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| Spring Break in Bosnia |
Oh, Netflix, you are my muse, my magic carpet, my time machine. This morning, it was "The Hunting Party," which triggered all sorts of neurotransmitters and brought me face to face with Helga.
Helga was, literally, the Prom Queen from age 13, the prettiest, most desirable girl in Bethesda, Maryland, a blue eyed, blonde, high cheek bones, impeccable skin which flushed appealingly when she got excited, which was often, and at all the best times. The daughter of a NIH scientist, she had an IQ, of 154--she told me that, and I had no reason to doubt her because she was in all my classes and was always the brightest star.
She did not leave junior high school a virgin, and was happy about that, the sort of girl who would push you against a wall outside the gym and say, "You know, every boy wants me, but you know who I think about at night? You." And you knew that was a practiced line, but you didn't care. She'd pass you a note in class, "Do you think Mr. S has an erection right now?" Mr. Schneider was the AP English teacher, and reputedly the most brilliant man on earth, or at least, he was the most brilliant man at the high school, and he was rumored to be having an affair with Helga, a rumor she kept alive by refusing to comment, but looking at him looking at her, I believed it.
And why would she pass that note to me? Because that was Helga: She sent me notes just often enough to keep me dangling, telling me how special I was to her. But why? She was not interested in most boys my age, she just wanted every boy to adore her, a latter day Scarlett O'Hara.
When we were 14, Helga met Kurt at a county-wide student government festival, which ended in a stage revue, where Kurt had a leading role, and he danced across the stage and sang a wonderful song which ended with the line, "I've passed the acid test," a line which, in Kurt's case, proved to be prophetic.
Watching Helga watch Kurt, I told her, "You'll marry that guy."
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| Kurt , Reuters War Correspondent |
Stock in Kurt's chances for becoming even Helga's last husband dipped when he decided he'd had so much fun playing football on the county championship team from Rockville that he signed a blood pack with his football buddies and they all went off to Jamestown College in North Dakota, so they could play football together for four more years. Kids in Helga's world, at our posh high school, slit their wrists if they didn't get into the Ivy League, and certainly nobody from our world would go off to some off brand school in North Dakota. So Kurt was toast. He had peaked in high school and was going nowhere.
Didn't work out that way: Kurt got himself a Rhodes scholarship in 1969--Clinton was at Oxford then--which had to be at least as much a glittering prize as a Yale degree and Helga graduated from Wellsley and flew to England and married him. (He became not her last, but her first husband.) But then, Helga's college roommate visited Oxford and Kurt put her on the back of a motorcycle and disappeared off to Europe with her and Helga went back to America and went to law school and I did not hear from her for years. She stopped writing me notes.
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| Living Life on the Edge: The Short, Happy Life |
But if Helga disappeared, Kurt did not.
This posting is actually not about Helga. It's about Kurt, and "The Hunting Party" which is about people who choose to live life on the edge, with the adrenalin rush a daily drug, an addiction. Anthony Lloyd wrote about this, and about Kurt, in My War Gone By, I Miss It So, and Chris Hedges did the same in War Is a Force That Gives Life Meaning.
Much later, when I had moved back to Washington, I heard Kurt every morning on NPR, while I drove to work. He was covering wars for Reuters in Bosnia, Chechnya, Sarajevo, Kosovo. Richard Holbrook, the State Department roving ambassador, said whenever he arrived at a hot spot, he would seek out Kurt before he went for his official briefing, because Kurt always knew what was really going on and would tell him without the spin.
Kurt was still on the world stage, passing the acid test every day, and you could hear the mortar rounds in the background. I was driving to my office back in Bethesda, to the hospital, to moonlighting jobs, in the work-a-day world.
In 2000, at age 53, Kurt went to cover the civil war in Sierra Leone and was shot to death in an ambush on some nameless dirt road.
I talked to Helga at a high school reunion that year and she said, "Well, he was addicted. It had to happen sometime."
Then she asked me, "So, how did you manage to turn yourself into a nerd?"
Kurt chose the short exciting life, a different life from what his parents wanted for him, no doubt. but your parents want what's good for you, not necessarily what's best for you.
Some children, like Jane Goodall, manage to take the path less traveled without getting killed. Others, like Kurt, flame out and crash and burn. Icarus flying too close to the sun.
