THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 26, 1995 TAG: 9502260034
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: By KERRY DEROCHI, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: ZAGREB, CROATIA LENGTH: Long : 336 lines
The letter from Evelina arrived on a balmy afternoon, two days before the Navy medics were to leave the U.N. compound.
In the anguished words of a teenager who's grown up too fast, Evelina begged her friends not to forget those who must stay behind. She asked them to remember the mortar shells that fell in the night around her refugee camp, the machine gun fire that ripped through the early morning quiet.
She reminded them of the blood that stained the rocky Balkan soil. She wrote of her own childhood that seemed so long ago.
``Don't forget to talk about one foolish girl, when you sit together with your grandchildren, and tell them how proud she was to know you and to be your friend,'' Evelina, 17, wrote to the medics.
``You'll never know how much you meant and still mean to me and how much you helped me once when I was lost like I'm lost now.''
To some, the four-page letter is proof of the legacy the 230 Navy doctors, corpsmen and nurses have left in this corner of Croatia.
For six months, they have treated thousands of U.N. peacekeepers from a row of green tents on an airfield outside Zagreb. They have cared for hundreds of refugees trapped in ravaged camps and donated toys and time to the wide-eyed orphans of war.
Still, as the members of the Portsmouth-based Fleet Hospital Five packed seabags and prepared to return home, there was a feeling that more could have been done.
Controversial from the start, the staff of this tiny, tent hospital has struggled daily to make a difference in a conflict that defies definition.
The odds weighed heavily against them.
As part of the United Nations, the medics were faced with a mounting criticism of the U.N. role in the region, and a growing skepticism that a solution could be found to the 3-year-old war
Even as the doctors worked to save the limbs of peacekeepers, Croatian politicians were voting to oust the U.N. protection forces from the country by the end of March.
The capital city, Zagreb, teemed with a resentment as tangible as the 4-foot-high brick wall built around the U.N. headquarters by families of Croats who had died or were missing.
That anger seemed to echo across the Atlantic Ocean to Washington, where congressional leaders, decrying the bungling of the Somalia relief mission, seek to limit future U.N. peacekeeping roles.
For members of the Navy medical team, the politics of peacekeeping adds frustration to a deployment made difficult by spartan living conditions on a sprawling U.N. compound called Camp Pleso.
As their 178-day stay drew to a close and they readied to greet their Air Force replacements, many of the men and women came to a painful realization.
Despite the miracles performed in the emergency OR, despite tears shed for the young men who were patched up and returned to the field, despite bonds formed with teenage refugees, the fighting and hatred of this region was unrelenting.
``It's hard sometimes to understand why this goes on,'' said Lt. Cmdr. Robert Mendez, an anesthesiologist. ``They don't even want us here. They want us out of the way so they can fight, get it over with.
``We're in the middle. We're not on anybody's side. We're just here.''
It's hard to be the white knight in a war where all the sides wear gray.
At Camp Pleso, talk of cease-fires, of brokered peace deals, have been drowned out by the muffled roar of U.N. trucks that pass through the gates in monotonous succession.
Here, political battles are hidden in the listless eyes of young soldiers who lost arms or legs while trying to bring about peace.
The faces and names of patients have changed repeatedly since the Navy team arrived at the hospital on a steamy August morning.
But the stories haven't.
``It was hard for me to see these people who were so young fighting a war that wasn't theirs,'' said Lt. j.g. Cindy Buchholz, a nurse on the hospital's main ward.
``We don't even understand what this war is about. To lose a body part in it, that's beyond me.''
In the weeks at Camp Pleso, the hospital staff treated more than 10,000 of these soldiers, most in outpatient clinics.
They performed 240 surgeries and admitted 373 to the hospital ward.
Few patients spoke English. Most were unused to Western medicine. Some suffered from land mine injuries. Others were sick with pneumonia or tuberculosis.
Some became friends:
Gregzotz Kwaitek, a 20-year-old Polish man who was impaled on the gearshift of a U.N. vehicle, the wound stretching 6 inches inside. He would leave Camp Pleso for home in late October, twirling a cane above his head.
