Free The Best American Travel Writing 2014 by Paul Theroux Page B

in the Holiday Inn, and it was in that grotty hotel that the man who was to become my husband and the father of my child professed undying love. I met some of my best friends in Sarajevo and lost several others—to alcoholism, drugs, insanity, and suicide. My own sense of compassion and integrity, I think, was shaped during those years.
    Since then I had come back many times to report on Bosnia, on the genocide there, and to try to find people who had gone missing during the war. Now I was returning for a peculiar sort of reunion that would bring together reporters, photographers, and aid workers who, for one reason or another, had never forgotten the brutal and protracted siege, which lasted nearly four years. By the end of the war, in 1995, a city once renowned for its multiculturalism and industrial vigor had been reduced to medieval squalor.
    Why was it that Sarajevo, and not Rwanda or Congo or Sierra Leone or Chechnya—wars that all of us went on to report—captured us the way this war did? One of us, I think it was Christiane Amanpour, called it “our generation’s Vietnam.” We were often accused of falling in love with Sarajevo because it was a European conflict—a war whose victims looked like us, who sat in cafés and loved Philip Roth and Susan Sontag. As reporters, we lived among the people of Sarajevo. We saw the West turn its back and felt helpless.
    I had begun my career in journalism covering the First Intifada in the late 1980s. I came to Sarajevo because I wanted to experience firsthand the effect war had on civilians. My father had taught me to stick up for underdogs, to be on the right side of history. But I had no idea what it would feel like to stare into the open eyes of the recently dead; how to count bodies daily in a morgue; how to talk to a woman whose children had just been killed by shrapnel while they were building a snowman.
    During my first ride into the city from the airport—past a blasted wall on which the words
Welcome to Hell
had been graffitied—it was clear that my wish to see war up close would be granted. I had gotten a lift from a photographer named Jon Jones, and as we careened down Snipers’ Alley toward the city, he told me how many reporters had already been killed, how close the snipers were and how easily they could see us, and about the hundreds of mortar shells that fell on Sarajevo each day. He recounted in detail how a CNN camerawoman had been shot in the jaw, and told me that a bullet could rip through the metal of a car as easily as a needle pierces a piece of cloth.
    â€œThink of being in a doll’s house,” he said, edging up to a hundred miles per hour on the straightaways. “We’re the tiny dolls.”
    He dropped me off at the Holiday Inn, the only “functioning” hotel in the city, leaving me to lug inside my flak jacket, battery-operated Tandy computer, sleeping bag, and a duffel bag filled with protein bars, antibiotics, a flashlight, batteries, candles, waterproof matches, pens and notebooks, and a pair of silk long johns (which I never took off that entire first winter of the war). I had with me just a single book: a copy of
The Face of War,
by Martha Gellhorn, a journalist who had covered the Spanish Civil War, the Allies’ invasion of Normandy, Vietnam, the Six-Day War, and almost every other major conflict of the 20th century. She settled in Paris in 1930, married a Frenchman, and began to write for
Collier’s,
the
Saturday Evening Post,
and other publications. In 1936, in a bar in Key West (the Frenchman was long gone), she met Ernest Hemingway, whom she married, and later moved with him to Spain. She was blond and beautiful and, above all, brave. She was also, as I would later find out, very ill-tempered and often not a “woman’s woman.”
    I had gone to meet Gellhorn in Wales on a hot summer day in 1991, having been sent to interview her about a collection of her novels