SALON

National security

Saturday, Dec 19, 1998 2:33 PM UTC

Airstrikes of mercy

A lifelong pacifist and former Middle East reporter for the Wall Street Journal on why we should bomb Baghdad.

By
  • more

    • All Share Services

Until the Gulf War, I had always been on the pacifist side of the argument in all the conflicts of my lifetime. Vietnam, Panama, the Falklands — I protested them all. And then in 1988, on a searing summer day, I stepped off a plane in Baghdad and began my acquaintance with a regime of such unfathomable cruelty that it changed my views on the use of force.

I learned from Iraqi dissidents about mothers, under interrogation, tortured by the cries of their own starving infants whom they weren’t allowed to breast-feed; about thalium, the slow-acting rat poison Saddam Hussein used on his enemies; about Iraqi government employees whose official job description was “violator of women’s honor” — i.e., prison rapist.

One bright spring day during the Kurdish uprising, I followed Kurds into the security prison they’d just liberated in northern Iraq. It was dim in the underground cells, so my face was only inches from the wall before I was sure what I was looking at. Long, rusty nails had been driven into the plaster. Around them curled small pieces of human flesh. One withered curve of cartilage looked like part of an ear.

I’m home now in my own liberal, pacifist country, Australia. Within a couple of hours of the news of the latest Baghdad bombings, people in Sydney were in the streets, demonstrating against them. Friends were on the phone, upset: “Terrible, isn’t it? And at this time of the year! Whatever happened to peace on earth, goodwill to men?” Local pundits argued on the television, decrying American bully-boy tactics against a small and defanged Arab country. I agreed with almost everything they said: Yes, the slaughter and injury of Iraqi civilians is tragic. And yes, the timing of the bombing is the worst kind of political cynicism. And yes, it is questionable what effect this new onslaught will have on Iraq’s weapons capability. And yet I disagreed with their conclusion: that this bombing is therefore wrong.

If Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, he will use them. We know that, because he already has. For two years I’ve studied a haunting photograph of two of his victims: a young Kurdish father prone on a dusty street in Halabja and his infant, still tenderly cradeled in his arms.

- – - – - – - – - -

The West’s great crimes in Iraq are not the latest bombings, but the years of inaction: ignoring the use of poison gas in the theaters of the Iran-Iraq war; ignoring it again in Halabja and other rebellious Iraqi cities; ignoring the vast human and environmental devastation since the Gulf War in the mostly Shiite regions of southern Iraq, where the ancient wetlands of Mesopotamia and the unique culture of the marsh Arabs have been wiped out by a series of dams and diversions designed to starve a minority into submission.

Just after the Gulf War, apologists for its inconclusive ending claimed that it barely mattered that Saddam had been left in power. The metaphor of choice was the piece of rotten fruit: Saddam would fall from the tree under the weight of his own decay. Instead, the tree may be dying from the effects of sanctions, but Saddam is holding as tight as ever to its desiccated branches.

Opponents of the bombing say that dealing with Iraq should be left with the United Nations and its gentle leader, Kofi Annan. But Annan is a peacemaker, and a peacemaker isn’t necessarily what’s required in Iraq, any more than it was in Bosnia. Sarajevans will tell you of the agonies caused by the U.N.’s “evenhanded diplomacy” — the pressures to accept any kind of unjust peace the Serbs happened to offer. The history of the United Nations has shown that the organization is most useful in keeping peace between belligerents who have decided they no longer wish to fight. But recent experience has shown that the organization is both inept at, and degraded by, its insertion into conflicts where one or both parties have no wish for peace.

After I left the Middle East, I spent some time covering the United Nations at its headquarters in New York and in the field in Bosnia and Somalia. During that time, I learned that people who go to work for the United Nations often do so because they believe that war is the greatest evil and that force is never justified. In Somalia, one U.N. staffer broke into sobs in front of me because instead of keeping peace, her job had become the administration of a war.

It is impossible to imagine the bureaucrats of the United Nations accepting the kind of harsh conclusion that may be necessary in the case of Saddam Hussein: that the bombs should continue to fall until he does. Iraqis will die. But they are dying now, by the scores and the hundreds, in horrible pain, in the dark security prisons with the blood on the walls and the excrement on the floor.

I wish I still believed, as I used to, that the United Nations was always the world’s best chance to avert bloodshed. I wish I could join, as I once would have, the placard-waving peace protesters outside the U.S. Consulate here in Sydney.

I wish I’d never seen the piece of ear nailed to the wall.

Geraldine Brooks covered the Middle East and the UnitedNations for the Wall Street Journal. She is the author of "ForeignCorrespondence" and "Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of IslamicWomen." More Geraldine Brooks.

Tuesday, Jul 28, 1998 7:00 PM UTC

World war 3.0

A new book on futuristic 'cyberwar' has an old-fashioned agenda.

By
  • more

    • All Share Services

| At the outset of “The Next World War,” author James Adams recounts a story from the days of the Persian Gulf war. It seems that CIA operatives loaded a computer virus into hardware destined for use by the Iraqi military. But just before the virus kicked in and began knocking Iraqi “command and control” networks off line, the air war began. A blizzard of bombs obliterated the building that housed the infected hardware. play

It’s a great story — the perfect preface for a book about how military tactics and strategy are being revolutionized by digital technology. But is it too good to be true? Like so many other interesting and alarming info-nuggets in “The Next World War,” the anecdote is attributed to unnamed “intelligence” officers. And that should give pause. Who, in the age of “information warfare,” is more likely to be a master of disinformation and deceit than an intelligence officer?

By Adams’ definition, “information warfare” includes the management of media and popular perceptions as much as it does hard-coded weaponry like smart bombs or targeted viruses. So perhaps the question of whether the story is true is irrelevant. If America’s enemies believe that the U.S. is capable of unleashing digital attacks on their telecom infrastructure or banking system, then the battle is already half won. Or, even closer to home, if the various wings of the military bureaucracy can convince Congress that computerized destabilization is a real threat, then their continued funding is assured for years to come.

Adams is a former defense correspondent for the London Sunday Times and the author of 12 books . One of his specialties is espionage, and his years of expertise and extended network of contacts bolster “The Next World War’s” claim to insight. When he confines himself to discussing how the U.S. military services and intelligence agencies are coping with an age of fast-moving technological change and information-warfare issues, Adams is precise and informative. His analyses of the Gulf War and other ’90s hot spots, such as Somalia and Bosnia, may not offer much that is particularly new, but they’re still authoritative and interesting — as are his rapturous descriptions of imminent advances in high-tech military hardware.

But when Adams actually attempts to live up to his title and talk about the specifics of cyber-warfare, he ventures onto shakier ground. His chapter on hackers is by far the weakest. First comes the tiresomely predictable stereotype of “hackers” as “brilliant, twisted and destructive.” It certainly comes as no surprise that a mainstream journalist would misuse the word “hacker” — which in its original sense meant anyone who enjoyed tinkering with computers but has now been adopted by the media to describe a malicious class of pimply teenage lawbreakers. But when such ignorance is combined with a stream of unsubstantiated allegations, the reader loses faith in the entire enterprise.