Volodia Zhubrin, a Russian who lost a foot while stepping out of his barracks onto a mine and arrived at the U.S. hospital depressed and sullen. He would walk out with a prosthesis and a cassette tape of the rock band Metallica.
Eugene Tarasenko, 20, another Russian, whose foot was injured in a mine explosion. He would return briefly to his battalion only to develop what is often an uncurable nerve disorder.
The pain was so intense, he begged Navy doctors cut off the foot.
``You feel bad, these kids, most of them are 19 or 20 or 21,'' said Mendez, the anesthesiologist, who pumped massive painkillers into Tarasenko's spinal column every day.
``You walk around Zagreb, you see them standing around. When they go back to Russia what are they going to get? Nothing.''
For some, the costs were especially high.
In December, five Bangladeshi peacekeepers were wounded in a mortar attack on patrol in central Croatia. They climbed out of their truck and were hit by sniper fire. Another shell landed minutes later.
The patients were brought to Camp Pleso at 10:30 p.m. One died the next morning, one of the 138 U.N. peacekeepers killed while serving in Yugoslavia.
``You just realize that, `God, that could be anybody,' '' said hospital Corpsman Drew Colligan. ``It's hard to be here and not take sides. They both hate each other. They've both done terrible things to each other.
``I don't regret being here. I understand this place a little more. I've grown up a little more.''
Growing up was part of the Camp Pleso creed.
The week before Thanksgiving, the team was forced to wear protective flak jackets and blue helmets as their alert status went from green to red.
Attack was imminent. The war was less than 40 miles away.
``People became very introspective and really realized a lot of things,'' said Lt. Terry Snow, a nurse in the intensive care unit. ``It was a scary time. That week, I realized who were the important people in my life.''
There were other complications - a phone system that seemed down more than up, the electricity that went out the day before Christmas and stayed off for days. Showers that rarely held enough hot water.
``Sometimes our mission was muddied and we weren't quite sure what it was,'' said Lt. j.g. Jody Weiss, a nurse. ``But we did the job we were sent in to do.
``We didn't make a difference in the Bosnian, Croatian, Serb situation. But as far as our mission? Yeah. Did we have a sense of purpose? We took care of the U.N. troops.''
In the final moments, that's what seemed to matter most.
Especially to Cezary Mraciniak.
Cezary was a 29-year-old battalion commander in the Polish contingent on patrol in central Croatia. A member of his crew tripped on a thin wire stretched across the road.
On the other side was a land mine.
The explosion sent Cezary and his crew reeling. Shrapnel flew into his body, piercing his liver and the sac that surrounds his heart.
He was brought to the U.S. Hospital Zagreb where he underwent two hours of surgery, while doctors searched for the tiny metal fragments.
``They want to maim people, they want them to live so they can terrorize them,'' said Lt. Cmdr. Mike Perez, the surgeon.
``That's what we're seeing around here. The mines are purposely small. They're meant to maim.''
Cezary - whom the nurses dubbed Charlie - would survive.
On this night, he played rummy with corpsmen and walked hesitantly through the long, narrow hallways to call his wife.
He wanted to return to his men. He still had 10 months to serve.
``We work for the peace,'' said Charlie. ``Our task is to bring peace for these people. I don't want to go home. My job is to work as a soldier.''
At 11:30 p.m., as a nurse checked Charlie's vital signs, the robe fell open, showing the long, thin scar.
He smiled, embarrassed. It was hard to believe that 24 hours earlier, doctors had cracked open his chest and peered into his heart.
Snow, the nurse in the ICU, helped Charlie into bed. It was time for rest.
``The politics I understand, the killing I understand,'' Snow said as she untied the privacy curtain and slowly pulled it closed. ``I know it's a war based on religious convictions and over land. Do I understand why? No. I don't think anybody does.
``I know in my heart we've made a difference. I know in my heart we made a difference in some patients' living or dying. I really feel that way. I really do.''
Making a difference. It was a refrain heard often in the final days of Fleet Hospital Five.
``With medical people, you've got this need to fix things, '' said Lt. M.J. Hoban, a nurse. ``It's a caring, a need to help.