Makes you think about the path you chose for yourself. If you did the conventional thing, did you miss out? Did you trade safe for what would have been best for you?
Sitting in the Cardiac Care unit one night, when I wasn't on call, my good friend Patricia, one of the nurses on that unit, asked me why I hung around the CCU or the ER some nights, when I was off call, and could have been home or out at a bar.
I had to admit I didn't know why.
"You're bored," she said, with her typical insight. "You want to be where the action is. You are an adrenalin junkie."
"Oh," I said. "I've known an adrenalin junkie. You have no idea."
"I know one when I see one."
"Nobody's shooting at me," I said.
She shook her head. "I know you. You can't sleep if your beeper is too quiet."
"Nope, I'm just ordinary," I told her.
I walked off the CCU ward and across the street to my apartment, wondering how I had managed to turn myself into a nerd.
As for "The Hunting Party," it was ravaged by the critics because it did not cleave to any recognizable genre, neither action thriller, political satire nor polemic ( a la "Brockavitch" or "The Verdict.") This is one of those cases of the author being way more sophisticated than the audience. In fact, the point is, this story depicts the world as it really is, amoral, indifferent, savage. It's the nihilism the reviewers for Rotten Tomatoes and the Metacritic could not abide. Simon and Duck, the main hunters, look at the world as it really is and see monsters who visit their horrors on remote villages and nobody cares, except those who are directly affected. For my money, it's a film worth seeing and thinking about.
Phantom,
ReplyDeleteI will have to check out the Hunting Party...As for Helga, she must have been an exceptional girl and woman to have attracted the likes of Kurt, not to mention you. However, her ability to judge men seems a bit lacking-you are not a nerd, you're something I can't quite put my finger on, but it isn't nerd and Kurt S. was never going to be good husband material. Nurse Patricia seems more on the money when she said you were an adrenalin junkie-I can see that, more so in you than in the average person, but surely not to the extreme of Kurt S. Although I had never heard of Kurt before now, I probably did hear him on NPR and the internet provides quite a bit of information on his brief but remarkable life. He was obviously brilliant, but also, it would seem, quietly, yet supremely, confident. You could tell from their writing after his death, that his peers were in awe of him. But then, who before 40 is a Rhodes scholar, political operative, race car driver and in charge of the NY subways. One can understand the other journalists awe. It's warranted. But I agree, he did also seem very addicted to the rush some people get in extreme and risky situations. On his memorial fund website there is an article he wrote in 1993, three years after he decided to become a war correspondent, which was more telling than any of the pieces written by others after his death. He begins the article by saying " I landed in Hong Kong on my 43rd birthday, intent on becoming a foreign correspondent. My credentials were unimpressive: no reporting experience, no contacts in Asia, minimal language skills." Talk about confidence and nerve..then he writes that there is an over abundance of journalists there, so that in order to distinguish himself, he decides to "write well from places so dangerous there would be no competition"..which he did and got noticed by editors very quickly. But this article also clearly revealed how much he loved the adrenaline rush of almost unthinkable situations-he describes swimming across a "snow melt swollen river" from Turkey into Iraq to report on the Kurdish rebellion and when he accompanies the Kurdish soldiers onto a battlefield and men are dying all around him and bullets are flying he says "I had never felt so alive". He must have known how much he was revealing about himself in those words, but said them anyway. That was most likely the component of his writing his peers admired-the ability and willingness to tell it like it is no matter the subject. Even though the situations he describes as a war correspondent are desperate and extreme there is a calm to his writing... In his signature piece on Romeo and Juliet in Sarajevo, he is both moving and dispassionately factual at the same time-not an easy feat and probably what the other journalists and editors noticed right away.... A small anecdote, and yet one I thought so revealing- the other correspondents reported that during some of the worst days in Sarajevo he would play the haunting and beautiful "Brothers in Arms" on his CD player-it was the song his fellow journalists most associated with him. I was struck by this when I read it-this was a side to him hinted at, but not so readily apparent in the few pieces I read of his. But this was probably the side Helga saw in him....
Maud
Maud,
ReplyDeleteI know it's the internet age, and all that, but I'm speechless before your intellectual vigor. What kind of mind...? You know more about Kurt than I ever knew, and I did do some reading about him on line at some point. I can only imagine you hold a chair in some university department, and if you don't , it is a great loss to the universities.
Phantom