Adams tells us that in the early ’80s the Soviet Union infected Wall Street’s biggest banks with viruses “that would have taken down the banking system in the event of war.” He claims that that phone companies are suffering “major losses” from “phone phreakers” and that hate groups are taking advantage of “this new wave in hacking power.” But he doesn’t offer any evidence. And to argue that the “Internet has become the communications tool of choice for terror/liberation groups across the globe” is simply warmed-over alarmism. The Internet is also the communications tool of choice for fans of Japanese animation, 3-D graphics specialists and lovers of stuffed animals. So what?

I am fully willing to believe that somewhere deep in the bowels of China, Russia, Iraq and the CIA, diabolical computer programmers are cooking up dastardly viruses aimed at sowing confusion and wreaking havoc. But I’d like to see some proof, other than anonymous assertions by NSA spooks or anecdotes about 16-year-old boys fooling around with unclassified documents on a U.S. Air Force computer.

Malevolent hacking isn’t really what “The Next World War” is about, anyway, despite the book’s own marketing hype. Adams’ real concern is with military preparedness and the possibilities for resolving conflict in an age where neither the military nor the political leadership is prepared to wage war if there is a chance of suffering casualties: “With a military that only wanted to fight wars where no one got hurt, advocates of information warfare found a ready audience for what they had to offer.”

The promise of fighting battles via the computer chip and the guided missile, rather than with bayonet and AK-47, is seductive. In an era of military downsizing in which countries like the U.S. are led by a political generation that has no experience of a real war (something that Adams finds distressing), the possibility of winning wars by pressing buttons at CIA headquarters seems like an armchair general’s dream come true.

It is at this point that the Adams’ agenda finally surfaces. He deplores that “a risk-averse approach to warfare in all its forms has seeped into the corridors of power.” We must understand, he argues: If you want to win wars and stop thugs from running amok, you’ve got to pay the price — people will have to die.

Cyberspace is partly to blame for this contemporary cowardice, argues Adams.

“Patriotism,” he concludes, “which allowed politicians to send their men to fight and die for their country, is becoming an old-fashioned concept with little resonance among a generation that has loyalty to cyberspace but little loyalty to a world where sacrifice, honor and duty are the price that might have to be paid for membership in a society with standards, morals and principles.”

No wonder “The Next World War” gets fulsome back-cover blurbs from right-wing flag bearers like thriller author Tom Clancy and former prisoner-of-war Sen. John McCain. “The Next World War” isn’t actually about the future at all. It’s a fulmination against the present — against vacillating politicians like President Clinton who are slaves to pollsters and CNN, and who refuse to make the same hard choices as the “brilliant” George Bush or the visionary Ronald Reagan.

McCain calls his book “a clarion call to prepare for threats that are already materializing.” But it’s more like a position paper for boosting government spending on high-tech gadgets that the military-industrial complex is infatuated with.

Continue Reading Close
Andrew Leonard

Andrew Leonard is a staff writer at Salon. On Twitter, @koxinga21. More Andrew Leonard.

Tuesday, Nov 18, 1997 8:00 PM UTC

Passages: Full Circle

In an excerpt from his book, 'Full Circle,' Michael Palin describes his journeys through Vietnam.

By
  • more

    • All Share Services

DAY 74
In order to reach the border by bus and to have time for all the formalities we are advised to leave early. Wake at five and pack my bags. It is Sod’s law that we spend the least time in the most attractive places. Nanning, warm, airy and cheerful, slips away and we roll steadily and unspectacularly south-west along soft-wooded valleys and through scrub-covered hills. The road is straight and empty. As recently as 1979 troops and tanks rolled along here when the Chinese, angered by the Vietnamese invasion of their ally, Cambodia, fought a seventeen-day war before withdrawing. Until 1992, when the Cambodian situation was settled, this border remained firmly closed.

Last images of China. A late breakfast in a candlelit restaurant, outside which a turtle shell is being skinned for soup. Despite a power cut we are served omelettes, pumpkin leaf, tarot and sweet potato. A huge “One-child” poster at the border town of Pinxiang, a reminder of the birth control policy.

The frontier is eight kilometres beyond Pinxiang at a place called Friendship Pass. The road bursts out from thickly-wooded hills and high cliffs onto a run-down square. In one corner is a handsome, disused cream-and-white French colonial residence, with elegant ironwork balconies, pilastered fagade and louvred windows, a relic from the days when this was a northern outpost of French Indo-China. Opposite stands a three-tiered stone pile as clumsy as the other is elegant. It bestrides a triumphal archway called Friendship Gate. Through the arch is a parking area with cypress trees planted around it, where two or three heavy trucks are drawn up. Beyond that is Vietnam.

The last rites of Chinese bureaucracy are given from what looks like a requisitioned cow-shed. Behind desks, in stalls separated by concrete partitions, sits a trio of black-uniformed and epauletted officials from customs, immigration and quarantine. There is no sign of ring fences, barbed wire or the usual trappings of military surveillance. This sleepy, tree-shrouded backwater is a most unconvincing exit.

The barrier is raised and we make our way down the muddy track to Vietnam. Only then do we notice a big new circular concrete and glass building under construction amongst the trees. This is what will replace the cowshed. To the very last, evidence of China being born.

A cold wind blows through Friendship Pass, and there is not much one can do to avoid it. The facilities at the Vietnamese border post at Dong Dang are basic. The steps and wall outside are monopolized by a large and rebellious German tour group which has obviously been here for some considerable time. There is a toilet, situated in a blockhouse behind some nearby bushes, but this reached saturation point years ago and no one goes inside it anymore, preferring to use the bushes themselves. Small, sad-faced Miss Ha, our fixer in Vietnam, waits with inscrutable calm as the enigmatic processes of customs and immigration slowly evolve.

The road to Hanoi is equally slow, picking its way between sharp, irregular limestone peaks that give the landscape the look of a workshop, where new mountain designs are tried out. According to my guidebook this frontier area is still heavily mined. Considering that the Chinese were fighting their way through here only sixteen years ago and eight years before that the Americans were bombing the place flat, the countryside looks remarkably unscarred. The red and white kilometer markers the French left behind are still intact, and the rocky fields are carefully tended by men in olive-green pith helmets and tiny old ladies in the conical coolie hats I had expected to see everywhere in China, but never did.

After an hour on a rough, meandering road through the mountains we emerge onto the rough, straight road that leads across the rich plain of the Red River delta. The countryside is filled with people. A great throng moves in both directions, like a scene of refugee exodus. Few have cars, most are either walking or on pedal and motor cycles. Every few miles, usually on a low rise beside the road, are monuments to the Vietcong army that defeated the French and the Americans. Nothing grandiose or militaristic; often nothing more than a whitewashed obelisk. The box-girder bridges across the Red River still show patches and repairs from the American bombings of the seventies.

We are in the centre of Hanoi by six o’clock — twelve hours after leaving Nanning. Two hours later I’m sat in a cyclo, something like a bath chair attached to a bicycle frame. My driver, who pedals from behind, moves me at a stately pace up the dimly-lit streets towards the highly recommended “N6″ roof-top restaurant. Roof-top means exactly what it says — eating on a roof, beside pipes and chimneys.

