The New Yorker, 11th December 2006
School for Survival
By Elizabeth Rubin
One cold and drizzly afternoon last fall, I was riding with a group of BBC journalists through a stretch of leafy woodlands, when our driver suddenly hit the brakes. A red car was parked across the road, blocking our way. Men with guns, in balaclavas and combat fatigues, surrounded us, banging on the windows and firing Kalashnikovs into the air. "Get out! Get the f**k out!" they yelled. The doors were ripped open, and we were hauled from our seats and shoved face down into the wet grass and dirt. When I turned my head slightly to breathe more easily, someone grabbed my hair, pushed my face back into the mud, and shouted, "Keep your f***in' head down!" Then he wrapped a burlap sack around my head and hoisted me to my feet.
We'd been travelling in a convoy of twelve, in two Land Rovers, and we were now lined up, told to put our hands on the shoulders of the person in front of us, and marched away, stumbling up a hill. When we came to a patch of level ground, we were separated, and a man pushed me to the ground and made me stretch out flat with my legs apart. He crouched over me and twisted and pulled on my rings until he finally got one off my finger. Then he kicked my boots, tightened my hood, gave my head a jerk, and walked off.
Then nothing happened. All I could hear was the wind and my heart beating. The bag around my head was itchy, and I was getting claustrophobic. I tried to calm myself by closing my eyes and letting my mind wander. I heard a blackbird calling in the distance and remembered being in the Jewish cemetery in Sarajevo during my first days in Bosnia, in 1994. I was with two photographers, and we had just come across a new Bosnian military position. Armed men appeared and clearly thought that we were spies. One of them pulled me aside while another punched a photographer. They shoved rifle butts in our backs and took us to a house, where we were interrogated by an officer for several hours. We were released in the end, but, either for sadistic entertainment or for fear that we'd give away their position, the soldiers forced us to leave over a bridge that was a favorite target of Serbian snipers.
As I lay in the wet grass with a hood over my head, I wondered what I could have done differently that day in Sarajevo. Not ventured so close to contested terrain? Perhaps. But isn't that what reporters do?
While what had happened in Sarajevo had been unnerving, what was going on here in the woods was merely uncomfortable. I knew that our abductors were British instructors, that the kidnapping was a fake, that it was part of a Hostile Environments course for journalists, which is given by Centurion Risk Assessment Services, on an estate in Hampshire, not far from Heathrow Airport. Soon we would be drinking tea and eating biscuits in a nearby manor house with Steve, a former Royal Marine commando who had had more than twenty years of experience fighting in the Persian Gulf, the Falklands, Cambodia, and Northern Ireland. He would lecture us on how to deal with hostile militiamen at checkpoints ("Keep your hands visible; don't try to get away"); on evasive driving techniques ("Don't go in without an exit strategy; if you can see the rear tyres of the car in front of you then you've got room to pull out and escape"); on communicating with kidnappers ("Don't talk first"); on avoiding mines-all the kinds of things a war correspondent could expect to run into in today's wars, whether in Bosnia, Kosovo, or Congo.
The Centurion course was established in 1993, at the behest of Chris Cramer, who was then the head of BBC News and is now the president of CNN International. The idea was initially very unpopular-"uncool," Cramer says. "It was pointed out to me in no uncertain terms that real men and women went to war and the children stayed at home. That getting your head blown off went with the territory." But the territory was changing, and too many of Cramer's correspondents were getting killed. In the first two and a half years of the war in the former Yugoslavia, more journalists died than had during the whole of the Vietnam War. And the Bosnian War was more conventional than most post-Cold War conflicts, which are often fought without clearly drawn front lines by irregular militias who do not like to have their activities observed. More than five hundred journalists have been killed on the job since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
If there was a single event that led the BBC to require battlefield training for all its war correspondents, it was the fatal shooting of a twenty-nine-year-old reporter, John Schofield, in August of 1995. Schofield had been covering Yugoslavia since the outbreak of the war. While he and his camera crew were trying to film houses burning in a Serbian village, Croatian soldiers opened fire. Schofield's torso was protected by body armor, but a bullet went through his neck. Two of his colleagues were also shot and wounded. It is unclear whether the Croatians fired because they didn't want scenes of burning, looted Serbian homes broadcast on the nightly news or because-as they claimed-they mistook the BBC crew for a Serbian reconnaissance party. Nor is it clear that Schofield took any unusual risks on the day of his death, although in the competitive news business caution is often at odds with pressure from editorial desks to supply the most dramatic images. "They'll tell you, 'Don't do anything dangerous, and then ask, 'Why didn't you get the story?'" said one of my Centurion classmates, a fifty-nine-year-old BBC correspondent who had covered Vietnam and Northern Ireland.
