A soldier's heart
Newsday, May 29, 2005
In the heart of Sag Harbor, cradle of whaling history and home of the late novelist John Steinbeck, lives a lower-profile, more homespun author. By day, he earns his bread by cutting down trees at homes plain and fancy. On those rounds, or late at night when he gets home, Richard Sawyer sometimes detects a poem stirring inside: nothing epic, just simple rhymes to capture his complex feelings.
The latest poem is about a mental affliction, post-traumatic stress disorder, which plagues Sawyer, thousands of other Vietnam War veterans, and new legions just home from Iraq. It begins: “Post-traumatic stress is a terrible mess./It makes you sad, it makes you mad, it makes you want to die.”
Bits of Sawyer’s poetry and prose have appeared in East End papers since he started writing three years ago. Beyond that, he is known in Sag Harbor and environs for his sense of whimsy (dressing as Frosty the Snowman to clear the snow), his sharp instinct for commerce and public relations (setting a Guinness world record for log-splitting, to help sell a splitting tool), and his astonishing levels of energy.
His goal: Eisenhower Park
“Rich is very, very persistent with the things he’s excited about and passionate about,” said Dr. Brian DiRussa, his Southampton chiropractor, whose work has helped ease Sawyer's stress. Sawyer’s current passion is to help establish a Soldier’s Heart PTSD monument in East Meadow's Eisenhower Park. His effort is the culmination of a long personal journey, first to ease the pain in his own soldier’s heart, and now to increase awareness of PTSD and offer solace to those who bear this anguish.
Recently, Sawyer’s campaign has reached a key milestone: a maquette, a 13-inch preliminary design, by Shelter Island sculptor Jerry Glassberg. It won’t be a cakewalk to get from there to the 57-inch-high full-size work in a plaza already bristling with war monuments. But there are far greater improbabilities in the long, vivid arc of his 60 years.
Richard Jefferson Sawyer was born in Boston and grew up in Elmont, then Freeport. After two years at the private Stony Brook School, he graduated from Freeport High School, where he wrestled and was a celebrated offensive lineman.
His transition to college was bumpy: Temple University in Philadelphia; East Stroudsburg State Teachers College in Pennsylvania, where he partied energetically; the C.W. Post campus of Long Island University, and Nassau Community College.
With the Vietnam War raging, it was a bad time to attend college halfheartedly. Sawyer was three credits short of maintaining a college deferment. So the draft plucked him. On Jan. 2, 1969, he entered the Army.
Soon after that, Richard M. Nixon also swore to defend the Constitution. The new president later announced a policy of Vietnamization: increasing the role of South Vietnam’s troops and decreasing America’s burden.
Sawyer saw that as a good reason to prolong his training and hope to delay his arrival in Vietnam until the shooting had stopped. First, he chose a 90-day noncommissioned officer school at Fort Benning, Ga. From there, he trained as a handler of scout dogs, also at Benning.
The dog training would slow his progress toward Vietnam, but once there, he’d have an especially dangerous job: walking point, ahead of other troops, using the dog to sniff out the Viet Cong or North Vietnamese.
Sawyer and his German shepherd, Teddy, got to Vietnam in March 1970. Both dog and handler had excelled in their training, which gave Sawyer hope for survival. But his hopes were quickly shaken.
“Teddy got a parasitic disease on the first mission and died,” Sawyer said. “He died in my arms. That was the first great loss of my life. This was my ticket to get out of Vietnam alive, and I loved him, too. After that happened, I started cursing everyone from the president on down.”
So Sawyer had to work with another dog, Prince, whose previous handler had been killed. “I was walking point with a dead man’s dog,” Sawyer said. And the dog, not yet recovered from his handler’s death, was acting shy and withdrawn.
His first time out with Prince, the mission was to seek out a first-aid area for injured Viet Cong. As he and Prince walked along, Prince picked up a scent, and Sawyer instantly warned his buddies to spread out. The GIs took cover, and the Viet Cong opened fire.
No one died in that ambush, but it created vivid memories, along with the other Vietnam experiences of a man who abhors violence.
“I never pulled my trigger when I was over in Vietnam,” he said. “I never aimed at the enemy. I didn’t want to kill anybody. I didn’t believe in war, number one. I always believed, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ There shouldn’t be any exceptions to that.”
When his tour ended in October 1970, Sawyer returned to earn his associate's degree from Nassau Community College, then a psychology degree from Southampton College. His next few years were a blend of seeking a master’s degree in health counseling and working in a chain of bars on Long Island and in the Cayman Islands. “It was a great life,” he said.
Then, in the mid-1970s, with a feeling of swelling in his jaw, he began to discover that Vietnam was still with him. At the VA Medical Center in Northport, he learned that the problem was bruxism, a gnashing or clenching of the teeth during sleep, often related to stress. So the staff told him to see a psychiatrist.
“For the first time in my life,” Sawyer said, “someone was telling me I had emotional problems.”
A delayed reaction
The bicentennial summer of 1976, the year of tall ships and patriotic fervor, was a nightmare. Holed up alone for three months in his family’s Sag Harbor home, he suffered a nervous breakdown. “I felt my mind actually leave my body,” he recalled. “I was coming unglued....I was crying all the time.”
It was such a profound experience that it shook loose even his name. Growing up, Richard Jefferson Sawyer had always been Jeff. From that time of trial on, he has been Richard, which sounded to him more solid, professional or mature.
It took a while before Sawyer got a formal diagnosis of PTSD and began receiving disability payments. In fact, PTSD did not become an official psychiatric diagnosis until 1980.
“I used to be very easygoing,” he said. Now, his anger flares easily. “If I get mad at something, I just start crying like crazy.”
The downward spiral also made Sawyer newly prayerful. “I was so down and out,” he recalled. “The first time in my life, I really turned to God and pleaded with him. I said, ‘Please, could you do something to bring me out of this?’ ”
Then the athlete in him reasserted itself, and he found that physical activity helped. On one jog, he encountered Ray Smith, who had been in Freeport High School with him. Smith owned a tree business and offered Sawyer work clearing away trees downed by a hurricane. That storm seemed an answer to his prayers—not a coincidence, but one in “a steady stream” of propitious events.
After working briefly with Smith, he set out on his own tree-cutting business, Treely Yours. In his fragile state, he felt unable to deal with human egos; the company of trees was more agreeable. “That’s how I got better,” he said. “Liking what you are doing is so important, and I loved it.”
But his PTSD kept him from being content with just one line of work. “I was a workaholic,” he said. “That’s one thing about this post-traumatic stress: It can make you obsessive-compulsive.”
The compulsion led him into other businesses, such as chimney sweeping and selling wood stoves and wood-splitting tools. His marketing research led him to set a Guinness record for wood-splitting in 1982, to spread the word about the quartering wedge he was selling. At two later public events, though he didn’t apply for a new record, he split wood even faster, fueled by anger: at the organizers in one case and scoffers in another.
“I was so mad,” he recalled. “Mentally, it gives me the adrenaline and the go-power that the average person doesn’t have, because I totally, like, almost lose it, and I take it out on the wood.”
Sawyer’s restless drive took on a new direction on Memorial Day 2001. In the shower of the Sag Harbor home that he inherited from his parents, he began thinking about veterans with PTSD. What was America doing to recognize their suffering?
Initially, his idea was a new battle medal, something comparable to the Purple Heart. The inspiration for its name came to him in a 2002 alumni bulletin from The Stony Brook School. It was about Louis Simpson, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and retired professor at Stony Brook University, who also had taught at Stony Brook School. The article said Simpson suffered a nervous breakdown after his World War II service, and he preferred to call his condition “soldier's heart.”