Walk back to the hotel marvelling at the night-time activity, the small-scale bustle on the streets. Shops and workshops lit by single strip-lights. There’s no neon, no bright-lit billboards, no seething lines of stationary cars. This seems to be a city on a human scale — busy but not oppressive. I catch myself wondering how it could be so different from China, and making the mistake of merging these countries of the Asian Pacific into one homogeneous “oriental” mass. Vietnam is as distinct from China as South Korea was from Japan. It has its own ancient culture, language and alphabet and its own, instantly appealing style.

Tired, but unable to drag ourselves away from these dim, congenial streets, Basil and I take a last beer in a small Thai restaurant by the hotel. The proprietor is friendly.

“You like Thai food?” he asks.

“Oh, yes.”

He looks out into the night and sighs.

“Yes, one day,” he says, “I will go to Thailand.”

+ + + + + + + +

DAY 76
The characteristic sound of Hanoi traffic is the tinkle of the bicycle bell and the squawk of the scooter horn. It’s a discordant sound, but discordant in quite an acceptable way, like that of a farmyard. It’s the sound of traffic at an early stage of evolution, lacking the high-tech swish and roar of Western cities.

But Vietnam, like China and Russia, is opening up. Here they call the process Doi-Moi — “renovation” or “new thinking” — and it has informed government policy for almost ten years. A managed market economy has replaced the communist command economy. Foreign participation in business is encouraged. It is obligatory for Vietnamese civil servants to learn a foreign language. Walking into town I pass the fruits of this policy. A four-star hotel called The Standard is being developed in partnership with Singaporeans and Malaysians and a South Korean company is building on the site of the old French prison, the Maison Centrale. In the Vietnam war this was the main holding and interrogation centre for captured American servicemen, known, mockingly, as the Hanoi Hilton. Many were tortured here. Now cranes and reinforced concrete piling rise from behind the prison walls and it could indeed become the Hanoi Hilton once again. Only, this time Americans will come to be pampered.

While the big developers try to spring their monumental schemes on Hanoi, the city remains defiantly small and low slung. Ninety-five years of colonial rule have left behind a passable imitation of a warm French provincial town based around shady avenues of two and three-storey buildings with stuccoed fronts, wrought iron balconies, pantiled roofs and tall green louvred shutters. Baguettes are sold by the roadside, bicycles are stacked along the broad pavements, cyclos re-route round old ladies with shoulder poles and baskets. I pass a long wall, hung with jackets, in front of which is a heap of clothes languidly supervised by a hollow-cheeked old man and a young boy. A passer-by stops, rummages around, pulls a jacket out from beneath the pile and puts it on. It’s hopelessly crumpled, and far too small for him, but the old man and the boy, like men’s outfitters anywhere, nod approvingly.

In Hanoi, you don’t need to hail a taxi, they hail you. Constantly.

“Hey you!”

I always fall for it, wheeling round as if I’m about to be karate-chopped. So when I do choose a cyclo I go for someone who doesn’t seem to be the slightest bit interested in me. His name, it transpires, is Than, an elderly man with a Ho Chi Minh beard, broken teeth and one wandering eye. He wears a workman’s blue cotton jacket and a grey-brown pith helmet. Before he mounts the saddle he takes a long gurgling puff from a bamboo pipe, which he then tucks down behind the seat, and mounts the saddle, exhaling slowly and skilfully.

With Than I visit the bleak, triumphal square where the remains of Uncle Ho, the father of modern Vietnam and the architect of the victory over the Americans, lie in a forbidding, columned mausoleum of black granite and marble. It’s a depressing place for many reasons. For a start he shouldn’t be here. Ho Chi Minh expressly requested that he be cremated and his ashes scattered over the countryside.

“Ho Chi Minh Will Live For Ever In Our Life”, proclaims a red and gold banner beside the tomb.

There is not much life around this portentous monument today apart from two boys on bikes practising wheelie turns and a middle-aged woman learning how to ride a motor-scooter.

Beside a lake in the middle of town is a theatre where the internationally-known Thang Long Water Puppet Troupe performs. The show is based on the traditional agriculture of Vietnam and particularly the vital importance of the flooding of the paddy-fields to ensure a successful rice harvest. The “stage” is a 20 x 12-foot water tank and the puppets, which range from peasant figures to birds, animals, ceremonial barges and legendary dragons, are all operated on the end of long submerged metal rods by puppeteers you never see.

The Water Puppet Theatre reminds me once again of the heady pace of political change in Asia. Twenty-three years ago the Americans were raining bombs down on this city. Now a show which celebrates the resilience of the peasants who defeated them is sponsored by AT&T, one of the largest companies in the USA.

+ + + + + + + +

+ + + + + + + +


DAY 79

Dong Hoi station is in a downpour. Little children, wet through, beg at the windows, smiling ever so sweetly, raising their palms out at arm’s length until little pools of water form in them. They are chased away by the guard. Catering ladies, middle-aged and motherly, with grey suits and incongruous white frilly aprons, come by with breakfast. This consists of a dry, vermicular collection of noodles sloshed into a bowl, accompanied by a cream wafer. When I ask if there’s anything else they look at me pitifully and move on.

Feel a bit dejected. It could be all sorts of things — the weather, the breakfast, lack of sleep after a night of being rocked and rolled about on my couchette, or the side-effects of the strong anti-malaria pills which I shall be taking from now until we leave the tropics.

I’m struggling to stuff the cold sticky noodles into my mouth when, with loud protestations, the ladies in grey reappear, seize back my bowl and pour a heap of hot pork broth on top, giggling gently as one might at someone who had tried to eat Weetabix without milk.

From my window I look out on a grey-green, washed-out world of paddy-fields and palm trees. White specks of light fleck the grey as a flock of egrets rises and curls away. A cemetery offers a brief splash of colour, bright blue and green paint peeling off the gravestones. There is an animated game of cards going on in the compartment next to mine. I count nine people squeezed around an up-turned suitcase. Next to that a man with a full-length keyboard across his knee is giving music lessons to a vivacious lady in a pink and black jumpsuit.

Forty miles south of Dong Hoi the rain has passed out to sea and a hot sun is breaking through as we roll slowly across the Ben Hai River, better known by its line of latitude as the Seventeenth Parallel. Between the years of 1954 and 1976, it marked the division between North and South Vietnam.

Thirty years ago President Johnson’s huge “Rolling Thunder” bombing offensive swept across the soft, sylvan countryside. Some of the craters can still be seen, though most have been filled in to prevent them becoming stagnant breeding grounds for malarial mosquitoes. Defoliants, like Agent Orange, have left their mark too, but the trees they burned and poisoned have been replaced, mostly by fast-growing eucalypts. Mines, planted by both sides, are still being discovered.

For someone of my age the Vietnam War remains a source of appalled fascination. For ten years or more images of the utmost cruelty came out of this green and pleasant land. Today nature has covered up most of the scars and, seeing it with my own eyes for the first time, the landscape looks as innocent as a baby.

We arrive at Ga Hue at midday. (Ga, meaning station, is a phonetic Vietnamization of the French “gare“.) Nothing much advertises the fact that we are in what was once the imperial capital of Vietnam. An ugly concrete girdle has been grafted onto the crumbling pink wash of the old French station building. Across a dusty square white metal tables are set out beneath a pair of thin acacia trees.

