There has always been something, in my mind, slightly loopy about the romance and adventurism inherent in most war reporting. Maybe it's the boy thing. But it seems entirely one matter to be committed to the principle of "letting the world know" about armed conflict in far-off places, and quite another to experience personal thrill and excitement as a voyeur to national slaughter. The most well-written and poetic accounts of war are usually the ones that are most morally disturbing. Is the skillful employment of imagery and narrative, making something seem dangerous but still lovely and unrequited, any more than a glamorisation of killing?
Those were some of the reasons that I wanted to actually cover a war, be in it, at least once. How different was war in the Balkans, say, from street gangs in the South Bronx? Killing is killing, a cheap life costs the same anywhere. But there are far fewer lyrical accounts of lives felled by crack cocaine or teen pregnancy than there are books about reporters' transformative experiences in the second World War or Vietnam or Bosnia.
Michael Herr 's 1977 Dispatches, about Vietnam, set the standard for many subsequent war books. The genre may have reached a new high, or low, depending on your perspective, with Anthony Loyd 's aptly titled recent book, My War Gone By, I Miss It So, about his three years in the Balkans during the early 1990s.
When I finally did cover a war, arriving in Belgrade in May 1999 during the Kosovo conflict, I learned a few things, including the unstartling notion in retrospect that war is different, but only in some ways. Looking up at the belly of a Tomahawk cruise missile whistling over your head is different. Corpses in copious quantity are different too, but one sees that in earthquakes and hurricanes also.
One of the most unique things about war, then, one of the things that makes the endeavour most distinct from other stories is the presence of War Reporters. In general, they are mostly men, they have done this before . . . and they love the very smell of it. They risk their lives only rarely in allegiance to principles of democracy and press freedom, but largely because the whole damn thing is so exciting. It is about adrenaline. And in modern warfare it is about toys. They love the fighter planes, the missiles, the gadgetry of hi-tech warfare.
Of course, some reporters are different. In the Kosovo conflict, the few women reporters seemed more interested in the stories of peoples' lives, less enamoured of the firepower at hand. A few journalists clearly could not have cared less, preferring the hotel lobby bar and a plentiful supply of Chardonnay and Srpski salads to the admittedly inconvenient task of crossing bridges during an air war.
In the midst of the Kosovo war I met Eve-Ann Prentice, a correspondent for The Times of London. Although she had covered the Balkans for 15 years, including a harrowing tour of Bosnia, Prentice seemed thoroughly unseduced by the prospect of getting killed in the line of duty. She was more interested in long-term political consequences, in analysis, and much less so in dissecting the daily bombardments. In other words, she seemed to be an ideal travelling companion for an attempted sojourn in the province of Kosovo, a place that was largely off limits to journalists. As she recounts in this book, she and I managed to get into Kosovo on May 20th, 1999. We eventually split up when she returned briefly to Belgrade to renew her visa, and I stayed on in Pristina.
At 3.30 p.m. on May 30th, 1999 Eve-Ann Prentice was one of eight people in a two-car convoy of reporters that was bombed near Prizren. A NATO aircraft repeatedly pummelled them for half an hour as the group scattered, running in and out of tunnels, leaping into culverts, and praying. When it was over, the Serbian interpreter who had served us, Nebojsa Radojevic, was dead, his body trapped inside the Toyota. The others were shaken, bruised and cut up, but alive.
IT was that bombing which brought about the publication of Prentice 's book, which is part memoir, part Balkan history, part eyewitness account of the Kosovo war. It was an event of unquestionable drama and horror for those involved, and indeed the description of it in the book 's opening chapter is riveting.
But the mistaken bombing of a group of journalists is not what sustains the reader's interest here. It is Prentice' s story-telling itself that accomplishes this, and does so superbly. This book is a gripping account of what it was like to be on the ground during Kosovo. But it is also a thoughtful look at the perils of simplifying complex conflicts into political rhetoric suitable for the televised sound bite.
Prentice deftly weaves the story of her own background as a prelude to her career as a reporter. Born in 1952, she first learned about repression and totalitarianism in a girls' convent school run by Irish nuns, the kind apparently, where beatings and outright sadism were routine. Her father was elected as Labour MP for King's Lynn in North Norfolk in 1964. During his career he travelled to such Communist outposts as Prague and Cuba, bringing back tales of intrigue. These two things - curiosity about Communism and a direct experience of institutional cruelty - gave Prentice such a hunger for freedom and information that she became a journalist, joining The Guardian in 1977.
By the time she came to Belgrade in April 1999, Prentice was a Balkans veteran. Her first visit to Yugoslavia was in 1986, where she, like other journalists, was feted on the Montenegrin coast at Sveti Stefan. By 1993, she was sharing a train to Belgrade with a bunch of drunken Serb soldiers returning from Serb-held areas in Bosnia, identifying herself as an Irish UN nurse at one point in the hope of avoiding discovery as a British passport-carrying journalist. The year 1994 found her in Sarajevo.
All of which is to say that Prentice had adequate time and experience to form educated opinions and perspectives on the Balkans. By 1999, she felt that the Serbs had been unduly demonised, that the ethnic and political conflicts in the Balkans had been over-simplified in the name of Western patriotism and expediency. She also felt the NATO bombing campaign was wrong, and that it would fail to solve the problem of Kosovo.
"When I voiced my opposition to the air strikes, I was constantly told by people in the West that `we had to do something'," Prentice writes. She would have preferred, she says, to see the UN take the leading role in trying to solve the crisis. In voicing this sentiment, Prentice echos the perspective of many Balkan veterans, including General Francis Briquemont, the Belgian UN commander in Sarajevo. Disillusioned by all sides, General Briquemont tells author William Shawcross (in his new book, Deliver Us From Evil, reviewed on these pages last month by Kevin Myers) that if he ever wrote his memoirs he'd call them General, something must be done.
The "something must be done" imperative seems a flimsy strategic basis for military planning and intervention, and Prentice makes a compelling case that NATO failed to achieve a sound long-term solution to lethal Balkan conflicts. It must be said, however, that she occasionally weakens her case by overstatement and unfortunate comparison. She notes, for example, that the Nazis waged a concerted campaign of extermination. By contrast, the Serbs only wanted to "terrorise non-Serbs into leaving certain areas. Many were killed in the terror and the policy was cruel, but it was not the same as systematic annihilation". This hardly serves as an invitation to sympathise with the Serbs.
Yet, despite its occasional lapses, One Woman's War is in the best tradition of a rare kind of eyewitness war reporting, the sort that is highly readable but does nothing to make the military theatre an inviting destination. Virginia Woolf urged women, in Three Guineas, to "make no part of any claque or audience that encourages war . . ." That is a tall order, however, if one is writing about war. Prentice achieves it handily.
Elaine Lafferty is an Irish Times journalist