``I guess we started out thinking we could.''
For Hoban, that meant weekly trips to an orphanage in the heart of Zagreb, where 140 children were cared for by Catholic nuns.
There, afternoon hours passed in a melee of pillow fights and games of dodgeball across plump sofas and plastic chairs.
There was Tommy, 4, whose shirt spoke of living ``In A Far Away Land.'' Marina, 3, who wriggled across the hardwood floor clutching a pink teddy bear. Ivana, 6, who drew sketches of sunshines and smiling butterflies.
It could be any orphanage in any city in the world.
Until a small boy in the corner built a gun out of Lego pieces. Until that same child waved a plastic fork and made the piercing sound of a bomb.
These children were the orphans of war.
``I wanted to take them all home,'' Hoban said. ``I'm going to have a really hard time if the U.N. pulls out and they go to an all-out war. What's going to happen to those kids? What kind of future is that going to give them?''
It's a question that has plagued Lt. Max Dawkins since September, when he left Evelina in the refugee camp 80 miles south of Zagreb.
Dawkins, a physician's assistant, was part of a team sent to treat the war refugees, the first U.S. medical forces allowed to go into the field since the fighting broke out in the region.
In less than two weeks, the team treated 1,500 refugees - most of them Bosnian Muslims - outside the town of Batnoga.
Evelina served as a translator. Her family was among the 25,000 living in abandoned chicken coops, huddling on blankets and stacking their belongings on the feeding troughs.
The mission, though historic, was cut short because of the intense fighting in the nearby Bihac pocket of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Dawkins returned to Camp Pleso.
He wrote often to Evelina, sending her clothes and, at times, novels by authors such as Henry James. Things that would teach her good English.
``She's a little girl - a little girl who's been forced to grow up,'' said Dawkins, as he stood in the hospital emergency room, proudly clutching the letter.
``These kids, these people need what they can get, they have nothing. If it was just one person that you made a difference with, it was worth it.''
It's what they held on to, even as the days drifted one into the other and the deployment dragged into its fourth and fifth month.
Soon, it was time to hang calendars and mark each block with an ``X.''
The staff taped fuzzy pink Valentines to the canvas walls along the ward. They tied lace hearts to electrical cords in the ER.
Valentine's Day would be their last day of duty.
They woke that morning to a cold, driving rain that pelted the canvas flaps and soaked the muddy compound.
Already, Air Force medics were on hand, struggling to learn the quirks of dispensing medicine from tents.
Vacuum cleaners roared throughout the hallways as the Navy staff prepared to hand over control of the hospital. Nurses crouched on the cushioned tarp, wiping the floor in broad strokes with thick yellow sponges.
It was time to say good-bye.
In the operating room, a radio blared a song about war. . . . With their tanks and their bombs and their bombs and their guns. In your head, in your head they are dying . . .
Mendez, the anesthesiologist, leaned over a gurney where his patient Tarasenko rested, waiting for the dose of painkillers. Mendez made a jet noise and spread his arms wide to show the Russian he was leaving.
``This is Dr. Tang,'' Mendez said. ``I'm going home. He's the new guy. He's a good guy.''
Tarasenko raised his head.
``No problem,'' he said.
Hours later, members of Fleet Hospital Five stood at attention in the main corridor of the hospital. It was their last formal formation.
They wore bright blue U.N. berets and carefully tied ascots as they listened to the words of a U.N. general and a Navy admiral.
You made a difference.
You have made a difference.
In the end, the commanding officer, Capt. Gregg Parker, came to the podium to say, simply, thank you. He cited the open-heart surgeries, the nights when the drills weren't drills anymore, and the long winter days that passed in a cold, gray haze.
His final words were the hardest.
``You're the most professional, dedicated people that I know,'' he said, his voice faltering.
``It has been my privilege.''
Abruptly, he turned and sat down. The mission was over.
Early the next morning, a thick fog blanketed Camp Pleso as the Navy team gathered its bags and began walking to the cement square where it had all started six months ago in the summer heat.