The expression arose during the Civil War. It’s the title of a Civil War novel by Gary Paulsen and, recently, the title of a PBS Frontline special on PTSD. But for Sawyer, that alumni bulletin item was a revelation. “I finally had a name for it,” he said.
The idea drew further inspiration from the film “Scent of a Woman.” In an impassioned speech, Al Pacino, as a blind veteran, says there is “no prosthetic” for “an amputated spirit.”
That moved Sawyer deeply.
“When Al Pacino uttered the words,” he recalled, “it was the light that finally went off in my mind to give me the impetus to fight for veterans who are suffering from what I would call soldier’s heart.”
The film also summoned Sawyer’s muse: The words for a poem, “Soldier’s Heart,” poured out of him, and he later made it into note cards that he gives his customers.
Early inspiration
But writing about it was not enough. He wanted the medal created. That hit a bump when Maryann Calendrille and Kathryn Szoka invited him to address a small gathering of veterans at Canio’s, their landmark bookstore on Sag Harbor’s Main Street. The reaction was mixed.
“He was getting into something that a lot of them preferred not to address directly,” Calendrille said. “One guy was very shut down about the idea. That individual is deeply suffering the effects.”
That meeting did not kill the medal plan.
But the more Sawyer thought about the idea, the more he realized that veterans did not yearn for a medal that would proclaim their mental disability. So he shifted focus to a monument.
Another in the “steady stream” of not-coincidences took him to the next step. In The Shelter Island Reporter, he read an item about sculptor Jerry Glassberg creating a bust of Dr. George Nicklin, a local psychiatrist. Once, biking on Shelter Island, Sawyer had encountered a group of Quakers, including Nicklin. After Nicklin spoke movingly of his own aversion to war, Sawyer approached him, and Nicklin gently shook his hand and acknowledged Sawyer’s Vietnam service. “He said, ‘I want to thank you,’ ” Sawyer recalled. “That was the first time in 26 years anyone ever thanked me.”
Staring at a bust of Nicklin in the newspaper, Sawyer felt another connection. So he called Glassberg. In the few minutes between the call and Sawyer's arrival at his studio, Glassberg clearly envisioned what the sculpture should look like.
Soon after, in the Museum of Modern Art, Glassberg saw a work by a German sculptor, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, who worked in cast stone, as Glassberg does. So he looked up Lehmbruck on the Internet and found one of his sculptures, more abstract than the idea in his own mind, but that exactly captured the spirit of anguish he was seeking for the piece for Sawyer. He also learned that Lehmbruck, like Sawyer, had suffered from combat-induced stress. He killed himself in 1919 at age 38, after serving in the German army in World War I.
Working with Sawyer, Glassberg has found him intriguing. “He’s a very caring person,” Glassberg said. But he told Sawyer that a one-man campaign won’t turn the maquette into a monument. “I’ve been after him to get a nonprofit name, so that he can get donations from a wide variety of people.”
Sawyer has written to Nassau County Executive Thomas Suozzi, who passed his request on to Edward Aulman, director of the county’s Veterans Service Agency. “He’s on his own,” Aulman said. “He needs an organization to back him.”
Proposed monuments must win approval from the United Veterans Organization of Nassau County. Its president, Raymond O’Connor of Seaford, likes Sawyer's chances. “From what I hear, he has my vote,” O'Connor said. “He sounded very sincere, and since it’s for the Vietnam veterans, with the trauma that they’re going through, I’m sure we’ll get a positive vote for him.”
A new generation
Actually, it’s not just for the Vietnam veterans. Sawyer also worries about those coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan. “I don’t want them to go through what I went through,” he said.
A New England Journal of Medicine study last year found one of six Iraq veterans with signs of PTSD, anxiety or depression. But Stephen Robinson, executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center, said the final figure will be more like one in four.
“Historically, from the Vietnam War, 30 percent of all who served suffer from PTSD,” Robinson said. “Because the wars are very much similar, we think the same thing’s going to happen here.”
Already, the federal government is having a tough time caring for the mental-health needs of Iraq veterans.
“I'm not opposed to monuments,” Robinson said, “but what I think is more important than a monument is that we correct this problem for a new generation.”
Sawyer can’t accomplish that by himself. But he can act as a Johnny Appleseed, spreading his own prescription to help PTSD sufferers: physical exercise, healthful food and the kind of chiropractic alignment he gets from DiRussa. “You can keep it from eating you up,” Sawyer said. And he can try to enlist everyone he meets in the monument drive.
This month, for example, he felled an 80-foot tree for Robert Evjen, who sells real estate and also runs the Sag Harbor Chamber of Commerce. He asked Evjen if the chamber could help. Sawyer gave him a bunch of cards with his “Soldier's Heart” poem to pass on to chamber members.
Sawyer vibrates at a high frequency, and his persistence can grate. But people see through it. “He’s a sweet guy,” DiRussa said. “He’s just a very, very nice man.” Peter Boody, editor of The Shelter Island Reporter, which has carried Sawyer’s work and reported on his campaign, added: “There’s a certain brilliance to the guy.”
The person who knows him best, Marlies Leifer, his companion, looks back on his life before Vietnam.
“He was always in the newspaper, a handsome, beautiful young man who wouldn't hurt a fly,” she said, thinking ruefully about the effects of Vietnam on Sawyer's generation. “I wonder what his life would have been without that experience, because those six months must have changed his path.”
One of Richard Sawyer’s poems, many of which deal with post-traumatic stress disorder, or “soldier's heart.” Sawyer has the poems printed on note cards, and he distributes them to his tree service customers.
Soldier's Heart
A soldier’s heart you'll never see.
It was born and raised in the infantry.
His heart, though wounded, continues to beat,
Going through life on wandering feet.
In search of a cure which will help him endure
The pain he feels inside.
No one knows what he’s been through
To save his country for me and you.
Please, dear God, help rest his soul.
He's been through so much
He needs your touch
To make him whole.
In the heart of Sag Harbor, cradle of whaling history and home of the late novelist John Steinbeck, lives a lower-profile, more homespun author. By day, he earns his bread by cutting down trees at homes plain and fancy. On those rounds, or late at night when he gets home, Richard Sawyer sometimes detects a poem stirring inside: nothing epic, just simple rhymes to capture his complex feelings.
The latest poem is about a mental affliction, post-traumatic stress disorder, which plagues Sawyer, thousands of other Vietnam War veterans, and new legions just home from Iraq. It begins: “Post-traumatic stress is a terrible mess./It makes you sad, it makes you mad, it makes you want to die.”
Bits of Sawyer’s poetry and prose have appeared in East End papers since he started writing three years ago. Beyond that, he is known in Sag Harbor and environs for his sense of whimsy (dressing as Frosty the Snowman to clear the snow), his sharp instinct for commerce and public relations (setting a Guinness world record for log-splitting, to help sell a splitting tool), and his astonishing levels of energy.
His goal: Eisenhower Park
“Rich is very, very persistent with the things he’s excited about and passionate about,” said Dr. Brian DiRussa, his Southampton chiropractor, whose work has helped ease Sawyer's stress. Sawyer’s current passion is to help establish a Soldier’s Heart PTSD monument in East Meadow's Eisenhower Park. His effort is the culmination of a long personal journey, first to ease the pain in his own soldier’s heart, and now to increase awareness of PTSD and offer solace to those who bear this anguish.