We leave the train here and take a boat up the Song Huong — the Perfume River — as far as the famous Thien Mu Pagoda. Its popularity as a tourist attraction is evident from the amount of transport available, ranging from catamarans, their prows decorated with gaudily-painted tin dragons, to the bobbing sampans with semi-circular rattan cabin covers, fan shaped bows and long-stem outboards, nimbly steered by foot or groin even. As we chug up river I see a woman bending over the side of a boat washing her hair. She rinses it with scoops of water from an American army helmet.

At the jetty below the elegant seven-storey brick pagoda, children gather round, hands outstretched.

“Pen? … Chewing gum? … Money?”

There is a small monastery up on the hill behind the pagoda. It was from here that a monk called Thich Quang Duc left for Saigon in June 1963, and became the subject of one of the most famous photographs of the century by setting himself alight on a public street as a protest against President Diem’s treatment of Buddhists. His car, a four door light-blue Austin sedan, registration DBA 599, which appears in the background of the photo, is now on display in a corner of the monastery. In colour, make, model and quite possibly year of manufacture, it is identical to the one in which my father used to drive to work every day.

Back in Hue, cyclo drivers outside the hotel offer us “Dancing”, “Boom-boom” and “Eighteen-year-old girls”. But in the end we settle for Princess Diana. Her Panorama interview, filling a huge screen, plays to an almost empty hotel bar.
+ + + + + + + +


DAY 82

Breakfast overlooking the Perfume River. Rain falls from a low, flat sky, as it has done for the last thirty-six hours. A shiny green kingfisher stares intently into the limpid water. A village of sampans lies strung out on the stream and the slim boats look like driftwood in a monochrome morning light.

At Hue station, cyclo passengers arrive encased like babies in multi-colored rainproof sheeting. Children are sheltering under one of the arcades, taking it in turns to see who can slide their sandal furthest along the tiled floor.

As we progress slowly down the coast towards Da Nang on the southbound Reunification Express I can see why water puppetry is such an art form in Vietnam. The entire countryside looks as though it is about to float away. Short, fat, lazy rivers merge with waterlogged fields. Canals join up with impromptu creeks and ponds, which are in turn swelled by streams spilling merrily over mud walls. My bowels seem to take inspiration from all this and I am forced to face the Chinese toilet-paper torture. Hong-He Sanitary Tissues, the only lavatory paper that could also be used for sanding down.

Outside Da Nang the prospect changes dramatically. Our single line track winds up through tunnels and across steep, bridged gorges until we reach Hai Van Pass, nearly 4000 feet above the ocean. Waterfalls and tumbling streams have replaced the listless rivers of the plain. Far below, the flat, dull-silver surface of the South China Sea is transformed into tossing, turbulent breakers.
+ + + + + + + +


DAY 82

We are on our way north from Saigon, heading for the town of Tay Ninh, near the Cambodian border, in search of an international religion found only in Vietnam. It’s called Caodaism and its secrets were revealed to a minor official in the French administration called Ngo Van Chieu at a seance in 1921. Through Ngo Van Chieu God made known his “third alliance with mankind”, which turned out to be a fusion of existing religions — Roman Catholicism, Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism. This eclectic ecumenical grouping was based on direct psychic communication with great figures of world history and at times Descartes, Pasteur, Joan of Arc, Lenin and even Shakespeare have been contacted (though Shakespeare has not been heard of since 1935). The most regular respondent has been Victor Hugo, who was honored for his ability by being made spiritual chief of Foreign Missions (which have so far extended only as far as Cambodia, 40 miles away).

At Tay Ninh this youngest of world religions is alive and well and the red-and-white trimmed, ornately-towered ochre walls of the Caodaist cathedral rise from a wide and empty compound the size of Red Square.

The general shape of the cathedral is open-plan Western-style, but there the similarity ends. The floor is on nine different levels — representing the nine steps to heaven — and from it rise columns wound round with lumpy, luridly-painted green and orange dragons. The tracery is wildly and fantastically floral with what looks like great cabbage stalks growing up around the windows. The dome at the far end is painted to represent star-spangled heavens and beneath it is a huge globe on which is painted a single eye in a triangle, the symbol of Caodaism.

The service is very laid back. The mood is gentle and contemplative, the music precise and delicate, and quite haunting. Women enter from one door and men from the other and all sit cross-legged on the brightly-tiled floor wearing ethereal expressions and chanting gently. Above them birds swoop in and out of the building.

Irrepressible roving bands of ten-year-old salesmen lurk outside.

“What your name?”

“Michael.”

“Oh. Your name beautiful.” An ice-cold can of 7-Up is thrust against my arm. “You very handsome.”

“Not now thank you.”

“Maybe later. Yes?”

On the way back to Saigon we stop at the Cu-Chi tunnels, a system of passageways and chambers dug from the hard red earth during the guerrilla wars against the French, and later the American and South Vietnamese forces. Despite being close to enemy bases, their cover stripped by dioxin defoliants and carpet-bombed by B-52s, they were never destroyed in thirty-five years of warfare. I crawl down the tunnels to see preserved hospitals, war-rooms, and the kitchens with their special system of underground ducts which funnelled cooking smoke two miles away before letting it out above the surface. The tunnels are hot and tight, and I found my back scratching and scraping painfully against the mud wall.

The Cu-Chi underground system could accommodate five thousand people for up to two weeks. My guide, Le Di Phuoc, has shown high-ranking American generals round the tunnels. I ask him what their reaction is. “Well,” he says, with a trace of a smile, “they understand why they lost.”

Continue Reading Close

More Michael Palin.

Monday, Jan 6, 1997 4:30 PM UTC

In the land of the war criminals

Street dogs, dead souls and killers who are heroes

By
  • more

    • All Share Services

they eat pig or they get the fuck out,” Ranko, 20, says of his former Muslim neighbors and friends in this northern Bosnian town.

Ranko is a nice guy. Good-looking, with a raffish sense of humor and a fluent rap-like English lapped up from the cinema and the meager offerings of
Republika Srpska television, he translates for me the lyrics of a Croatian rock band, Atomic Shelter, blaring from the loudspeakers.

Nix, 21, is quieter. “The Thinker,” his friends call him. He’s a writer, a poet, and as militantly Serbian as Ranko, though late at night and drunk, he whisperingly confesses: “My legs carry my dead soul, man; I am empty; I feel nothing. Do you understand me?”

Over beer and marijuana at the Ars Media bar in town, Ranko, Nix and other demobbed soldiers from the Bosnian Serbian army — they call themselves “The Street Dogs” — espouse in no particular order Stalinism, anarchism, nihilism, punk, metal, genocide, fascism, freedom of the press, love for mother Serbia and undying devotion for Ratko Mladic, the notorious Bosnian Serbian military leader and indicted war criminal. “Mladic, he’s our man, our main man; he’s a fucking hero and we would all die for him,” says Ranko.

And they never forget Prijedor’s “Silent Night.”

Prijedor is a town of about 100,000 people in the center of a mining, forestry and agricultural district, nominally in Bosnia-Herzegovina, but to the Serbian residents, a proud component of the self-proclaimed statelet Republika Srpska. “Cleansed” of its Muslim population, Prijedor is also home to an estimated one-third of those indicted by the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague for “crimes against humanity” and “genocide” committed in Bosnia’s civil war.