As NATO troops fanned out across Kosovo last June, correspondents, spurred on by eager editors, rushed to find the first mass graves. One member of a British TV crew, who was taken to a site where some twenty people had purportedly been buried, even helped to dig up the earth himself-an act that could have destroyed crucial evidence in an investigation. Those first few days of peace were a disorienting time. Serb troops had not all pulled out of the province; you were never sure whom you'd run into at the next crossroads, which roads were mined, whose guns were firing in the distance. Two German correspondents for Stern magazine were executed by unidentified gunmen near one of Kosovo's main roads the day NATO arrived, and the rumor I heard among journalists at the clogged border crossings and in Pristina's Grand Hotel, where Serb secret police were still prowling, was that someone had lured them out of their car by promising to show them the site of a mass grave. A Stern correspondent who investigated the deaths told me that the two men had simply been the random and lucky victims of a Serb carjacking on a well-travelled mountain pass. But none of the members of the Kosovo press corps I spoke with mentioned this version of the story. They could all relate to the idea of pushing one's luck for a scoop, and it was naturally more comforting to believe that there had been a reason, a mistake made-that fatal accidents could be averted by sound judgment.
Hence the Centurion course. BBC correspondents could not go to Kosovo unless they'd taken it, and freelance journalists can now get discounted war-zone insurance if they have a Centurion diploma. CNN, Reuters, the Associated Press, and the New York Times, among others, are also sending their foreign correspondents out for training in battlefield-survival skills. And last year the BBC, with the Freedom Forum European Center, dispatched former members of the British Special Forces to Albania to teach local journalists the same techniques.
After my kidnapped classmates and I were untied, brushed off, and driven back to our residence-a sixty-eight-acre estate surrounded by fountains, manicured gardens, duck ponds, and groves of chestnut, birch, and cypress trees-we were indeed served tea and biscuits and debriefed by Steve, who tended to talk as if he were in a "Rambo" movie. He told us that we should have been reassured by the silence that followed our abduction, because it was a sign that the "bad guys" knew what they were doing. "If the screaming continues," he warned, "you're in big trouble, because then it's amateur week." He had plenty of colorful advice to give us. "They'll put you in a world of pain," he said with a grin, "and then they'll be looking to see who's in charge. So be the gray man, just blend in." When someone suggested that one should run for cover from an incoming mortar round, Steve clutched his head in frustration. An exploding mortar round, he explained, sends burning pieces of metal flying at an upward angle, so the best thing to do is "hit the ground." After three and a half years of bombardment, Sarajevans were so conditioned to hitting the ground that for a short time after the war ended you could walk down the street and see people suddenly disappear from view at the sound of a car backfiring.
Over the four days of war school, through skits, live encounters, lectures, and videos, we were told how to react to almost every threat we could expect to confront on assignment: among them, the nearly hundred million mines that lie unexploded in sixty-two countries and have names like Bounding Betties, Widowmakers, and Dingbats; the forty million Kalashnikovs traded around the world, many of which are in the hands of children; the mortars, machine guns, booby traps, and improvised bombs used by kidnappers, terrorists, snipers, and thieves; ambushes, vehicle accidents, and helicopter crashes; frostbite, trench foot, hypothermia, heatstroke, malaria, dysentery, hepatitis, and assorted tropical diseases; scorpions, giant centipedes, black mambas, mosquitoes, killer ants, hippopotamuses, and elephants; depression, nightmares, hallucinations, and irrational thoughts.