Recently, Sawyer’s campaign has reached a key milestone: a maquette, a 13-inch preliminary design, by Shelter Island sculptor Jerry Glassberg. It won’t be a cakewalk to get from there to the 57-inch-high full-size work in a plaza already bristling with war monuments. But there are far greater improbabilities in the long, vivid arc of his 60 years.
Richard Jefferson Sawyer was born in Boston and grew up in Elmont, then Freeport. After two years at the private Stony Brook School, he graduated from Freeport High School, where he wrestled and was a celebrated offensive lineman.
His transition to college was bumpy: Temple University in Philadelphia; East Stroudsburg State Teachers College in Pennsylvania, where he partied energetically; the C.W. Post campus of Long Island University, and Nassau Community College.
With the Vietnam War raging, it was a bad time to attend college halfheartedly. Sawyer was three credits short of maintaining a college deferment. So the draft plucked him. On Jan. 2, 1969, he entered the Army.
Soon after that, Richard M. Nixon also swore to defend the Constitution. The new president later announced a policy of Vietnamization: increasing the role of South Vietnam’s troops and decreasing America’s burden.
Sawyer saw that as a good reason to prolong his training and hope to delay his arrival in Vietnam until the shooting had stopped. First, he chose a 90-day noncommissioned officer school at Fort Benning, Ga. From there, he trained as a handler of scout dogs, also at Benning.
The dog training would slow his progress toward Vietnam, but once there, he’d have an especially dangerous job: walking point, ahead of other troops, using the dog to sniff out the Viet Cong or North Vietnamese.
Sawyer and his German shepherd, Teddy, got to Vietnam in March 1970. Both dog and handler had excelled in their training, which gave Sawyer hope for survival. But his hopes were quickly shaken.
“Teddy got a parasitic disease on the first mission and died,” Sawyer said. “He died in my arms. That was the first great loss of my life. This was my ticket to get out of Vietnam alive, and I loved him, too. After that happened, I started cursing everyone from the president on down.”
So Sawyer had to work with another dog, Prince, whose previous handler had been killed. “I was walking point with a dead man’s dog,” Sawyer said. And the dog, not yet recovered from his handler’s death, was acting shy and withdrawn.
His first time out with Prince, the mission was to seek out a first-aid area for injured Viet Cong. As he and Prince walked along, Prince picked up a scent, and Sawyer instantly warned his buddies to spread out. The GIs took cover, and the Viet Cong opened fire.
No one died in that ambush, but it created vivid memories, along with the other Vietnam experiences of a man who abhors violence.
“I never pulled my trigger when I was over in Vietnam,” he said. “I never aimed at the enemy. I didn’t want to kill anybody. I didn’t believe in war, number one. I always believed, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ There shouldn’t be any exceptions to that.”
When his tour ended in October 1970, Sawyer returned to earn his associate's degree from Nassau Community College, then a psychology degree from Southampton College. His next few years were a blend of seeking a master’s degree in health counseling and working in a chain of bars on Long Island and in the Cayman Islands. “It was a great life,” he said.
Then, in the mid-1970s, with a feeling of swelling in his jaw, he began to discover that Vietnam was still with him. At the VA Medical Center in Northport, he learned that the problem was bruxism, a gnashing or clenching of the teeth during sleep, often related to stress. So the staff told him to see a psychiatrist.
“For the first time in my life,” Sawyer said, “someone was telling me I had emotional problems.”
A delayed reaction
The bicentennial summer of 1976, the year of tall ships and patriotic fervor, was a nightmare. Holed up alone for three months in his family’s Sag Harbor home, he suffered a nervous breakdown. “I felt my mind actually leave my body,” he recalled. “I was coming unglued....I was crying all the time.”
It was such a profound experience that it shook loose even his name. Growing up, Richard Jefferson Sawyer had always been Jeff. From that time of trial on, he has been Richard, which sounded to him more solid, professional or mature.
It took a while before Sawyer got a formal diagnosis of PTSD and began receiving disability payments. In fact, PTSD did not become an official psychiatric diagnosis until 1980.
“I used to be very easygoing,” he said. Now, his anger flares easily. “If I get mad at something, I just start crying like crazy.”
The downward spiral also made Sawyer newly prayerful. “I was so down and out,” he recalled. “The first time in my life, I really turned to God and pleaded with him. I said, ‘Please, could you do something to bring me out of this?’ ”
Then the athlete in him reasserted itself, and he found that physical activity helped. On one jog, he encountered Ray Smith, who had been in Freeport High School with him. Smith owned a tree business and offered Sawyer work clearing away trees downed by a hurricane. That storm seemed an answer to his prayers—not a coincidence, but one in “a steady stream” of propitious events.
After working briefly with Smith, he set out on his own tree-cutting business, Treely Yours. In his fragile state, he felt unable to deal with human egos; the company of trees was more agreeable. “That’s how I got better,” he said. “Liking what you are doing is so important, and I loved it.”
But his PTSD kept him from being content with just one line of work. “I was a workaholic,” he said. “That’s one thing about this post-traumatic stress: It can make you obsessive-compulsive.”
The compulsion led him into other businesses, such as chimney sweeping and selling wood stoves and wood-splitting tools. His marketing research led him to set a Guinness record for wood-splitting in 1982, to spread the word about the quartering wedge he was selling. At two later public events, though he didn’t apply for a new record, he split wood even faster, fueled by anger: at the organizers in one case and scoffers in another.
“I was so mad,” he recalled. “Mentally, it gives me the adrenaline and the go-power that the average person doesn’t have, because I totally, like, almost lose it, and I take it out on the wood.”
Sawyer’s restless drive took on a new direction on Memorial Day 2001. In the shower of the Sag Harbor home that he inherited from his parents, he began thinking about veterans with PTSD. What was America doing to recognize their suffering?
Initially, his idea was a new battle medal, something comparable to the Purple Heart. The inspiration for its name came to him in a 2002 alumni bulletin from The Stony Brook School. It was about Louis Simpson, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and retired professor at Stony Brook University, who also had taught at Stony Brook School. The article said Simpson suffered a nervous breakdown after his World War II service, and he preferred to call his condition “soldier's heart.”
The expression arose during the Civil War. It’s the title of a Civil War novel by Gary Paulsen and, recently, the title of a PBS Frontline special on PTSD. But for Sawyer, that alumni bulletin item was a revelation. “I finally had a name for it,” he said.
The idea drew further inspiration from the film “Scent of a Woman.” In an impassioned speech, Al Pacino, as a blind veteran, says there is “no prosthetic” for “an amputated spirit.”
That moved Sawyer deeply.
“When Al Pacino uttered the words,” he recalled, “it was the light that finally went off in my mind to give me the impetus to fight for veterans who are suffering from what I would call soldier’s heart.”
The film also summoned Sawyer’s muse: The words for a poem, “Soldier’s Heart,” poured out of him, and he later made it into note cards that he gives his customers.
Early inspiration
But writing about it was not enough. He wanted the medal created. That hit a bump when Maryann Calendrille and Kathryn Szoka invited him to address a small gathering of veterans at Canio’s, their landmark bookstore on Sag Harbor’s Main Street. The reaction was mixed.
“He was getting into something that a lot of them preferred not to address directly,” Calendrille said. “One guy was very shut down about the idea. That individual is deeply suffering the effects.”
That meeting did not kill the medal plan.
But the more Sawyer thought about the idea, the more he realized that veterans did not yearn for a medal that would proclaim their mental disability. So he shifted focus to a monument.
