After covering a war, a friend said, buy yourself a house. I did. I came to this French village where church bells chime the rhythm of the days, married here, raised children and parked Bosnia somewhere in a corner of my mind.
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Nermin Tulic, an actor, his legs blown off by a Serbian shell on June 10, 1992, telling me how he wanted to die until his wife gave birth to their second daughter and his dad told him a child needs his father even if he just sits in the corner.
I took that away from the war: the stubbornness of love.
Amra Dzaferovic, beautiful Amra, telling me in the desperate Sarajevo summer of 1995 that: “Here things are black and white, they are. There is evil and there is good, and the evil is up in the hills. So when you say you are just a journalist, an observer, I understand you, but I still hate you. Yes, I hate you.”
I took that away from the war: the fierceness of moral clarity.
Pale Faruk Sabanovic watching a video of the moment he was shot in Sarajevo and saying: “If I remain a paraplegic, I will be better, anyhow, than the Serb who shot me. I will be clean in my mind, clean with respect to others, and clean with respect to this dirty world.”
I took that away from the war: the quietness of courage.
Ron Neitzke, noblest of American diplomats, handing me his excoriation of the U.S. government and State Department for “repeatedly and gratuitously dishonoring the Bosnians in the very hour of their genocide” and urging future Foreign Service officers to be “guided by the belief that a policy fundamentally at odds with our national conscience cannot endure indefinitely — if that conscience is well and truthfully informed.”
I took that away from the war: the indivisibility of integrity and the importance of a single dissenting voice.