Many of those crimes were committed in these parts, beginning on a spring night in 1992.

the way Ranko and the others tell it, there was a list circulating through town, ominously entitled “The Silent Night.” It supposedly listed the names of Serbian intellectuals, political leaders and community figures targeted by militant Muslim outsiders who had come to Prijedor to raise the town’s 70 percent Muslim majority against its Serbian minority. The threatened Serbs, goes the story, struck first.

Documents issued by The Hague tribunal give a succinct and somewhat less mythological account of what happened next:

“About 23 May 1992, approximately three weeks after Serbs forcibly took control of government authority in Opstina [district] Prijedor, Bosnia-Herzegovina, intensive shelling by Serb forces of Bosnian Muslim and Croat areas in Prijedor caused Muslim and Croat residents to flee their homes. The majority of them were seized by the Serb forces … [who] shot or beat them on the spot … the Serb forces began taking prisoners to the Omarska, Keraterm, and Trnopolje camps.”

In the camps inmates were gang raped; they were stabbed and mutilated; they were starved; they were sexually assaulted in front of their families and forced to perform fellatio on one another; some were shot. But mostly they were slowly, mercilessly beaten to death with boots, fists, shovels, baseball bats or any instrument that came to hand. Some of those indicted were listed as “visitors” to the camps.

Armed with an official “Wanted” poster, I drove the 300 kilometers from Sarajevo to Prijedor. It was early winter, and smoke was drawing from the chimneys in the Serbian villages I passed. Nothing was alive in what were once Muslim villages, only the skulls of torched homes, their roofs, windows and door frames burned out completely.

Finding the former camps is not difficult. There are signposts and billboards all along the 50-kilometer drive between the Bosnian provincial capital of Banja Luka and Prijedor. One of the camps, Keraterm, on the edge of Prijedor, is operating again, as a tile factory. Trnopolje, a village lying halfway between Prijedor and the Omarska concentration camp — labeled a “death camp” by the Hague tribunal — advertises guest houses.

The camps, linked to nearby residential areas by narrow-gauge railway lines, are remarkable only for their offensive blandness. The older villagers are gruff. To a visitor they claim to know nothing, except for the sowing of fields and the cutting of timber. In Prijedor, there is a mixture of fear, conspiracy and defiant pride. “What you have to understand is that these so-called war criminals are heroes up here,” says an ex-opera singer from Sarajevo, playing “Killing Me Softly” on a Hammond organ at the AeroClub in Prijedor. “If you are going to indict one person, you have to indict everybody, because everybody participated.”

The Aeroclub is owned by Simo Drljaca, the former police chief of Prijedor, described by a spokesman for The Hague tribunal as a man “accused by every major human rights organization of massive human rights violations,” from the beginning of the ethnic cleansing in May 1992 until September 1996, when he was forced to resign at the insistence of IFOR, the Nato-led ground forces. Drljaca once famously remarked to a British journalist during a tour of the Omarska concentration camp in August 1992 that “Muslims are usually very skinny because they don’t eat pork — have you read the Koran?”

Drljaca remains free, though he is expected to be included in the next list of indictments to be issued this month. Meanwhile, he works for the Republika Srpska Ministry of the Interior and owns and runs a successful transportation business in Prijedor. The locals call him “Mr. Ten Percent.” I find his office easily enough but a bodyguard acidly declines my request for an interview and advises me not to come again.

On May 11, 1992, the roundup began. Ranko passed through the streets of Prijedor as Muslims and Croats were dragged from their houses and shot, or beaten, and loaded into yellow and blue vans for transportation to the camps. Only 16 years old, he had already volunteered for the militia. A couple of men he knew were dragging an old Muslim man from his house. They grabbed Ranko and thrust a pistol into his hand, telling him to shoot the old man.

“My hands were shaking, I looked at him and pointed the gun but I couldn’t shoot. He reminded me of my father. He was saying, ‘Don’t do it, son, don’t do it.’ He was kneeling in the gutter outside his house. Then his wife came down the stairs screaming and crying, and they shot her in the eye. She fell back inside her home. The old man stopped pleading, and began crying, just crying then.”

The men pointed at a passing dog and ordered Ranko to shoot it, which he did. As the dog lay dying, they screamed at Ranko, asking him if he was a good Serb and telling him that if he could shoot a dog, then he could shoot a Muslim. Yes, yes, he was a good Serb. He closed his eyes and pulled the trigger. Ranko’s customary bravado evaporates as he recounts the one second it took him to kill his first man. He saw at least 50 murdered bodies in the streets that day.


The Sensei Bar in Kozarac, a small, devastated village a couple of kilometers from Prijedor, is owned by Dusan Tadic, who has the dubious honor to be the first man tried by the war crimes tribunal.

Tadic was a guard at the Omarska, Keraterm and Trnopolje camps, where, according to the war crimes indictment, he raped women, beat and shot some prisoners to death and forced others to drink from puddles and crawl over broken glass, while jumping on them until they could not move. Then he emptied a fire extinguisher into their mouths as they lay prone. To his kid brother, Mladen, who now runs the Sensei Bar, “Dusan is a great guy … he actually saved a lot of Muslims … wouldn’t hurt a fly… it’s a case of mistaken identity … he didn’t even know how to use a gun.”
Goran Borovnica, also from Kozarac, is on the wanted list, but has disappeared. Friends think he died fighting on the central Bosnia front during the war. He is accused of hauling out Muslim prisoners as they were being marched to the camps and shooting them on the spot. Goran was also “a great guy,” says Mladen, “but very, very violent when drunk.”

Goran’s two sisters and mother live in a pitifully small house that used to belong to Muslims. Lubica, his mother, alternately weeps and screams obscenities about her former
Muslim neighbors. “He was a lovely man, and wouldn’t hurt a mouse,” she says. “If there were more people like my brother and Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, this war would never have happened,” says Goran’s sister, Branka, 38, pulling on a Vek cigarette. She kisses the images of Mladic and Karadzic on the wanted posters. “It was a normal war here — and the Muslims shot at their own houses.”

If that’s true, the Muslims did a brutally efficient job. Kozarac is a ghost village, leveled, burned and empty. Scattered teapots and pans, lumps of melted glass, torn clothing, a dog carcass and charred bits of washing machines and stoves litter the streets and muddy lanes where 6,000 houses once stood.

IFOR wanted posters are sometimes quaintly accurate. One simply goes to 31 Cirkin Polje Street, Prijedor, as noted in one of the posters, and there you find Predrag Banovic — and if you’re very lucky his twin brother, Nendad. Both of them are accused of torturing and beating to death civilian prisoners.
The Banovics still work for the reserve police, a couple of local policemen tell me. They share a red motorbike and can often be seen riding through town, a couple of kilometers from the Keraterm concentration camp, where among other things, Predrag forced one man to bite off another’s testicles.