On the first morning of the course, we were taken to the Bisley Rifle Range, in Surrey, for a demonstration of "ballistics penetration." The class began with a video of recent war footage set to the accompaniment of Queen's 'Another One Bites the Dust.' It was meant, as our instructor put it, to illustrate that 'scalawags don't fire single shots; they empty their magazines.' On the shooting range, objects that one might try to hide behind were lined up at the base of a hillock: a brick wall, a concrete barrier, tree stumps, cinder blocks, wooden doors, car doors, sandbags, and a steel girder. There were also water jugs that represented the human torso, and dummies in flak jackets and helmets. It was damp and misty, and for nearly an hour two instructors lay in the mud and fired weapons ranging from a Colt .45 to a sniper's rifle loaded with rounds of armor-piercing bullets. The results were alarming. Just about everything was penetrated or demolished. Only a double layer of sandbags and the latest-model flexible ceramic body armor were reliably effective. The manufacturer of the body armor was standing by to deliver a product promotion, but one of our instructors, who had a vivid repertoire of similes, told us later that if we wore the manufacturer's flak jacket in the tropics, or even just in the summer, we'd be "sweating like a pedophile in a playground."
While our instructors' methods were often crude and their language was filled with macho bluster, they conveyed a message: if you're going to enter other people's wars without the benefit of rifles or bodyguards, or expose yourself to rebel groups who view journalists as legitimate targets, then you should know how vulnerable you are. Among the more interesting classes was one taught by Jon, a short, serious ex-marine, who had graduated from the most difficult military course in the British Army- sniper training- and been posted in Northern Ireland. He had lived, often for days at a time-eating, sleeping, taking photographs, wrapping his waste in cellophane-in the back-yard hedge of an I.R.A. house. He told us that fifty per cent of his work as a sniper had had to do with observation-evading it, and using it to read his environment. "You want to get a good photo of Sarajevo, so you go to the top of a hill. But that's stupid, because you're now a nice silhouetted target," Jon said. John Schofield and his camera crew may have been spotted by Croatian soldiers in this way. To avoid being "skylined," Jon told us, all you have to do is go ten metres down the hill, and the silhouette disappears without compromising the shot. He also showed us how from a distance a gunman might mistake a television camera for a shoulder-launched rocket system. He warned us not to look up at helicopters unless we wanted to be seen, because "the human face, no matter what color, shines." He showed us how a camera lens, a rivet on a pair of Levi's, or a silver pen would glimmer in the sun, and how a shadow could work for you or against you.
That afternoon, we were led down a wooded path and told to look for signs of danger. It seemed like a fairly easy task: a mortar was sticking out of the bracken; a tripod was visible in the woods; a grenade lay by an oak tree. We surmised that people had come under attack here and fled. But, when we went back over the trail, our instructors showed us what we'd missed: a man with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, who was camouflaged under netting made of leaves; cartridges and a grenade pin by a tree that revealed someone's shooting position; a twig woven into a leaf overhead that was pointing to a mine; an army jacket and a Kalashnikov hanging in a tree, which probably meant that a sentry was sleeping there or nearby; and the branches in the middle of the trail that had "channelled" us into mines.
Land mines, anti-tank and antipersonnel mines, and homemade bombs-our explosives expert, Tommo, showed us a sampling of dozens of different types in cunning disguises. Some looked like wine bottles, some like Mr. Potato Head, others like sycamore leaves or candy boxes. He showed us how easy it is to improvise a bomb with household goods: a battery, a three-way switch, a clothespin, epoxy, ammonium nitrate taken from fertillzer, diesel fuel, a travel alarm dock, and a lunch box. His statistics on mines were ominous. Some five hundred people are killed by them every week. About a hundred million lie unexploded around the world. Fourteen years ago, there were approximately ten million mines in Afghanistan alone, and it was calculated that twenty-seven mine-clearing teams would take four thousand three hundred years to clear away twenty per cent of them.
