My father’s reaction surprised me. Vietnam had made him vehemently antiwar, so I expected him to applaud my decision, but instead he told me that American soldiers had saved the world from fascism during World War II and that thousands of young Americans were buried in his homeland of France. “You don’t owe your country nothing,” I remember him telling me. “You owe it something, and depending on what happens, you might owe it your life.”
The way my father put it completely turned the issue around for me: suddenly the draft card wasn’t so much an obligation as a chance to be part of something bigger than myself. And he’d made it clear that if the United States embarked on a war that I felt was wrong, I could always refuse to go; in his opinion, protesting an immoral war was just as honorable as fighting a moral one. Either way, he made it clear that my country needed help protecting the principles and ideals that I’d benefited from my entire life.
In many tribal societies, young men had to prove themselves by undergoing initiation rites that demonstrated their readiness for adulthood. In some tribes, such as the Mara of northern Australia, the tests were so brutal that initiates occasionally died. Those who refused or failed these tests weren’t considered men and led their lives in a kind of gender twilight. Modern society obviously doesn’t conduct initiations on its young men, but many boys still do their best to demonstrate their readiness for manhood in all kinds of clumsy and dangerous ways. They drive too fast, get into fights, haze each other, play sports, join fraternities, drink too much, and gamble with their lives in a million idiotic ways. Girls generally don’t take those kinds of risks, and as a result, boys in modern society die by violence and accidents at many times the rate that girls do. These deaths can be thought of as one generation after another trying to run their own initiation rites because they live in a society that no longer does that for them. To the extent that boys are drawn to war, it may be less out of an interest in violence than a longing for the kind of maturity and respect that often come with it.
That, at any rate, was how I came to understand my own curiosity about combat when I was young. That was how I came to understand why I found myself, broke and directionless, on the tarmac of the Sarajevo airport at age thirty-one, listening to the tapping of machine-gun fire in a nearby suburb named Dobrinja.
Sarajevo was under siege by Serb forces that had overrun most of Bosnia during the civil war that started when the former Yugoslavia broke apart in 1991. I had almost no experience as a journalist, but going to a war was surprisingly easy: I flew to Vienna, took a train to Zagreb, and pulled into a station that had field guns lined up on flatbed carriages and soldiers standing around with long knives in their belts. It was a soft summer night and the atmosphere felt electric—exactly what I’d been looking for since I was a teenager. I took the same backpack that I’d had out West a decade earlier, and in it I’d put a block of field notebooks, a box of pens, a manual typewriter, and a change of clothes. I’d heard there was no electricity in Sarajevo, so the typewriter would guarantee that I could always write and file assignments if I were lucky enough to get any. I also had a sleeping bag and a letter from a magazine editor whom I’d convinced to vouch for me so that I could at least get a press pass when I arrived.
I eventually got into Sarajevo on a UN relief flight from Italy. Sarajevo had once been a gorgeous Hapsburg-era city filled with cafés, art galleries, and theaters, but now it was sweltering in the July heat and permeated by the smell of burning garbage. Destroyed cars littered intersections where street battles had taken place, and almost every building was spattered with shrapnel. The bombed-out Oslobodjenje newspaper building oozed its guts out a lower floor as if someone had just pulled a huge plug on the inside. People hired taxis to drive close to the front lines so they could talk by radio to friends on the other side, who were also in taxis. At night the city was completely, absolutely dark and you could walk through it as if you were the only human left on earth. During the day, the streets were filled with people carrying jugs of water or dragging branches for firewood or walking to work in their office clothes, some semblance of life the way it was before. Open areas around apartment buildings had been planted with summer vegetables, and there was even a little turbine made out of tin cans and a bicycle wheel in the Miljacka River that could charge a car battery in a day.