Another in the “steady stream” of not-coincidences took him to the next step. In The Shelter Island Reporter, he read an item about sculptor Jerry Glassberg creating a bust of Dr. George Nicklin, a local psychiatrist. Once, biking on Shelter Island, Sawyer had encountered a group of Quakers, including Nicklin. After Nicklin spoke movingly of his own aversion to war, Sawyer approached him, and Nicklin gently shook his hand and acknowledged Sawyer’s Vietnam service. “He said, ‘I want to thank you,’ ” Sawyer recalled. “That was the first time in 26 years anyone ever thanked me.”
Staring at a bust of Nicklin in the newspaper, Sawyer felt another connection. So he called Glassberg. In the few minutes between the call and Sawyer's arrival at his studio, Glassberg clearly envisioned what the sculpture should look like.
Soon after, in the Museum of Modern Art, Glassberg saw a work by a German sculptor, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, who worked in cast stone, as Glassberg does. So he looked up Lehmbruck on the Internet and found one of his sculptures, more abstract than the idea in his own mind, but that exactly captured the spirit of anguish he was seeking for the piece for Sawyer. He also learned that Lehmbruck, like Sawyer, had suffered from combat-induced stress. He killed himself in 1919 at age 38, after serving in the German army in World War I.
Working with Sawyer, Glassberg has found him intriguing. “He’s a very caring person,” Glassberg said. But he told Sawyer that a one-man campaign won’t turn the maquette into a monument. “I’ve been after him to get a nonprofit name, so that he can get donations from a wide variety of people.”
Sawyer has written to Nassau County Executive Thomas Suozzi, who passed his request on to Edward Aulman, director of the county’s Veterans Service Agency. “He’s on his own,” Aulman said. “He needs an organization to back him.”
Proposed monuments must win approval from the United Veterans Organization of Nassau County. Its president, Raymond O’Connor of Seaford, likes Sawyer's chances. “From what I hear, he has my vote,” O'Connor said. “He sounded very sincere, and since it’s for the Vietnam veterans, with the trauma that they’re going through, I’m sure we’ll get a positive vote for him.”
A new generation
Actually, it’s not just for the Vietnam veterans. Sawyer also worries about those coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan. “I don’t want them to go through what I went through,” he said.
A New England Journal of Medicine study last year found one of six Iraq veterans with signs of PTSD, anxiety or depression. But Stephen Robinson, executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center, said the final figure will be more like one in four.
“Historically, from the Vietnam War, 30 percent of all who served suffer from PTSD,” Robinson said. “Because the wars are very much similar, we think the same thing’s going to happen here.”
Already, the federal government is having a tough time caring for the mental-health needs of Iraq veterans.
“I'm not opposed to monuments,” Robinson said, “but what I think is more important than a monument is that we correct this problem for a new generation.”
Sawyer can’t accomplish that by himself. But he can act as a Johnny Appleseed, spreading his own prescription to help PTSD sufferers: physical exercise, healthful food and the kind of chiropractic alignment he gets from DiRussa. “You can keep it from eating you up,” Sawyer said. And he can try to enlist everyone he meets in the monument drive.
This month, for example, he felled an 80-foot tree for Robert Evjen, who sells real estate and also runs the Sag Harbor Chamber of Commerce. He asked Evjen if the chamber could help. Sawyer gave him a bunch of cards with his “Soldier's Heart” poem to pass on to chamber members.
Sawyer vibrates at a high frequency, and his persistence can grate. But people see through it. “He’s a sweet guy,” DiRussa said. “He’s just a very, very nice man.” Peter Boody, editor of The Shelter Island Reporter, which has carried Sawyer’s work and reported on his campaign, added: “There’s a certain brilliance to the guy.”
The person who knows him best, Marlies Leifer, his companion, looks back on his life before Vietnam.
“He was always in the newspaper, a handsome, beautiful young man who wouldn't hurt a fly,” she said, thinking ruefully about the effects of Vietnam on Sawyer's generation. “I wonder what his life would have been without that experience, because those six months must have changed his path.”
One of Richard Sawyer’s poems, many of which deal with post-traumatic stress disorder, or “soldier's heart.” Sawyer has the poems printed on note cards, and he distributes them to his tree service customers.
Soldier's Heart
A soldier’s heart you'll never see.
It was born and raised in the infantry.
His heart, though wounded, continues to beat,
Going through life on wandering feet.
In search of a cure which will help him endure
The pain he feels inside.
No one knows what he’s been through
To save his country for me and you.
Please, dear God, help rest his soul.
He's been through so much
He needs your touch
To make him whole.
The murder of four great women
Newsday, November 29, 2000
“Christ invites us not to fear persecution because, believe me, brothers and sisters, those who are committed to the poor must risk the same fate as the poor, and in El Salvador we know what the fate of the poor signifies: to disappear, to be tortured, to be captive, and to be found dead.”
—Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero
THE PHONE call brought stark news about Sister Maura Clarke, a Maryknoll nun: Somewhere in bloody El Salvador, where so many of the poor had disappeared forever, Maura and three other missionary women were missing.
The news reached Maura’s younger sister, Julia Clarke Keogh, at her new home in Old Brookville, in early December, 1980. Now, she had to digest the call from Maryknoll, the worldwide Catholic mission society, and begin to decipher the fragmentary flow of information about this latest horrific turn in the violent events surrounding the peasant revolt and government repression in El Salvador. “Church groups would call; newspapers would call,” Julia said. “You really didn’t know, and you’d hear this and that.”
Beyond figuring it out for herself and her children, Julia had to help her elderly parents, John and Mary Clarke, cope. They were in their 80s, still living in their own home in Belle Harbor, on the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens.
The small comfort for Julia was that Maura had survived previous peril, during her long service in Nicaragua, before arriving in El Salvador. When an earthquake devastated the Nicaraguan capital of Managua in 1972, Maura was trapped in the building where she lived. Tying sheets into an escape rope, Maura and the other nuns lowered themselves to safety. Only then, in the presence of a priest with a very formal demeanor, did they realize they were still wearing nightgowns. In the family’s relief, this story provoked hearty laughter.
“When we first heard she was missing in El Salvador, we did hang on to that thread,” Julia recalled. “Other times, things happened and then we all sat together and had a good laugh at the experience.”
The call from Maryknoll reached Bill Ford’s home in New Jersey at a moment of joy. The youngest of his six children, John, had been born on Nov. 29 and had just come home from the hospital. “All the other five kids, Mary Anne and I were in his room, just poking and prodding and marveling at this new life, and the phone rang,” Bill Ford recalled. On the other end of the line was Sister Melinda Roper, then the president of the Maryknoll sisters. She told him that his younger sister, Ita, was among the four women missing.
“They didn’t know more than that, but it was a very bad sign,” Bill recalled. He phoned his mother, Mildred, and tried to reassure her. Then, on impulse, he called the American embassy in El Salvador and found himself speaking with Ambassador Robert White, who had taken that post just before the March 24 assassination of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero.
“White told me that the women had obviously been taken by the army, that there was a 10 percent chance that they were alive, and that I should help to raise the biggest uproar possible,” Bill said. “So, for the next, I don’t know, 18 hours or so, I called everybody I knew and asked them to call everybody they knew, people in Congress.”
That launched two decades of activism by the families of the four women: Maura Clarke and Ita Ford, the Maryknoll nuns, who both had family roots in New York City; Dorothy Kazel, an Ursuline nun, and Jean Donovan, a laywoman, who both served on a missionary team from the Diocese of Cleveland.
