Life in Bosnia: Traveling into War

Life in Bosnia: Traveling into War

The article was submitted by LISA.

What attracted Bill Carter, a guy from Chico, California to Bosnia during the 1992-1996 Siege of Sarajevo?

Bill wrote Fools Rush In in 2005. It’s an intense memoir of the sequence of events that led him to board an aid bus to Sarajevo, evade sniper’s bullets, and as fate would have it, help U2 broadcast Sarajevo’s struggle for survival during their Zoo TV tours. You could even say this young guy from California had a hand in stopping the war.

How did Bill end up in this extreme situation, evading sniper’s bullets that were not exactly meant for him? Partly he admits to a subconscious death wish after losing his deeply loved fiancée to a car accident. And partly he describes an extreme selflessness and desire to help. In the book, he speaks of losing one’s ego — losing a sense of needing something for oneself, and in the process, being capable of extraordinary things.

I had the luck of meeting Bill Carter at a literary event in San Francisco. I was still processing my 6 weeks traveling through the Balkans, and our conversation couldn’t have been timelier. I wanted to know, “How do people survive through a war like that? How do they go on?” His book describes exactly how people do survive, and how they go on. He also made the film Miss Sarajevo, the title taken from beauty pageants that continued to go on underground while the bombing went on above.

Sarajevo impacted me like no other city. Traditionally a model city where Muslims, Croats, Jews, Christians intermarried and did not label people by their religions, it is truly where East Meets West. An ancient city that has hosted everyone from weary Arabian nomads to 1984 Winter Olympiads, Sarajevo feels like a city that has survived.

During the Siege, they planted vegetables in window boxes. They hid in their basements. They braved bullets to get drinking water each day. They drank, they partied, they fought.

I will never forget speaking with an ex-Bosnian soldier, now a tour guide, who was about 15 when the war broke out. “There was no choice. If you were living in Sarajevo at this time you either fought as a citizen or you joined the army.” He was shot twice. He could have had a military career, but instead he decided to give tours of the Sarajevo Tunnel to make sure people keep talking about what happened there.

The adolescents who survived the Siege are now 30-somethings deciding the future of Sarajevo, of which Bill Carter is now an honorary citizen. Bill told me, “It’s odd. People don’t exactly miss the war, but they miss the way that people came together to help each other. The intensity of surviving, of living life each day.” To me, that love of life defines Sarajevo.

Photo Credit: gianluca.golino Flickr via Compfight cc