Once again travelling through the swedish forests on my way back to Stockholm yesterday after having spent one night in my cadet apartment after the return from Sarajevo I noticed something was different. Time and time again I caught myself looking for shrapnel damage and bullet wounds in the on the traditionally red houses that passed by outside the window, and I was constantly surprised when I couldn't find any. After having spent one week noticing and registering the degree of damage to the buildings I had passed and over time realized that it was easier keeping track of the few ones without damage, my gaze automatically searched the landscape for the traces of a war it had never seen.
Slowly the width of what I had experienced started to dawn upon me. One intense week in Bosnia had left us all mentally exhausted and we had all been relieved when boarding that plane on the airport, without any of that sad melancholy that often follows on the end of a vacation. Well at home I had thrown off my gear and simply thrust myself into the couch and spent the night surfing and watching the crappiest thing I could find on tv.
The impressions and the experiences from last week felt unsettled in my head and convinced me that I would not have had the energy for one more day of the Horrors of War. Enough was enough.
How naive.
I had been in Bosnia for seven days, almost fifteen years after the war ended, stayed in a hotel with more than enough money in my pockets, time for shopping, gossiping and beer after four o'clock every night where my only worry had been that I had to get up at half past six every morning to be able to make it to the un-continental and very extensive and hotel breakfast.
And I felt saturated with the war.
But think of the ones who actually were there. Think of Samir, the Bosnian officer who came along with us during the whole week and who had fought in the war for his army fifteen years ago. Think of the kind man with the worn face and jeans jacket who had been one of the Muslim prisoners in the school in Vares that had been saved by NordBat back in '93 and with his warm smile waved at us and thanked us for what the Swedes had done for him that time. Think of the rough local in Stupni Do whose wife and two children had been among those who had been able to escape the massacre and been saved by NordBat, and who out of gratitude insisted on donating a bottle of rakija to our department. Think of the dark eyed woman who on broken English and tears burning in her eyes had sixty people captivated as she told us how the whole male side of her family had been erased during the massacre in Srebrenica and how her uncle had been found and identified from three different secondary mass graves where none of the bones had been longer than five centimeters.
To them the war is real.
To us it has been nothing more than an extended working week,
Back in Sweden things look different. Sweden looks different. Cleaner, more innocent. Probably it is just like any other vacation aftermath, a temporary effect of having become used to something different, but I can't help hoping that some of it will stay. That some of it will remain and allow me to keep appreciating the fact that my mother did not have to see me grow up under the threat of being shot by snipers, captured and burned alive by people who used to be my neighbors or seen my family become victims of the cruel game called war.
Because in the end, a privileged life is not a last years model cell phone, yearly vacations to the Canarie Islands and a two floor villa with broadband and LCD tv. A privileged life is to be able to experience it without fear of having it ripped from you by a well-aimed sniper bullet or the ruthless shrapnels of a 60mm mortar sent off by somebody who think they have the right to take it away from you.
We tend to forget that.
Slowly the width of what I had experienced started to dawn upon me. One intense week in Bosnia had left us all mentally exhausted and we had all been relieved when boarding that plane on the airport, without any of that sad melancholy that often follows on the end of a vacation. Well at home I had thrown off my gear and simply thrust myself into the couch and spent the night surfing and watching the crappiest thing I could find on tv.
The impressions and the experiences from last week felt unsettled in my head and convinced me that I would not have had the energy for one more day of the Horrors of War. Enough was enough.
How naive.
I had been in Bosnia for seven days, almost fifteen years after the war ended, stayed in a hotel with more than enough money in my pockets, time for shopping, gossiping and beer after four o'clock every night where my only worry had been that I had to get up at half past six every morning to be able to make it to the un-continental and very extensive and hotel breakfast.
And I felt saturated with the war.
But think of the ones who actually were there. Think of Samir, the Bosnian officer who came along with us during the whole week and who had fought in the war for his army fifteen years ago. Think of the kind man with the worn face and jeans jacket who had been one of the Muslim prisoners in the school in Vares that had been saved by NordBat back in '93 and with his warm smile waved at us and thanked us for what the Swedes had done for him that time. Think of the rough local in Stupni Do whose wife and two children had been among those who had been able to escape the massacre and been saved by NordBat, and who out of gratitude insisted on donating a bottle of rakija to our department. Think of the dark eyed woman who on broken English and tears burning in her eyes had sixty people captivated as she told us how the whole male side of her family had been erased during the massacre in Srebrenica and how her uncle had been found and identified from three different secondary mass graves where none of the bones had been longer than five centimeters.
To them the war is real.
To us it has been nothing more than an extended working week,
Back in Sweden things look different. Sweden looks different. Cleaner, more innocent. Probably it is just like any other vacation aftermath, a temporary effect of having become used to something different, but I can't help hoping that some of it will stay. That some of it will remain and allow me to keep appreciating the fact that my mother did not have to see me grow up under the threat of being shot by snipers, captured and burned alive by people who used to be my neighbors or seen my family become victims of the cruel game called war.
Because in the end, a privileged life is not a last years model cell phone, yearly vacations to the Canarie Islands and a two floor villa with broadband and LCD tv. A privileged life is to be able to experience it without fear of having it ripped from you by a well-aimed sniper bullet or the ruthless shrapnels of a 60mm mortar sent off by somebody who think they have the right to take it away from you.
We tend to forget that.
mab:
hello lovely!