignment was because my reputation had been ruined.
The poster.
Not only was I a lousy cameraman and journalist, but also a Russian disinformation specialist. Had the poster traveled to those very same New York newsrooms that were now turning down my Samashki film left and right? What about Europe? Turkey? Russia? Chechnya?
No, it did not look like a joke to me.
My erstwhile employers were not only ruining my career—they had just put a potential death warrant on my head.
The poster.
In retrospect, I guess my behavior might be said to be linked to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder caused by the rusty razor blade of a distant war remembered, and the fact that I was forced to watch it as a distant voyeur. I spit and fought and drank and shrieked and relived Samashki and Chechnya on a daily basis, alienating friends and family, and hating the fireworks on the Fourth of July. There was Crow Fair and Annual All-Indian Rodeo within sight of the Little Big Horn Battlefield, where I joined the Fancy Dancers from the Lakota reservation, performing a zikr in the open sessions while trying to make profound connections between the white man’s conquest of the American West and the Russian conquest of the Caucasus. If this sounds strange—and to this day I do not think the comparison so much unreasonable as just obscure—I was certainly drifting off in still more distant directions and walking the thin line that separates delusion from insight.