Living History by Unknown (best non fiction books of all time .txt) 📕

C-17 pilots in the Air Force, kept the plane cruising high over the devastated countryside, above the reach of surface-to-air missiles and sniper fire. As a reminder of the dangers that remained despite the official cease-fire, each of us was required to wear a flak jacket on the plane, and the Secret Service moved Chelsea and me up to the armored cockpit for the landing. Above the airstrip, the captain dipped a wing and made a near-perpendicular landing to evade possible ground fire.

Security conditions were constantly changing in the former Yugoslavia, and they had recently deteriorated again. Due to reports of snipers in the hills around the airstrip, we were forced to cut short an event on the tarmac with local children, though we did have time to meet them and their teachers and to learn how hard they had worked during the war to continue classes in any safe spot they could find. One eight-year-old girl gave me a copy of a poem she had written entitled “Peace.” Chelsea and I presented the school supplies we had brought, along with letters from seventh-grade children at Baumholder whose parents and teachers had initiated a pen pal program. We were then hustled off to the fortified American base at Tuzla, where over two thousand American, Russian, Canadian, British and Polish soldiers were encamped in a large tent city.

Sheryl Crow, Sinbad and Chelsea and I flew in Black Hawk helicopters to visit soldiers in forward positions. We were flanked by gunships, an indication of what a dangerous job peacekeeping could be. We touched down at Camp Bedrock and Camp Alicia, army outposts in northeastern Bosnia. We watched our troops demonstrate how they were clearing mines from the fields and roads―a grim mission and another reminder of the precarious life our soldiers led. Many voices back home were raising questions about America’s role in Bosnia. Some argued that soldiers should not be involved in “peacekeeping,”

even though it has been part of our military’s historic mission in places and times as disparate as the Sinai desert after the peace agreement between Israel and Egypt and the DMZ after the Korean War. Others argued that European, not American, troops should bear responsibility for maintaining secure borders in the region. Because of these concerns, I spent time talking with the soldiers and their officers, asking for their opinions and listening to their assessments of their mission. One lieutenant told me he hadn’t understood the role the United States could play until he saw Bosnia for himself.

“Before we came,” he said, “it was hard to fathom what was going on here.” He described ethnic groups who had lived peacefully together and suddenly were killing each other over their religions. “You go out in the villages and see all the damage,” he told me.

“You see roofs blown off of houses. You see whole neighborhoods that were completely bombed out. You see people who had to survive for years with hardly any food to eat or water to drink. But now, wherever we go, the kids wave at us and smile,” he told me. “To me, that’s reason enough to be here.”

I got my own look at the desolation of war from the window of our chopper. From a distance, the rolling countryside seemed beautiful and green, typical of pastoral Europe.

But as I flew lower I could see that there were few farmhouses with an intact roof, and it was the rare building that had not been pocked by bullets. The fields weren’t tilled; they were torn up by shelling. It was springtime, but nobody was planting because of the dangers posed by land mines and snipers. The forests and the roads were not safe either. It was awful to see the extent of the suffering and to recognize how much work remained before the people of Bosnia could resume a semblance of normal life.

I had planned a stop in Sarajevo to meet with a multiethnic delegation to hear their ideas about what the United States government and private organizations could do to help heal a society ripped apart by war. The security situation forced me to cancel my trip to Sarajevo, but the people I was to meet were so disappointed that they insisted on braving the journey along fifty miles of treacherous roads to meet me in Tuzla.

We gathered in the conference room at U.S. Army headquarters. My visitors, including the first Bosnian Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church and the leader of the Orthodox Church in the Serb Republic, looked exhausted and beaten down by their ordeals, but they were anxious to talk. They described what they had tried to do to maintain a sense of normalcy in a world turned upside down by war. They described the shock of discovering that their longtime friends and colleagues would no longer talk to them and sometimes became actively hostile. When the violence started, bombs and snipers became a way of life. The Bosnian chief of Kosovo Hospital’s trauma ward told me the hospital had been kept open even after running out of supplies and losing power. A Croat kindergarten teacher, who lost her own twelveyear-old son in the siege of Sarajevo, reported that her class shrank in size as children fled with their families, stopped coming to school or became casualties of the chaotic and arbitrary violence. A Serbian journalist who had been beaten and imprisoned by his fellow Serbs for attempting to protect Bosnian Muslims confirmed that psychological wounds are often more damaging than physical devastation.

In many places I visited, the scarring effect of war on the hearts and minds of citizens was still evident decades and even centuries later. Rebuilding infrastructure in the aftermath of war is one thing; rebuilding trust among people is quite another.

After the meeting, I toured the camp, examining the soldiers’ living conditions and dropping into the infirmary, mess and recreation hall. When Sheryl and Sinbad returned to Tuzla, they put on a great USO show. Chelsea had been a big