The activism began in hope, but the hope died quickly. On Thursday, Dec. 4, the families learned that the four women were dead. In those first days of shock, they gathered a few basic facts:
On Tuesday, Dec. 2, Jean and Dorothy had twice driven to the main airport in El Salvador to pick up Maryknoll nuns returning from a regional assembly in Nicaragua. First, they met Madeline Dorsey and Teresa Alexander and drove them to the coastal town of La Libertad. Then they returned to the airport to meet Maura and Ita. That night, someone left their burning van beside a main road from the airport to La Libertad. The next morning, in a different location, a group of peasants found four bodies and notified a local judge, who authorized their burial in a common grave.
Finally, on Dec. 4, peasants told a local Catholic priest about the grave. Word spread to the American embassy. By noon, White had reached the scene and watched the exhumation, along with a group of reporters, members of the Cleveland missionary team, and Madeline and Teresa, who knelt by the grave in prayer.
Ever since that original information became available, the families have struggled with the governments of the United States and El Salvador to determine who sexually assaulted and murdered the women and who ordered it.
They have endured cover-up from the Salvadoran government and indifference, even hostility, from their own. They have experienced some vindication, such as the 1984 convictions of five Salvadoran National Guard soldiers for the murders, and the 1993 release of a report by a United Nations truth commission. Now, just before the 20th anniversary of the murders, they have felt the sting of watching two Salvadoran generals cleared on Nov. 3 of responsibility for the killings at a civil trial in Florida, where the generals live.
In those two decades, the fate of “the four churchwomen” has thrown an intense spotlight on the repressive policies of the Salvadoran government and the complicity of the United States. Although the two generals were not found liable, the trial has created an important record of a difficult time. Using State Department documents, the plaintiffs showed White advising his superiors not to see the Salvadoran peasants’ revolt as part of a plot by the Soviet Union or Cuba, but as a homegrown phenomenon. Washington ignored that advice and sided with the regime as its best bulwark against communism.
That is the tragedy of American policy, that its “blinding notion of a higher goal, which was to defeat communism,” kept the government from seeing “the exorbitant human cost of this policy,” said Robert Varenik, an official of the Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights, which gathered the evidence for the trial. That cost amounted to 75,000 deaths.
The four women themselves have become a powerful model for others to follow in living the Gospel.
“Both for Salvadorans and Americans, there’s something truly remarkable and beautiful about people who need not have done so, but who decide to stand by people in another country, from another walk of life, who are having an incredibly unfortunate and difficult experience on Earth,” Varenik said. “That feeling of standing with someone, the kind of notion of accompaniment, in a real sense, it sounds cliched, but when people actually do it with their lives, it’s quite extraordinary.”
That witness is all the more extraordinary for Americans because it came from ordinary women, raised in middle-class American households, who embraced the fate of the poor in another land. Two of them grew up here in New York.
MAURA WAS BORN Mary Elizabeth Clarke, but was always known in the family as Maura. She was the oldest of three, followed by James and Julia. They grew up near the ocean, in Belle Harbor. “She was always a very, very good person,” said Julia. “I just remember her as my older sister, who I thought was absolutely the smartest person in the whole world.” She attended elementary school at St. Francis de Sales in Belle Harbor and high school at Stella Maris in Rockaway Park.
At St. Joseph’s College in Brooklyn, she studied to become a teacher, but became drawn to missionary work. So she decided to become a Maryknoll nun and finish her education at Maryknoll.
The Clarkes encouraged their children to become whatever they wanted. “If she was going to be a dancer in Radio City Music Hall, it would have been just as fine,” Julia said. “I remember my mother saying, ‘If it doesn’t work out, just come home.’ ”
But Maura was in it for life, beginning with five years of teaching in a low-income section of the Bronx, then on to service in Nicaragua, starting in 1959. Even from there, she managed to come home occasionally.
“She came for visits, and then she would be gone for a long time,” said her godson, Julia’s son Scott, now 31, who loved her childlike willingness to enter his world, even at the cost of ripping her stocking as she toured his backyard forts. And when they all visited Maura’s parents at the beach, she was the one grown-up who let the kids bury her in sand. “She just really became like a child.”
In 1977, she returned to the United States to help develop mission awareness here, working from Maryknoll and Boston. She was not in Nicaragua for the fall of the repressive Somoza regime in 1979, but she returned there in 1980. For months, though, she had been thinking about the growing needs in El Salvador. That summer, she decided to visit and explore, after reading an appeal for help from two Maryknoll nuns already working in El Salvador: Carla Piette and Ita Ford.
Ita was the middle child of a solidly Democratic Brooklyn family. Bill was the oldest, Irene the youngest. “Ita was a very lively person, very quick-witted,” Bill said. “She believed that one person can make a difference. In many respects, Ita during the ’60s and ’70s was the conscience of the family.”
She was an accomplished student in elementary school at Visitation Academy, high school at Fontbonne Hall and college at Marymount Manhattan. Through her teenage years, she felt a tug toward Maryknoll. During a trip to Russia, she saw the pain of people unable to worship freely, and the experience made up her mind. She joined Maryknoll in 1961.
Three years later, illness forced her to leave. She found work editing English and religion textbooks, lived in Greenwich Village and led a busy life. “She was very well read and had a great sense of humor and loved being with people,” said her nephew, William P. Ford III. “She was the convener.”
The pull of Maryknoll continued, however, and she rejoined in 1971. She reached her first foreign assignment, in Chile, just before an American-sponsored military junta overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in 1973 and replaced him with Augusto Pinochet.
That timing was painful: Ita’s father died on Sept. 10, the coup struck the next day, and the chaos delayed her exit for two weeks, forcing her to miss her father’s funeral. “She and my grandfather were very close,” said her nephew. “He wrote to her almost every day.”
Two years later, her brother, Bill, and his wife visited her in Chile. The malnutrition among the children shocked them, and they saw armed soldiers on the streets, enforcing a curfew. “I can remember being out one night in a restaurant, and I guess we stayed too long, and Ita was very nervous,” Bill said. “We had to drive home with a white handkerchief tied to the side-view mirror.”
In Chile, Ita worked with Sister Carla Piette, developing a close friendship. In 1978, Ita returned to the United States for a year of reflection and theological study. Despite a serious auto accident in 1979, she returned to Chile in 1980. Drawn by Archbishop Romero's call for help, the two friends decided to go to El Salvador. Carla arrived at the time of Romero’s assassination, and Ita soon after that. They stayed briefly with Sister Madeline Dorsey in Santa Ana, traveled the country and eventually chose to work in Chalatenango.
Like Ita and Carla, Maura Clarke had been attracted by Romero’s preaching. She arrived in El Salvador to explore possibilities in early August, 1980. On Aug. 23, Ita and Carla were riding in a Jeep when a flash flood overcame them. “Carla pushed Ita through the window of the Jeep,” Madeline Dorsey recalled. Ita survived, but Carla drowned. In the regrouping that followed, Maura lived briefly with Madeline, then joined Ita in Chalatenango for what would prove to be less than three months. Maura and elfin Ita made a powerful team.
“Maura was a very gentle and generous person,” Madeline said. “Ita had a great deal of depth, a tremendous intelligence and a total commitment to what she was doing.” But what were they doing that infuriated the regime? They were helping feed people, but they had broader concerns, as Jean and Dorothy did elsewhere in the country.
“The thing is that all four of the women were outspoken about the human-rights violations,” said Margaret Swedish, director of the Religious Task Force on Central America and Mexico, which is sponsoring events tomorrow and Saturday in Washington to commemorate the murders. “Ita Ford wrote a very compassionate and moving letter at one point about going out and helping a mother identify the body of her 15-year-old son, which was being exhumed. That was a very disturbing thing for her, because you weren’t supposed to remove the bodies of the dead. That was also considered a subversive activity.”
