FROM WAR VIRGIN TO WAR WEARY 187in the shop stopped and glared. It was understandable, since at that time the
JNA and Croatian Serb paramilitary forces were laying waste throughout
Croatia. I was more careful before speaking from that point on.
During my TDY to the budding war zone, I combined denied area tra-
decraft with war correspondent skills to cover a unique wartime situation
with little recent precedent. The country was transformed almost over-
night from one of the more successful components of the Socialist Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia to an independent state fighting a bloody war for
independence. I brought an objective outsider’s perspective to the situa-
tion—those Americans covering Zagreb up until that point were begin-
ning to “go native” and were sometimes reporting and repeating untrue
Croatian propaganda and conspiracy theories. This was somewhat under-
standable, since the Serbs had already carried out deadly, unprovoked
“self-defense” attacks in Croatia. Moreover, the “brainwashing” of neutral
American officials slated for Yugoslavia began during language school in
Washington, DC, where Croatian teachers attempted to indoctrinate those
learning Croatian, while Serbian teachers did the same to those learning
Serbian. Learning Serbo-Croatian with native-born speakers was like being
stuck in the middle of someone else’s tribal tug-of-war. Or an ugly divorce.
My first dispatch from Zagreb was a play on CNN’s overused Bernard
Shaw teaser recorded in Baghdad during the start of hostilities in Desert
Storm; the two-line situation report read, “There’s nothing happening
outside. The skies over Zagreb have not been illuminated.” The objective
of this brief back-channel message was to calm official American nerves in
the wake of the US consulate’s previous alarmist reports that the JNA was
poised to overrun Zagreb and possibly slaughter people by the thousands.
Within a few days of my arrival in Zagreb, I was able to assess the situation
and conclude that, despite some indicators to the contrary, this was not
the case. It was true that the Yugoslav Air Force had attacked the Croatian
president’s residence in Zagreb just a few days before my arrival, along
with several other targets in the city. (The Putin-esque Serbs immediately
put out a typical and clearly false conspiracy theory, that the Croats had
staged the attack by setting off an explosive in the building just as a JNA
warplane flew innocently by overhead.) The JNA and Serb militias had
also surrounded and were systematically destroying the old Baroque city
of Vukovar, three hundred kilometers to the east, and had also begun their