I drove to their house on a narrow fruit tree-lined lane at the edge of Prijedor. Some lights were on, and through the latticed window I recognized Predrag, his black hair in a pony tail, kneeling on the bare wooden floor, counting freshly harvested apples. His father, Svetko Banovic, was entering the
figures in a book. I pushed the door open and stepped into the room. “IFOR!” Predrag whispered, thinking I was a military investigator who would arrest him. He hid his face with his hands and ran from the room as his father confronted me and forced me out. Mr. Banovic said that the man was a worker and that he hadn’t seen his son for three years.


Suzana, Ranko’s girlfriend, is angry and sick of the questions. It’s late at night and we are at an impromptu birthday party for their friend, Momo. Momo and others are imbibing marijuana and rejki (the local turpentine). There’s singing, laughter and a vague sensation that something could always turn nasty. Ranko tells us about a very funny night when they all got so drunk that “we beat the shit out of one another.”
“Why don’t you write about what the Muslims did to us?” demands Suzana. “Show what they did here.” What did they do? I ask. “They did nothing, because we got in first,” says Ranko. “But they wanted to. We were smarter and faster.”

They tell me again about “The Silent Night.”

“No, I never saw the list, but I know that it existed because my uncle’s name was on it,” says Ranko. “Hey,” says Nix, whispering to me out of earshot. “This was their city, the Muslims.” His eyes are wide. “No one will tell you what happened, because they’re too fucking scared.” The worst “atrocity” they can offer me is a cemetery for the Serbian war dead. “You will see it full of mothers crying for their sons and it will break your heart,” Ranko assures me.


The dull red buildings of the former Omarska concentration camp are perched on the edge of the village of Omarska, seven kilometers from Prijedor. People could wash their dishes and watch the beatings and shootings from their kitchen window. A small red brick building in the center of the compound, now covered with a snowy fringe, was known as “The Red Building.” Prisoners were taken there for “special treatment,” which they almost never survived.

I’m looking for Zeljko Meakic, the former camp commander at Omarska, where up to 3,000 inmates were incarcerated, tortured or killed. Despite assurances from the Republika Srbska Minister of the Interior that Meakic has since been removed as deputy chief of the Omarska police, local villagers tell me that, yes, every morning “the commander,” as they call him, still leaves for work at the Omarska police station.

It is freezing and snowing as night falls. I have been searching for Meakic’s house for nearly two hours, getting conflicting directions. I stop in a tiny, isolated bar and ask the barmaid if she knows where Meakic lives. She says she’s never heard of him, but a few minutes later, as I’m drinking coffee, I hear her describing my car over the telephone.


In late August 1992, Ranko had a friend over for a few drinks. His friend belonged to a military demolition team that had received orders that night to blow up a mosque in central Prijedor. Ranko’s friend invited him to go with the team, about a dozen boys. At around midnight they set off for the Muslim temple, which Ranko tells me, “was about 200 years old. I don’t know, they all look the same — cheap.” They battered the door down and began smashing up the mosque, downing more rejki as they looted and destroyed.
One of the boys started playing Iron Maiden and Nirvana over the loudspeakers that had once broadcast the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer. Then they lit a bonfire of carpets and tables in the middle of the mosque and bored holes in the walls by the light of the fire. They wired up the charges, dismantled and took the sound system and gathered outside to
watch the walls crumble in a single cloudy explosion, singing and laughing. I asked Ranko if he felt ashamed. “Why? I did two djamijas [mosques] the same way. If you destroy their djamijas, they never come back.”
I’m curious, then, as to why the mosques I pass are all destroyed, while the Muslim graveyards abutting them are left conspicuously untouched. One man I ask, a farmer in a field, replies, “not enough bulldozers,” but Suzana’s answer is different. “Disrupting the dead. It brings bad luck.”

One night, drunk and stoned, and by way of explanation for all the questions that I have asked, Nix replies in song:
I used to love her

But I have to kill her

She feels so much

She drove me nuts

She’s buried right in my backyard

I know I miss her

So I have to kill her

She’s buried six feet under

And I can still hear her complain

“Guns ‘n’ Roses,” he says, as if that says it all.

The head spins with the myths and imperatives that pervade all Balkan conversations, the memories of past wrongs crying to be righted. “The Silent Night,” Muslims who “breed like rabbits,” the dispossessed Serbs who had “once owned all the land,” the mythical caches of arms in every Muslim household, the frontier between Turkey and Europe, manned by the innocent, vigilant Serbs, the plans by Bosnian President Alia Izetbegovic to create a fundamentalist Islamic state where every Serbian maiden would be forced to wear the chador.
Beyond Prijedor, the process muddles on. While The Hague tribunal calls repeatedly for the arrest of the indicted, IFOR officials argue that they have no mandate to arrest. The government of the Republika Srpska maintains that there are no war criminals on its territory (it refuses to recognize the legality of the indictments), therefore it has no obligation under international law to arrest anyone.

In Prijedor, the Street Dogs yell “sex and violence” like baying wolves, screaming at the empty streets and darkened roofs, sending a chill across the town’s already frigid air. They have rocket-propelled grenades, anti-tank
missiles and plastic explosives in their bedrooms. Ranko’s cupboard has an arsenal where other kids might store their tennis rackets. Still, for all their bravado and defiance, psychic hounds are snapping at their own heels.

“You see,” says Nix, with a slow, sweet smile revealing tombstone teeth that belie his tender years, “you despise us. But you cannot despise us more than we despise ourselves.”

Continue Reading Close

Gordon Weiss is an Australian journalist based in Sarajevo. More Gordon Weiss.

Monday, Nov 18, 1996 10:05 AM UTC

The Awful Truth

Marriage: The Embalmment of Love

By
  • more

    • All Share Services

my best friend and old roommate got married the other day. We used
to live like two grubby skater hags, in one big warehouse room with essentially no privacy, and spent our unkempt
evenings together drinking beer on the couch and socking each other in the arm and cackling wildly. This was a
state of bliss and excellence I always held dear, and figured if nothing else in my life worked out, Chirt and I could
be two old filthy cackling women and live in some big cluttered house and renounce everything but books and beer
and possibly a dog together.

However, this fantasy escape route has been completely obliterated by her getting
married. “Can you believe it?” she was saying to me, weeks before. “I’m buying a dress. I’m buying
shoes. What’s happening to me?”

Indeed, a shock larger and perhaps more life-altering than
puberty, even. The lashing of herself to the mainmast of another. The renouncing of sexless cackling. The
renouncing of renouncing everything.

A wedding is an unspeakable ordeal. I have been a bridesmaid before, and
I know. It is one small disaster after the next. “Everything, everything cost two hundred dollars more than
everybody said it would,” lamented the groom, days before the ceremony. “I just had to squash all my rage and
write checks. Just smile and write the checks. Checks, checks. Everybody took advantage of me because they
knew I was over a barrel, and I couldn’t just tell them to fuck off and punch their lights out, or I’d risk losing the
space, the catering …”

Poor guy, I thought. People getting married, like people having children, have no idea
what’s about to happen to them. They suffer and shell out money, so they can suffer and shell out more money,
and have no life and no freedom, etc. etc. forever and ever, Amen. Yet once they do it, they all seem to think it was
all a great idea.

I was thrust into the role of “Maid of Honor.” This meant that I had to do things like Get My
Hair Done With The Bride early in the morning, and wear a pink dress that I normally would have looked at with the
evil alacrity of a group of Orinda skinheads discovering an unconscious drag queen lying in their parking lot.