For the four women, it was just the Gospel. “It was all about poor people who didn’t have food,” said Maura’s niece, Pamela Clarke Keogh. “It’s almost incomprehensible for Americans to think that people literally do not have enough to eat or do not have clothing. And so, if someone goes down and tries to help give someone those basic things, they're seen as radical.”
Still, for repressive governments, the line between the Gospel and the gun is fuzzy. Dom Helder Camara, the late archbishop of Recife, Brazil, put it this way: “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.”
The essential American error in El Salvador was to see an uprising by the hungry as a plot directed from Moscow or Havana. “I think that we should stay out of other countries’ civil wars,” said White, the former ambassador, who was fired by the Reagan administration only a few days after the inauguration in 1981. “The campesinos of Latin America are among the most conservative people in the world, and when they rise up, it’s a very serious thing, because they’re the most patient, long-suffering people, because they know that every time there’s change, they lose. So, it takes the heaped-up injustices of decades for them to go into revolution. And when that happens, we should never overemphasize outside factors.”
But the incoming Reagan administration saw the struggle in El Salvador as an extension of the Evil Empire, the Soviet Union. During the transition between Reagan’s election and inauguration, “people purporting to represent the views of the new administration” encouraged the Salvadoran regime in its fight against the peasant revolt, said Varenik, of the Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights. Summarizing White’s testimony and comments by others, Varenik said that these signals were “interpreted by the Salvadorans as a message that you will not be hectored on human rights and that the fight against communism will assume its proper first role.”
Some feel that those signals may have added to the death toll. “At the end of White’s testimony, he said that there was a lot of killing in Salvador, but there was a disproportionate amount of that killing that happened after the first Tuesday of November,” said Ita’s nephew Bill.
Whether the four women knew anything of these geopolitical machinations, they seemed to sense they were in danger. “My fear of death is being challenged constantly as children, lovely young girls, old people are being shot and some cut up with machetes and bodies thrown by the road and people prohibited from burying them,” Maura wrote. “One cries out: Lord how long? And then, too, what creeps into my mind is the little fear, or big, that when it touches me very personally, will I be faithful?”
THE DANGER took a written form when an ominous sign appeared on the building where Ita and Maura lived. “The sign over the door said all who enter here are communists and all will be killed,” Madeline Dorsey recalled. Soon after its appearance, Ita, Maura, Dorothy and Jean were dead.
The bodies of Jean and Dorothy were returned home to the United States, but Ita and Maura were buried where they worked, in keeping with Maryknoll custom. At the funeral in Chalatenango, Julia Clarke Keogh and her brother, James, met many of the campesinos Maura and Ita had helped. “People kept coming up to me and touching me—one story after another of something that she did,” Julia said.
But key U.S. government officials had their doubts about the four women. Less than a month after the deaths, Jeane Kirkpatrick, who later became Reagan’s U.N. ambassador, was quoted in The Tampa Tribune as saying: “I don’t think that the government was responsible. The nuns were not just nuns; the nuns were political activists.”
The following March, testifying before Congress, Reagan’s new secretary of state, Alexander Haig, said: “I would like to suggest to you that some of the investigations would lead one to believe that perhaps the vehicle that the nuns were riding in may have tried to run a roadblock or may have accidentally been perceived to have been doing so, and there may have been an exchange of fire.”
Though Haig insisted afterward that he had not meant to say that the women were actually firing weapons, the pistol-packing-nuns tone of his testimony infuriated the families. “What he was doing was smearing the memory of these women to justify an evil policy, in my opinion,” said Ita’s brother, Bill. “He raised his right hand, swore to tell the truth and then lied to protect the flow of guns and ammunition to this murder machine.”
That was the low point in the rocky relationship between the families and the State Department. “There are obviously people within the State Department who wanted to help us and did their best to, but the policy always was, during the Reagan and somewhat into the Bush years, that there was not going to be another Castro, that since Salvadorans were fighting our fight against communism, ‘the enemy of our enemy is our friend,’ and so, the end justified the means,” Bill Ford said. “It was a policy that contributed to tens of thousands of deaths. It was wrongheaded and immoral.”
They experienced sharp disappointment at the trial of two generals, Jose Guillermo Garcia and Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, an action brought under the Torture Victim Protection Act, a federal statute that gives victims a chance to sue those responsible for their suffering. The families argued that the generals failed to discipline their men for human-rights abuses, which set the stage for the murders. But the jury didn’t buy it.
White, the former ambassador to El Salvador, said the jurors may have felt they could not find the generals guilty without pointing a finger at the Reagan-Bush administrations. A defense lawyer argued that the generals were only doing what the United States wanted. “Well, you know what? He’s got a point,” White said. “As I understand it, each of them got two legions of merit, and Vides Casanova had a letter of commendation signed by President Reagan.”
Despite the verdict in favor of the generals, the trial already has aired the issues, and next year the generals face another trial, involving different plaintiffs. The information elicited in this fall’s trial will be available to those attorneys, and the families may seek a new trial in their case.
Just getting the generals into court was no small thing. “When I walked into the trial and saw the two of them there, looking a little bit older, but exactly the same, it was a great moment to see them in a courtroom, because believe me, you never in a billion, trillion years ever thought anything like that was going to happen,” Scott Keogh said.
Despite the verdict, the families will continue trying to get the U.S. government to make amends for a policy that has left El Salvador a society saturated with guns. “I think that, since we contributed to this murder and mayhem, and to a dysfunctional society, we’ve got an obligation to help to clean up the mess we made,” Ita Ford’s brother, Bill, said.
Over the years, the families have spoken about the murders to any group that would hear them. Up to a point, they received sympathy. But anti-communist fervor is so tightly woven into the fabric of American culture that they also have encountered blank looks and the unspoken but ever-present question: “Well, what were these women doing there, anyway?” What they were doing, the families argue, is living the Gospel.
“Maybe its hard for some people to understand that there are people that truly love God and think it’s important to serve him by working with his poor,” Julia Clarke Keogh said. “And that’s what Maura was doing when she was murdered in El Salvador.”
“Christ invites us not to fear persecution because, believe me, brothers and sisters, those who are committed to the poor must risk the same fate as the poor, and in El Salvador we know what the fate of the poor signifies: to disappear, to be tortured, to be captive, and to be found dead.”
—Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero
THE PHONE call brought stark news about Sister Maura Clarke, a Maryknoll nun: Somewhere in bloody El Salvador, where so many of the poor had disappeared forever, Maura and three other missionary women were missing.
The news reached Maura’s younger sister, Julia Clarke Keogh, at her new home in Old Brookville, in early December, 1980. Now, she had to digest the call from Maryknoll, the worldwide Catholic mission society, and begin to decipher the fragmentary flow of information about this latest horrific turn in the violent events surrounding the peasant revolt and government repression in El Salvador. “Church groups would call; newspapers would call,” Julia said. “You really didn’t know, and you’d hear this and that.”
Beyond figuring it out for herself and her children, Julia had to help her elderly parents, John and Mary Clarke, cope. They were in their 80s, still living in their own home in Belle Harbor, on the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens.
The small comfort for Julia was that Maura had survived previous peril, during her long service in Nicaragua, before arriving in El Salvador. When an earthquake devastated the Nicaraguan capital of Managua in 1972, Maura was trapped in the building where she lived. Tying sheets into an escape rope, Maura and the other nuns lowered themselves to safety. Only then, in the presence of a priest with a very formal demeanor, did they realize they were still wearing nightgowns. In the family’s relief, this story provoked hearty laughter.
