194 AMERICAN SPY
Vietnam War movie, Full Metal Jacket. As the real battle raged around us and
grew more deafening, John had trouble hearing his movie. He’d inch closer
to the generator-powered TV and turn up the volume so he wouldn’t miss
any of the action, all the while oblivious to the shooting going on outside. I
yelled at John that he might want to pause the movie for a while and come out and see
the real thing, but he was glued to the set and didn’t hear a word I said.
On Halloween day of 1992, on a flight from Zagreb to Frankfurt, I was
seated next to a pretty Croatian war widow with big, sad brown eyes.
Milana appeared to be about my age. In a barely audible voice, she told
me her husband had been a banker and he was killed during the recent
fighting in Zadar. She was devastated. When she told me her story, in addi-
tion to sympathy, I felt guilt. As always, I was able to leave this war behind
and return to my family and life in America. She and many others like her
could not so easily escape this reality. As we both looked out her window
in silence, I thought about the previous week’s adventure with my Croa-
tian security service colleagues. One minute, we were on the front lines in
Mostar, dodging bullets and shelling, death and destruction all around us.
The next, we were enjoying the idyllic Bosnian countryside and a good
meal. It was all in a day’s work for General Ivan, Colonel Markica, and the
other Croat officials who joined us that day. I marveled at how they dealt
with this stressful way of life. It had become normal for them. I was pretty
sure I could never become accustomed to living life with my family in a
war zone. Like Markica had said after the mortars landed uncomfortably
close to us, war was always someone else’s problem. This Balkan civil war,
like the war in Iraq, was wicked, but it wasn’t mine to own. I was merely an
outside observer. I wasn’t a soldier, whose job it was to seek out the enemy
and who was targeted for annihilation by that same enemy. I was a spy who
had much more control over my destiny than did the average soldier. And,
unlike the poor people who have no choice but to try and survive in war
zones, I knew I could always return home.
That night, about sixteen hours later, I arrived home just in time to go
trick-or-treating with my little girls. When I knelt down and hugged them
for the first time in months, I did not want to ever let them go.