I
mocked and taunted Chirt all morning. “Bridey! Bridey!” I hollered, to which she smiled and groaned, helpless in the
undertow of impending events. I brought her a beer as she was sitting in the stylist’s chair with her curlers. “Here,
you’ll need this,” I said. She looked at me, puzzled and amused. “You brought me a beer?!” she asked. The
obviousness of needing a beer at 9 a.m. on her wedding day had become a mystery to her. I realized that an
enormous steel door was slamming shut on our lives, forever. “Well, YEAH!” I blurted out, somehow defensive.
She ended up understanding the beer and drinking it, for which I was grateful.

“I’m so nervous,” she
said, which I found surprising. “He won’t back out now,” I told the Bride-to-Be. “He’s written too many
checks.”

“Wedding is theatre,” my mother said. “For most girls, this is the only time they’re ever really onstage.”
It’s true: Bride as Ingenue. Bride as the Embodiment of Beauty. Groom as Respectable Future Personified.
Innocence and Beauty Weds Stolid and Secure Respectability in Mutual Bond of Legally Fortified Love. Ideally.
Theatre, I guess. Ritual, really. The difference between Ritual and Theatre being that Ritual will cost you a whole lot
more.

We all managed to get through the short, utilitarian ceremony with a minimum of pain.

About
midway through the wedding day, the groom leaned over to me and said “Hey, somebody has to trash the car.” I
rushed out with holly fronds and doilies from the buffet table. Lumpy (his real name), the Best Man, had a bar of
Zest from his shaving kit and we proceeded to write “Just Married” and “Suckers” all over the Groom’s Honda. We
festooned it with toilet paper, we tied soda cans off the back bumper. This societally condoned vandalism had a
wholesome worthlessness about it, like a non-alcoholic beer. It’s hard to get a true vandal’s hard-on for an act
steeped in Tradition  getting away with something that is a time-honored tradition that you’re
supposed to get away with doesn’t pack the same creative emotional wallop as doing something that will
truly dismay the victims. But oh, hee hee hee. We trashed the car, us wedding party adults. Boola Boola, won’t the
rival college be shocked we stole their goat. Titter titter. Wheee.

The bride’s oldest brother is one of these guys who never says a word and lurks around in the background and
looks like he might be dangerously crazy, until you throw him up in front of a group of people and announce that
he’s going to make a speech. Then he becomes this fluid genius, like Dylan Thomas on a fresh drunk, rolling into
lyrical free-prose. “Marital partners need to be worthy opponents,” he said, wisely. “Your partner is somebody
you’re going to need to battle with for the cause of self-improvement for the rest of your lives. The bride and the
groom in this case are pretty evenly matched. If either of them were marrying anybody else, I’d be terrified for the
other person.”

Absolutely true, I thought. The worthiest opponent. Somebody with whom you can relentlessly
wage a War on Truth and Love, a socko mate with whom to knock each other’s blocks off, then pop them back on
again. Someone who won’t flee from the ring whining at the first taste of blood. A psychic animal of the same size
and weight. ‘Til death do you part.

Weddings make one want to get married. But one thing has to be self-evident, before one can do it  the
It Is Obvious That We Should Be Married thing. There shouldn’t be a shadow of doubt about it, because marriage is
an ordeal of mythological proportions. A Circus of Need. I wish I was needed by somebody. It brought a tear of
self-pity to my eye later, driving home, thinking that the only person who ever said they needed me was dead. But
life is funny and cool, and I have faith in its weird magnetic logic, and eventualities.

When Chirt and I lived
together, I got an emergency phone call one day at the theatre from her mother. “Do you know where Chirt is? I’ve
got some news…” As it turned out, the younger of her 2 brothers had just fallen through some thin ice in Sweden
with his girlfriend, and both of them had died. I watched Chirt go through this terrible grief for around a year and a
half  she was torn through with devastation. She and her brother were very close. They had language
between them like twins  some long alphabet of non-sequiturs that could reduce them to red explosions of
tearful laughter. He was one of the main anchors into the world for her.

The other person most affected by
Chirt’s brother’s death was the late brother’s best friend. The best friend and Chirt became pals through coping with
the loss together  they did a lot of crying and walking and talking and remembering. Then the other day
they got married. Unreasonable pain turned itself inside out, and through it came astonishing joy.

“He cried all
the way to Calistoga,” said Chirt of her groom, a few days after the honeymoon. “He said he’d never been that
happy before; he’d never cried because he was happy. He didn’t know he could be that happy.” The whiplash agony
and ecstacy of human life, exemplified. Up, down. Up, down. A little higher up, if you’re lucky, every time.

Continue Reading Close

Cintra Wilson is a culture critic and author whose books include "A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Re-Examined as a Grotesque, Crippling Disease" and "Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny." Her new book, "Fear and Clothing: Unbuckling America's Fashion Destiny," will be published by WW Norton. More Cintra Wilson.

Monday, Jul 15, 1996 12:18 PM UTC

Rewriting Bob Dole

Novelist Mark Helprin talks about his fascination with war and death, his exile from the liberal literary establishment, and his greatest writing challenge -- making flatlander Bob into a figure of mythical stature.

By
  • more

    • All Share Services

Mark Helprin is more than just an accomplished novelist and sometime conservative commentator. He’s also a would-be kingmaker. The novelist has been besieged by the press ever since it was revealed that he authored Bob Dole’s Senate retirement speech — an unusually lyrical oration by the Kansas solon’s dry standards. Helprin’s soaring words were widely credited with at least temporarily recharging Dole’s languishing presidential campaign.

After laboring unsuccessfully for an interview with the feted speechwriter, one recent afternoon I received a mysterious phone call. The caller challenged me to guess his identity, providing me with a series of obscure clues: he was calling from “the state with the second largest park service, after Alaska;” he lived in “the north of that state;” he was sitting at a “polished wooden desk with a clutter of papers in an office with rosewood panels;” he was “looking out the window
onto a farm field of alfalfa.” I finally realized that I was talking to none other than the elusive Mark Helprin himself. My acumen was rewarded with a nearly hour-long interview, as the novelist sat in his rosewood-paneled office in the farmhouse in upstate New York where he lives with his wife and two children.

Helprin’s participation in the Dole campaign did not come as a political shock. He has been a conservative contributor to the Wall Street Journal’s opinion page for more than a decade. It was one such column published in February — in which he argued that Dole’s leadership in the Senate was hampered by the Republican bomb-throwers in the House — that brought him to Dole’s attention.

As a senior fellow of the Hudson Institute, a right-wing think tank based in Indianapolis, Helprin promotes an almost aesthetic ideal of rugged individualism and a high-minded aversion to the sloppy realities of the welfare state. He will continue to sound these themes in a new online conservative magazine being launched by former Delaware Governor Pierre (“Pete”) du Pont.

Helprin is also the author of what some critics regard as among the most magical works in contemporary fiction — which he acknowledges Dole has not read (“Elizabeth maybe, but not
Dole”). “Ellis Island and other Stories” was nominated for a National Book Award. His three subsequent novels, “A Winter’s Tale,” “A Soldier of the Great War” and “Memoir from Antproof Case,” are books of ambitious sweep and complicated entanglements worthy of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. His outsized characters retain a bizarrely mystical, purist perspective, willing to throw everything overboard in pursuit of their beliefs. Sound familiar?