“When we first heard she was missing in El Salvador, we did hang on to that thread,” Julia recalled. “Other times, things happened and then we all sat together and had a good laugh at the experience.”
The call from Maryknoll reached Bill Ford’s home in New Jersey at a moment of joy. The youngest of his six children, John, had been born on Nov. 29 and had just come home from the hospital. “All the other five kids, Mary Anne and I were in his room, just poking and prodding and marveling at this new life, and the phone rang,” Bill Ford recalled. On the other end of the line was Sister Melinda Roper, then the president of the Maryknoll sisters. She told him that his younger sister, Ita, was among the four women missing.
“They didn’t know more than that, but it was a very bad sign,” Bill recalled. He phoned his mother, Mildred, and tried to reassure her. Then, on impulse, he called the American embassy in El Salvador and found himself speaking with Ambassador Robert White, who had taken that post just before the March 24 assassination of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero.
“White told me that the women had obviously been taken by the army, that there was a 10 percent chance that they were alive, and that I should help to raise the biggest uproar possible,” Bill said. “So, for the next, I don’t know, 18 hours or so, I called everybody I knew and asked them to call everybody they knew, people in Congress.”
That launched two decades of activism by the families of the four women: Maura Clarke and Ita Ford, the Maryknoll nuns, who both had family roots in New York City; Dorothy Kazel, an Ursuline nun, and Jean Donovan, a laywoman, who both served on a missionary team from the Diocese of Cleveland.
The activism began in hope, but the hope died quickly. On Thursday, Dec. 4, the families learned that the four women were dead. In those first days of shock, they gathered a few basic facts:
On Tuesday, Dec. 2, Jean and Dorothy had twice driven to the main airport in El Salvador to pick up Maryknoll nuns returning from a regional assembly in Nicaragua. First, they met Madeline Dorsey and Teresa Alexander and drove them to the coastal town of La Libertad. Then they returned to the airport to meet Maura and Ita. That night, someone left their burning van beside a main road from the airport to La Libertad. The next morning, in a different location, a group of peasants found four bodies and notified a local judge, who authorized their burial in a common grave.
Finally, on Dec. 4, peasants told a local Catholic priest about the grave. Word spread to the American embassy. By noon, White had reached the scene and watched the exhumation, along with a group of reporters, members of the Cleveland missionary team, and Madeline and Teresa, who knelt by the grave in prayer.
Ever since that original information became available, the families have struggled with the governments of the United States and El Salvador to determine who sexually assaulted and murdered the women and who ordered it.
They have endured cover-up from the Salvadoran government and indifference, even hostility, from their own. They have experienced some vindication, such as the 1984 convictions of five Salvadoran National Guard soldiers for the murders, and the 1993 release of a report by a United Nations truth commission. Now, just before the 20th anniversary of the murders, they have felt the sting of watching two Salvadoran generals cleared on Nov. 3 of responsibility for the killings at a civil trial in Florida, where the generals live.
In those two decades, the fate of “the four churchwomen” has thrown an intense spotlight on the repressive policies of the Salvadoran government and the complicity of the United States. Although the two generals were not found liable, the trial has created an important record of a difficult time. Using State Department documents, the plaintiffs showed White advising his superiors not to see the Salvadoran peasants’ revolt as part of a plot by the Soviet Union or Cuba, but as a homegrown phenomenon. Washington ignored that advice and sided with the regime as its best bulwark against communism.
That is the tragedy of American policy, that its “blinding notion of a higher goal, which was to defeat communism,” kept the government from seeing “the exorbitant human cost of this policy,” said Robert Varenik, an official of the Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights, which gathered the evidence for the trial. That cost amounted to 75,000 deaths.
The four women themselves have become a powerful model for others to follow in living the Gospel.
“Both for Salvadorans and Americans, there’s something truly remarkable and beautiful about people who need not have done so, but who decide to stand by people in another country, from another walk of life, who are having an incredibly unfortunate and difficult experience on Earth,” Varenik said. “That feeling of standing with someone, the kind of notion of accompaniment, in a real sense, it sounds cliched, but when people actually do it with their lives, it’s quite extraordinary.”
That witness is all the more extraordinary for Americans because it came from ordinary women, raised in middle-class American households, who embraced the fate of the poor in another land. Two of them grew up here in New York.
MAURA WAS BORN Mary Elizabeth Clarke, but was always known in the family as Maura. She was the oldest of three, followed by James and Julia. They grew up near the ocean, in Belle Harbor. “She was always a very, very good person,” said Julia. “I just remember her as my older sister, who I thought was absolutely the smartest person in the whole world.” She attended elementary school at St. Francis de Sales in Belle Harbor and high school at Stella Maris in Rockaway Park.
At St. Joseph’s College in Brooklyn, she studied to become a teacher, but became drawn to missionary work. So she decided to become a Maryknoll nun and finish her education at Maryknoll.
The Clarkes encouraged their children to become whatever they wanted. “If she was going to be a dancer in Radio City Music Hall, it would have been just as fine,” Julia said. “I remember my mother saying, ‘If it doesn’t work out, just come home.’ ”
But Maura was in it for life, beginning with five years of teaching in a low-income section of the Bronx, then on to service in Nicaragua, starting in 1959. Even from there, she managed to come home occasionally.
“She came for visits, and then she would be gone for a long time,” said her godson, Julia’s son Scott, now 31, who loved her childlike willingness to enter his world, even at the cost of ripping her stocking as she toured his backyard forts. And when they all visited Maura’s parents at the beach, she was the one grown-up who let the kids bury her in sand. “She just really became like a child.”
In 1977, she returned to the United States to help develop mission awareness here, working from Maryknoll and Boston. She was not in Nicaragua for the fall of the repressive Somoza regime in 1979, but she returned there in 1980. For months, though, she had been thinking about the growing needs in El Salvador. That summer, she decided to visit and explore, after reading an appeal for help from two Maryknoll nuns already working in El Salvador: Carla Piette and Ita Ford.
Ita was the middle child of a solidly Democratic Brooklyn family. Bill was the oldest, Irene the youngest. “Ita was a very lively person, very quick-witted,” Bill said. “She believed that one person can make a difference. In many respects, Ita during the ’60s and ’70s was the conscience of the family.”
She was an accomplished student in elementary school at Visitation Academy, high school at Fontbonne Hall and college at Marymount Manhattan. Through her teenage years, she felt a tug toward Maryknoll. During a trip to Russia, she saw the pain of people unable to worship freely, and the experience made up her mind. She joined Maryknoll in 1961.
Three years later, illness forced her to leave. She found work editing English and religion textbooks, lived in Greenwich Village and led a busy life. “She was very well read and had a great sense of humor and loved being with people,” said her nephew, William P. Ford III. “She was the convener.”
The pull of Maryknoll continued, however, and she rejoined in 1971. She reached her first foreign assignment, in Chile, just before an American-sponsored military junta overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in 1973 and replaced him with Augusto Pinochet.
That timing was painful: Ita’s father died on Sept. 10, the coup struck the next day, and the chaos delayed her exit for two weeks, forcing her to miss her father’s funeral. “She and my grandfather were very close,” said her nephew. “He wrote to her almost every day.”
Two years later, her brother, Bill, and his wife visited her in Chile. The malnutrition among the children shocked them, and they saw armed soldiers on the streets, enforcing a curfew. “I can remember being out one night in a restaurant, and I guess we stayed too long, and Ita was very nervous,” Bill said. “We had to drive home with a white handkerchief tied to the side-view mirror.”