The medics hugged and cried. They handed out tiny chocolates wrapped in tin foil.
Music blared from the public address system as one by one their names were called and they strode to the U.N. buses that were to take them to the Zagreb airport.
Minutes later, as the sun broke through the mist, members of Fleet Hospital Five left the U.S. compound, passing through the white barricades and coils of jagged metal wire for the last time.
To their right stood a lone U.N. sentry, wearing fatigues and a blue beret. He stood erect, as if a statue, his eyes focused straight ahead.
Slowly, he raised his arm in a stiff, solemn salute.
It was a tough week for the human heart on the Outer Banks. A sick and brutal drama of jealousy, hate and vengeance played out before our eyes, and the lives of three innocent children were snuffed.
We are left with sadness for their grieving family, and a bagful of unanswered ``Whys?''
In the wake of this tragedy, it would be easy enough to give in to hopelessness and despair. And it deserves repeating one more time that if a society is to be judged based on how we treat our children and our elderly, we are in a sorry mess.
But a few people we've come across in recent weeks, through snapshots of their lives, provide us with reason for hope.
A world that gave us again and again the image of police officers clubbing Rodney King also has shown us Chief Jim Gradeless and the Kill Devil Hills Police Department. Gradeless, a 20-year law enforcement veteran and a former Green Beret, fought to hold back tears as he recounted last Sunday's tragedy.
And remember the firefighters, who with blackened hands risked their lives to put out the blaze, only to learn that three children had died in the Delaware van. Know, too, that the firefighters hurt.
In a world that screams in our ears about clergy who stumble while running the race their calling demands, there comes the whisper of Father Terry Collins. Collins serves three counties for the Diocese of Raleigh, including two Spanish-speaking congregations of migrant workers. He also serves as an active chaplain for the Nags Head Police Department. Think of Father Terry, and it is hard not to be reminded of the words of the scriptures: ``Whatever you do for the least of these . . . ''
The world has shown us more than we want to see about marriages gone bad, parents who neglect (and sometimes kill) their children, and offspring who blame their parents for their own failings.
But in the little town of Hertford, Jimmy and Helen Hunter talk in glowing terms of their children, and of the memories of their parents. Ask the man known nationally as ``Catfish'' Hunter, now 48, what brings him his greatest joy, and he will tell you: ``Watching my children do well.'' From a pair of high school sweethearts, you can learn quickly that true joy isn't found in money, or status, or World Series rings or Hall of Fame plaques. Happiness is home and family in Hertford.
The poet Oscar Wilde had an appropriate description of life in this seemingly graceless age.
``All of us are in the gutter,'' he said, ``but some of us are looking at the stars.''
Therein lies the hope. ILLUSTRATION: BETH BERGMAN/Staff photos
For six months, Christopher Cote and others from Portsmouth-based
Fleet Hospital Five have treated United Nations peacekeepers and
refugees.
Dubrana Muzic, whose son fought for the Croats and has been missing
three years, starts to cry at the Wall of Shame in Zagreb. The
bricks in the wall bear the names of casualties in the civil war.
Muzic had placed flowers near the brick that carries her son's
name.
Residents of Zagreb travel by trolley through the city. The capital
city teems with resentment over the presence of the U.N.
peacekeepers.
ABOVE: Two members of Fleet Hospital Five - which includes 230 Navy
doctors, corpsmen and nurses - tend to a patient in surgery.
RIGHT: Eugene Tarasenko, a 20-year-old Russian injured in a mine
explosion, is escorted to surgery by nursing assistant Brandon
Bennett of Portsmouth.
Lt. M.J. Hoban, a nurse, embraces a young orphan on the last of her
weekly visits to a Zagreb orphanage, where 140 children were cared
for by Catholic nuns.
ABOVE: Nuns care for Zagreb's orphans of war. At the orphanage are a
mix of images of Croatia's young: sketches of sunshine and smiling
butterflies, and play guns built from Lego pieces.
Members of Portsmouth-based Fleet Hospital Five leave Zagreb for
home at the end of their 178-day mission.
KEYWORDS: CIVIL WAR YUGOSLAVIA by CNB