Thomas Goltz - Chechnya Diary

KirBAAMMM!!!

Hussein seems intent on sealing our fate by launching a second potshot at the distant armor. Jesus Christ. The guys are hunkered down in their foxholes. Christ they look small and pathetic. The foxholes, that is. Ali isn’t laughing anymore, and I am not laughing at all because while Xamid’s pit is the deepest and Ali’s the shallowest, I do not have a foxhole at all. Just twigs and sticks, like a badly made bird blind. And the camera. The tripod legs reflect like a steel beacon, and the microphone sticks out like a sore thumb. No. It sticks out like the muzzle of a heavy machine gun. I muddied up everything before this little romp in the woods but now my equipment seems to scream here he is, so get him! and it is too late to do anything about it now. Afraid to move. Afraid to breathe. If anybody on the other side is scouring the tree line with binoculars of any power, they are going to find me looking like the sniper, and not Hussein.

KirBAAMMM!!!

Hussein again. Big barrel flash. Big kirbam!

Are those gun flashes from the other side of the distant road? Is that a woosh over my head? I try to sniggle backward into the thorn-bush forest, but it is just too thick and I am going nowhere and losing my pathetic cover at the same time.

KirBAAMMM!!!

Only one thing to do. Only one way to go. Only one safe place. Do it, now. Suck it up and just go! Heart in my mouth, balls shriveled into my gut, I snatch the camera gear and run. Forward, straight across the open ground between the tree line and Hussein’s ambush pit. Run like the wind you fool. Fly! It may look like you crave action but the only thing you really want is a hole in the ground as deep as a grave to hide in.

One two three. One—two—THREE!

And I am in the gun pit, lungs bursting and heart pounding after the fastest fifty-yard dash of my life, trying, trying, trying to hide my utter terror.

“What are you doing here?” Hussein shouts. “This is MY war, not YOURS!!!!”

I say something useless and so incomprehensible I cannot understand it myself. It doesn’t matter a wit. Hussein isn’t listening. He is yanking on the big gun’s bolt. A dead shell leaps out over his head and hits me in the shoulder, dropping on my boot, still hot. That is not my main concern, however. My main concern is my realization that Hussein is loading the big gun manually. Manually. The bandolier feeder thing doesn’t work. We are taking manual potshots at three armored vehicles that can come back at us with fucking automatic fire.

“Toi matz,” Hussein curses in Russian, jamming another round into his gun.

The hunt has just turned. The hunters have become the hunted.

Ihad been shot at before. I had taken many risks, some foolish, in combat zones, too. I had ridden in overstuffed rescue helicopters under fire and traveled down quite a few mined or allegedly mined roads (the rumor being good enough to scare the wits out of you) to have earned my stripes in the vain league of combat correspondents. “Bridge Too Far Tommy” is what some of my professional pals called me.

But this was different. All those yams of ducking flying lead here and there, and amazingly managing to live to tell the tale were in the context of coincidence, such as getting caught in the rear guard of someone else’s army on the run. I had never been involved in an ambush before, pitting under-armed guerillas against vastly superior forces. And in broad daylight.

KirBAAMMM!!!

It is Hussein’s gun, firing one shot for every three hundred sixty-five of theirs.

Woosh, woosh!

Return fire into the thorn-bushes where I once innocently dwelled. Woosh, woosh, woosh!

I am sure I am going to die in this six-foot pit, this grave. And all because I have bought into the idea of war as entertainment. Bang Bang, yeah.

I sneak my head above ground just far enough to stick the camera lens out and click off a few seconds of whatever is shooting at us from the other side of the tracks. I mean, if you are insane enough to be out on this little ambush romp, you may as well complete the picture by doing your job and getting the bang bang that folks back home find so very entertaining. I have screwed my courage and stupidity to the sticking place and my head is above the rim of the pit and I am shooting film just as Hussein is shooting his 70-caliber small cannon broken tank machine gun at the armored beasts across the field. I want this camera of mine or the microphone that looks so much like an over-under gun mount to be just that right now, and I want the camera not to record but to recoil like my trusty 30-30 or maybe my left-eject, pawnshop special twelve-gauge shotgun letting loose against the metal beasts that are trying to kill me, kill us.

KirBAAMMM!!! KirBAAMMM!!! would be the sound of my film. KirBAAMMM!!!

“You are out of your mind!!” screams Hussein, pulling me back down into the pit.

Seylah’s face is white; his pants are stained wet from the inside. So are mine.

I look to my left; Hussein is crouching, studying something through his stupid glasses. Seylah, at the far end of the pit, is sneaking a peek through the Seemores, as some folks call binoculars in Montana. See more, get it? Leaverite? Haha!

Think of anything else. Anything.

Now Seylah is shouting at Hussein, but in Chechen, so I do not understand anything but the word kamaz, the Russian word for truck.

Truck.

One of the three trucks seems to be struggling up the muddy dirt path. Like that one mule deer that always lingers behind the rest when they know you are downwind in that coulee underneath the ridge. A calm settles over the gun pit. Hussein marginally adjusts the oversized glasses he is wearing. They look utterly ridiculous on his face. Seylah coughs something. Coordinates, I guess. I hit “run” on the back of the camera; I have about three minutes of battery life left and I left the spares in my backpack, hidden in the thorn bushes that incredibly distant fifty yards behind me. kirbam…

The blast is almost musical as the world slows, stops. Then, distantly, after two or three or five seconds, a soft, almost gentle thud. No, not a thud. Thud carries the sense of something hitting the earth, dirt. This is different. This is deadly. It is the unmistakable sound of metal meeting metal. Whack, maybe.

The distant truck is stopped on the slope. Then a sputter of red, a flame. Then a short, quick burp as the motor explodes and whatever or whoever was in the truck is very dead.

Seylah hugs Hussein in that attenuated way of snaking one hand around the back that serves as the Chechen handshake.

Congratulations on your kill.

I am about to vomit for joy.

“ It’s time for you to leave,” said Hussein that night after a supper of beef broth and pickles. “It is going to get nasty around here soon.”

I tried to explain that I still had more work to do, images to capture, interviews to conduct. Hussein dismissed my arguments with the sweep of a hand.

“I am a farmer, and not a specialist in photojournalism,” he said.

“But it seems to me that you have an abundance of rich material for your stated project. Our stated project. This is not your war; it is mine. And given present realities, my fear is now that you will lose all the material you have accumulated because you will get killed foolishly and needlessly. It is time for you to go. No, I order you to go. It is our film, too.”