Helprin hankers for the rough-and-tumble of political campaigning; he suggested that I consult “A Winter’s Tale” for the type of “campaign that I would love to run.” That book conjures up a mayoral campaign in New York City in which an eccentric Praeger de Pinto wages a challenge against the machine candidate, referred to simply as the Ermine Mayor. Helprin writes: “Where most politicians, including the Ermine Mayor, were quick to promise things
they would never deliver, such as clean streets or the absence of crime, Praeger’s approach was different… He never talked about garbage, electricity or police. He only talked about winter, horses and the countryside. He spoke almost hypnotically about love, loyalty and esthetics… He promised them love affairs and sleigh races, cross-country skiiing on the main thoroughfares, and the transfixing blizzards that howled outside and made the heart dance.”

Helprin concludes the passage with an observation as applicable to current American politics as it was to his literary invention: “They thought, or so it was generally stated at the time, that if they were going to be lied to, they might as well pick the liar who did it best.”

Though in real life Helprin’s preferred candidate, not unlike his opponent, already sounds more like the promise-a minute Ermine Mayor than the quixotic Praeger, Helprin has every intention of continuing his unpaid work for the Dole campaign. In fact, he revealed that he has already sent a draft acceptance speech for Dole to deliver at his Republican coronation next month — perhaps the candidate’s last chance to narrow the double-digit gap between himself and President Clinton. Helprin refused to provide any details of the speech, saying that it could be changed, or rejected altogether — an unlikely prospect given the success of his previous foray into speechwriting.

In our conversation, Helprin was alternately playful and resentful of being “misunderstood” — and at times reviled — by the “liberal” literary establishment. Claiming that his phone has been ringing 12 hours a day since Dole let slip who authored his resignation opus, Helprin insisted that I would be permitted only five questions, which he ticked off one by one as we spoke.

In “Memoir from Antproof Case” and “A Soldier of
the Great War,” your protagonists undergo dramatic
wartime experiences that shape the course of their lives. In the speech you wrote for Dole, you elevated his wartime experience into an almost religious metaphor of transcendence and redemption. Why does war have such literary and political resonance for you?

I write about war heroes because they are ever at risk
of their lives. The interest of the group comes ahead of your own personal experience. This is important to politics, as well as in literature. If you think too much of yourself, and about preserving yourself, you don’t have the spark of life. It is the same thing from a literary point of view. The liveliness of character and personality comes from one’s commitment to the world. Something that puts you at the door of death can do that.

I once had that experience. I was cross-country skiing down a glacier on Mt. Rainier, jumping crevasses. I was sailing over those crevasses one after another. I was perhaps a little out of it, maybe there was not enough oxygen in my blood cells. I sailed over one patch of snow and fell into a deep crevasse. I tumbled in, and was showered with snow and ice crystals. I can still feel the taste of them as they touched my lips. It looked to be 600 feet down. I thought I was going to die. I was in ecstasy. It was a wonderful feeling. Fortunately I caught myself on my ski poles, and I didn’t
die. It was also a wonderful feeling to survive. That is the stuff of life. Everyone faces death. In literature, you just shorten the time. When we exaggerate that, in literature as in politics, we make a metaphor of it, it has great power.

Is this idea of facing down death the root of your support for Dole?

The best way to encapsulate my attraction to Dole is that I admire the man’s courage, his fortitude, though I may not agree with all his political positions. When we vote for president, we’re not just voting on his political positions. Something could happen you cannot foresee to change those. The only way to judge is on the character of the man. We must know what the man is.

There’s a far stronger tradition of literary engagement in politics in Latin America and Europe than there is in the United States. Where do you see yourself in that tradition?

There is a long and honorable tradition of writers’ involvement in politics and political speechwriting. Look at history: Melville was awarded with a position as Customs House inspector; Hawthorne was American consul to Liverpool; Washington Irving was U.S. ambassador to Spain. They did political scutwork, and were rewarded. Walt Whitman — do you know why he wrote “Leaves of
Grass”? He was working as an editor at the Brooklyn Eagle and was fired for writing an editorial in support of Martin van Buren for President. He wrote “Leaves of Grass” because he was out of a job and had to earn some money.

Many people over the past few months have accused me of stooping to politics. But their objection is that it is the the “wrong” politics.
They lionize Vaclav Havel, Mario Vargas Llosa — they’re okay as long as their politics are okay.

You’re suggesting that you’ve suffered in this regard because you are a conservative. Has it had any effect on how people now perceive your fiction?

Though I can’t prove them, I hear anecdotal reports. I spoke to someone in a reading group who told me that someone said they wouldn’t stay in the group if they read me. She allegedly called me a “right-wing twerp.” I don’t mind the “right-wing,” but “twerp,” I don’t like that. I’ve heard reports of bookstores that won’t sell my books. Look at the history of my books. I wrote “Ellis Island” in the early 1980s. It received the Penn-Faulkner Award, was awarded a Guggenheim, the Prix de Rome, nominated for a National Book Award. Then Christopher Buckley wrote a piece in the Sunday New York Times saying that the Right now has its own reputable writer of belle lettres. There’s not been a single nomination since. I’m not saying that’s the reason, but it may have something to do with it. Whatever happens, I don’t give a damn.

According to your official biography, you served in the Israeli Air
Force; you did a stint in the British merchant marine; you grew up in
Jamaica. But you’ve been accused, in the New York Times Magazine and most recently in The New Republic, of blurring the line between fiction and nonfiction in describing your own life.

I cannot tell a lie. Except once or twice in my life. There was a
character assassination piece about me in the New York Times Magazine (by the novelist Paul Alexander), in which they tried to show I wasn’t straight with interviewers. This guy, he came to my house, I spent hours with him. He didn’t believe I was in the
British merchant marine; that I was almost killed in Jamaica by a Pakistani immigrant. He was such an idiot. I was in the British merchant Navy in 1967. Because I couldn’t show him crew records, he said I was making it up. Later I found the crew records in a warehouse in Newfoundland, and published them in the Paris Review.

And the truth is that I was in the Israeli Air Force in the late 1970s. I became an Israeli citizen, served in a combat unit, I went on dozens of patrols at the Lebanese border. Counter-infiltration it was called. But I never ran into anybody, I never said I did. I was never in combat, but I was at the risk of it. One of the stories in “Ellis Island”
came out of that experience: ‘The Jew of Persia,” based on a guy I met when we were stuck on the top of a mountain in a snowstorm.

I’ll admit to making up two stories. On a college radio station I made up a story that I was a millionaire, an assistant to an African dictator who stole diamonds. But it was a good story. And I made up a story once about my family, growing up. I said we’d all sit around the dinner table, and my father would command us to tell him a good story. My father saw that and got angry.

I keep a foot in both boats, truth and fiction. And you know what they say about keeping a foot in both boats…

Continue Reading Close

Mark Schapiro is a freelance writer based in New York. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Harper's, Harper's Bazaar and the Utne Reader. More Mark Schapiro.

Page 38 of 39 in National security

Recommendations