Page 78 of Tom Clancy Line of Sight
She led him crouching through the short span of timber-framed tunnel and out to the other displays depicting the tragic and heroic efforts of Sarajevans in crisis and under siege.
But the main point she wanted to drive home was on the other side of the cyclone fence. She pointed at the airport where Jack had landed a few days before.
“Sarajevo was completely cut off by the Serbs who occupied the surrounding hills. But here at the airport was where the UN and NATO planes landed with their food supplies instead of the guns and ammunition we needed to fight.”
“I think I read that the West was worried about the war escalating. They were trying to keep guns out of everybody’s hands, not just the Bosniaks’.”
“And yet the Serbs and Croats had tanks and planes and all the ammunition they needed to fight, didn’t they?”
“Yeah, I guess they did.”
“But at least we had food.” She led Jack over to a glass-enclosed display. “See? We received American military rations from the Vietnam War.” She smiled. “Very generous, yes?”
Jack read the label: 1963. He was embarrassed.
“Wow.”
“We received powdered chocolate, but no sugar. Flour, but no eggs. My mother used to pick hazelnut leaves off the trees to make dolmas because there weren’t any grape leaves. It was a very hard time, and all of it could have been prevented...” Her voice trailed off.
Jack finished her thought. “If only good men had not stood by and done nothing.”
It would’ve been a tough call for any NATO government, he thought to himself. Wage war to stop a war? With the Russians next door?
It wasn’t unreasonable for NATO to try and tamp the fire down first with an arms embargo and hope it went out by itself.
Unless, of course, you were a Bosniak living in Sarajevo in 1993.
As a student of history, Jack understood NATO’s reluctance. But he imagined himself as a Bosniak standing here with a family nearly starving to death in the city behind him. He knew he would be as angry today as Aida obviously was if he had experienced the war the way she and her family had.
Tough call. For the umpteenth time, he was glad he would never be president.
“In 1984, the whole world was cheering the Sarajevo WinterOlympics,” Aida said. “Ten years later, when it really mattered, who knew we were suffering?”
—
After the Tunnel of Hope Museum, Aida drove him to the seventeenth-century Jewish cemetery located on the slope of Mount Trebevic.
“After Spain expelled the Jews in 1492, many of them sought refuge in the Ottoman Empire, and many located here. It’s the second-largest Jewish cemetery in Europe, with nearly four thousand headstones and sepulchers.”
Many of the stones were toppled and damaged. “The war was here, too, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, we fight even among the dead. Unexploded mines and bombs weren’t removed until years after the war. It’s safe now.”
Safe but neglected, judging by the graffiti on some of the stonework and the trash in the grass.
Aida then drove Jack to a high point in the pine-covered mountains overlooking the city, a sea of red-tiled roofs in the sprawling valley down below. She pointed out the Serb positions, and from here Jack could clearly see the advantage their guns would have had over the terrified civilians below.
She next took him to the nearby abandoned Olympic bobsled track, now a graffiti artist’s wet dream of tubular concrete and colorful spray paint surrounded by tall evergreens. It was actually quite beautiful in its own unique, postapocalyptic anarchism. He ignored theFUCK RYAN—USAsplattered in red spray paint on one of the support columns, though it couldn’t be missed. Aida was courteous enough not to point it out, even though she surely saw it. He wondered what her reaction wouldbe if she knew how closely connected he was to the slanderous jab.
Jack would have liked to meet the poet laureate while he was rendering his aerosolized thoughts, to offer him a few choice adjectives of his own as he lifted the lad into an ambulance.
Aida pointed out the bullet and shrapnel scars on the bobsled run. “Our forces used these heavy concrete tubes as elevated bunkers.”
“Such a waste.”
“Yes, but by then, what else were they good for?”
—