As the course drew to a close, Dr. Bo Mills, a Sri Lankan psychiatrist who had worked with former hostages in Lebanon, with Gulf War soldiers, and with other patients who had suffered severe traumas, spent a morning alerting us to signs of post-traumatic stress disorder- what used to be called shell shock, battle stress, combat neurosis, or, during the American Civil War, "soldier's heart." His style was simple and practical, if a little hokey. His model for the unconscious, for example, was a Coke bottle into which all of one's undigested painfill experiences are deposited. If the bottle is full, he warned us, a seemingly insignificant incident can cause the unprocessed contents to erupt. "So don't go into danger with a frill bottle," he warned.
Last summer, a BBC correspondent from Africa completed the Centurion Hostile Environments course, then returned to her homeland on an assignment. Near the end of her trip, she and some of her relatives were accosted by gunmen. They led her off into the shade of a mango tree, swore at her, and threatened to kill her. Two of them shoved rifles in her back, and one poked her in the stomach with his bayonet. She saw that they were drugged, and, she later told me, "I realized that this was the last day of my life." Before the Centurion course, she said, her instinctive reaction would have been to swear back at the gunmen and demand to know why she was being detained. Had she done so, she believes, she would have been killed.
Instead, she recalled the advice she was given after being "kidnapped" in Hampshire. "I said to myself, 'Let me control my breathing, let me keep cool, let me not be negative. I have to cooperate, I should not ask them questions, I should not pretend to be tough, I should not say no.' "The one time she did ask a question-"Can I go now?"-a militia-man said, "Let's kill her now." An argument erupted, and those who did not want an incident with a BBC correspondent prevailed: she was released, but her captors warned her that if she publicized the incident they would kill her family.
I was impressed by this story, but I had my doubts about what four days of survival training had done for me. My performance in the final test that our instructors prepared for us did not inspire confidence. My class was divided into two groups of six people, and we set off in Land Rovers to a nearby National Trust farm. Outfitted in flak jackets and helmets, we did our best to maintain a serious attitude, and the English couples walking their Alaskan huskies and terriers did their best to pretend not to notice us. We rotated roles as team leader, navigator, and driver, but were unsure exactly what we were looking for. After an hour or so, we came around a bend and heard cries for help coming from a ravine. Rod, a Centurion instructor, was playing a photographer who had just stepped on a land mine. Beside him lay Eric, a rubber first-aid dummy, posing as an unconscious reporter. A red-and-white-striped tape leading down into the ravine told us that the area was mined, which presented a dilemma. Should we save Rod or heed the danger signs? Rod kept screaming out in pain and assuring us that it was all safe, so we went down. He had rigged up a sophisticated fake wound on his lower leg, which made it appear that his fibula was broken and poking out of torn flesh that spurted blood. I was given the nasty job of bandaging him, and I tried to do so, despite his curses and agonized yelps. Two of us then helped him to limp back up the hill, while the other two carried Eric on an improvised stretcher.
Back at the Land Rover, Rod gave us his evaluation. First, he said, we might easily have ended up casualties of mines ourselves. "If I'm lying in a ditch bleeding, I'm going to tell you any lie that will get you down there to help me," he said. Second, all that blood meant that he had severed a major artery, and, since I had failed to apply enough pressure, he would probably have bled to death. But even had I applied enough pressure, by fumbling with the bandages directly on his wound I had tortured him with "such pain," Rod said, "that I probably would have risen up and clobbered you to death before dying myself."
One night in Pristina, a few weeks ago, I watched some Gypsy homes burning, with my friend Fisi, a Kosovar journalist and veteran of Centurion. Albanians all over Kosovo had accused the local Gypsies of helping the Serbs to loot, burn, and kill during their three-month terror campaign. Now the Albanians were taking revenge. Fisi told me that he had recently watched a similar blaze in his neighborhood, and that when children had started gathering in front of the flaming house he'd remembered what we'd learned in our Molotovcocktail class-that fire will make windows explode outward. He started hurling stones to shatter the glass and release the pressure. While he probably prevented the children from getting hurt, Fisi came away from the incident with a different lesson: as soon as he, a Kosovar Albanian, began throwing rocks, an American cameraman turned his lens on Fisi and scolded him for taking part in ethnic violence. "He put the videotape on file," Fisi told me, "and labelled it 'Vandal.'"