In Chile, Ita worked with Sister Carla Piette, developing a close friendship. In 1978, Ita returned to the United States for a year of reflection and theological study. Despite a serious auto accident in 1979, she returned to Chile in 1980. Drawn by Archbishop Romero's call for help, the two friends decided to go to El Salvador. Carla arrived at the time of Romero’s assassination, and Ita soon after that. They stayed briefly with Sister Madeline Dorsey in Santa Ana, traveled the country and eventually chose to work in Chalatenango.
Like Ita and Carla, Maura Clarke had been attracted by Romero’s preaching. She arrived in El Salvador to explore possibilities in early August, 1980. On Aug. 23, Ita and Carla were riding in a Jeep when a flash flood overcame them. “Carla pushed Ita through the window of the Jeep,” Madeline Dorsey recalled. Ita survived, but Carla drowned. In the regrouping that followed, Maura lived briefly with Madeline, then joined Ita in Chalatenango for what would prove to be less than three months. Maura and elfin Ita made a powerful team.
“Maura was a very gentle and generous person,” Madeline said. “Ita had a great deal of depth, a tremendous intelligence and a total commitment to what she was doing.” But what were they doing that infuriated the regime? They were helping feed people, but they had broader concerns, as Jean and Dorothy did elsewhere in the country.
“The thing is that all four of the women were outspoken about the human-rights violations,” said Margaret Swedish, director of the Religious Task Force on Central America and Mexico, which is sponsoring events tomorrow and Saturday in Washington to commemorate the murders. “Ita Ford wrote a very compassionate and moving letter at one point about going out and helping a mother identify the body of her 15-year-old son, which was being exhumed. That was a very disturbing thing for her, because you weren’t supposed to remove the bodies of the dead. That was also considered a subversive activity.”
For the four women, it was just the Gospel. “It was all about poor people who didn’t have food,” said Maura’s niece, Pamela Clarke Keogh. “It’s almost incomprehensible for Americans to think that people literally do not have enough to eat or do not have clothing. And so, if someone goes down and tries to help give someone those basic things, they're seen as radical.”
Still, for repressive governments, the line between the Gospel and the gun is fuzzy. Dom Helder Camara, the late archbishop of Recife, Brazil, put it this way: “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.”
The essential American error in El Salvador was to see an uprising by the hungry as a plot directed from Moscow or Havana. “I think that we should stay out of other countries’ civil wars,” said White, the former ambassador, who was fired by the Reagan administration only a few days after the inauguration in 1981. “The campesinos of Latin America are among the most conservative people in the world, and when they rise up, it’s a very serious thing, because they’re the most patient, long-suffering people, because they know that every time there’s change, they lose. So, it takes the heaped-up injustices of decades for them to go into revolution. And when that happens, we should never overemphasize outside factors.”
But the incoming Reagan administration saw the struggle in El Salvador as an extension of the Evil Empire, the Soviet Union. During the transition between Reagan’s election and inauguration, “people purporting to represent the views of the new administration” encouraged the Salvadoran regime in its fight against the peasant revolt, said Varenik, of the Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights. Summarizing White’s testimony and comments by others, Varenik said that these signals were “interpreted by the Salvadorans as a message that you will not be hectored on human rights and that the fight against communism will assume its proper first role.”
Some feel that those signals may have added to the death toll. “At the end of White’s testimony, he said that there was a lot of killing in Salvador, but there was a disproportionate amount of that killing that happened after the first Tuesday of November,” said Ita’s nephew Bill.
Whether the four women knew anything of these geopolitical machinations, they seemed to sense they were in danger. “My fear of death is being challenged constantly as children, lovely young girls, old people are being shot and some cut up with machetes and bodies thrown by the road and people prohibited from burying them,” Maura wrote. “One cries out: Lord how long? And then, too, what creeps into my mind is the little fear, or big, that when it touches me very personally, will I be faithful?”
THE DANGER took a written form when an ominous sign appeared on the building where Ita and Maura lived. “The sign over the door said all who enter here are communists and all will be killed,” Madeline Dorsey recalled. Soon after its appearance, Ita, Maura, Dorothy and Jean were dead.
The bodies of Jean and Dorothy were returned home to the United States, but Ita and Maura were buried where they worked, in keeping with Maryknoll custom. At the funeral in Chalatenango, Julia Clarke Keogh and her brother, James, met many of the campesinos Maura and Ita had helped. “People kept coming up to me and touching me—one story after another of something that she did,” Julia said.
But key U.S. government officials had their doubts about the four women. Less than a month after the deaths, Jeane Kirkpatrick, who later became Reagan’s U.N. ambassador, was quoted in The Tampa Tribune as saying: “I don’t think that the government was responsible. The nuns were not just nuns; the nuns were political activists.”
The following March, testifying before Congress, Reagan’s new secretary of state, Alexander Haig, said: “I would like to suggest to you that some of the investigations would lead one to believe that perhaps the vehicle that the nuns were riding in may have tried to run a roadblock or may have accidentally been perceived to have been doing so, and there may have been an exchange of fire.”
Though Haig insisted afterward that he had not meant to say that the women were actually firing weapons, the pistol-packing-nuns tone of his testimony infuriated the families. “What he was doing was smearing the memory of these women to justify an evil policy, in my opinion,” said Ita’s brother, Bill. “He raised his right hand, swore to tell the truth and then lied to protect the flow of guns and ammunition to this murder machine.”
That was the low point in the rocky relationship between the families and the State Department. “There are obviously people within the State Department who wanted to help us and did their best to, but the policy always was, during the Reagan and somewhat into the Bush years, that there was not going to be another Castro, that since Salvadorans were fighting our fight against communism, ‘the enemy of our enemy is our friend,’ and so, the end justified the means,” Bill Ford said. “It was a policy that contributed to tens of thousands of deaths. It was wrongheaded and immoral.”
They experienced sharp disappointment at the trial of two generals, Jose Guillermo Garcia and Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, an action brought under the Torture Victim Protection Act, a federal statute that gives victims a chance to sue those responsible for their suffering. The families argued that the generals failed to discipline their men for human-rights abuses, which set the stage for the murders. But the jury didn’t buy it.
White, the former ambassador to El Salvador, said the jurors may have felt they could not find the generals guilty without pointing a finger at the Reagan-Bush administrations. A defense lawyer argued that the generals were only doing what the United States wanted. “Well, you know what? He’s got a point,” White said. “As I understand it, each of them got two legions of merit, and Vides Casanova had a letter of commendation signed by President Reagan.”
Despite the verdict in favor of the generals, the trial already has aired the issues, and next year the generals face another trial, involving different plaintiffs. The information elicited in this fall’s trial will be available to those attorneys, and the families may seek a new trial in their case.
Just getting the generals into court was no small thing. “When I walked into the trial and saw the two of them there, looking a little bit older, but exactly the same, it was a great moment to see them in a courtroom, because believe me, you never in a billion, trillion years ever thought anything like that was going to happen,” Scott Keogh said.
Despite the verdict, the families will continue trying to get the U.S. government to make amends for a policy that has left El Salvador a society saturated with guns. “I think that, since we contributed to this murder and mayhem, and to a dysfunctional society, we’ve got an obligation to help to clean up the mess we made,” Ita Ford’s brother, Bill, said.
Over the years, the families have spoken about the murders to any group that would hear them. Up to a point, they received sympathy. But anti-communist fervor is so tightly woven into the fabric of American culture that they also have encountered blank looks and the unspoken but ever-present question: “Well, what were these women doing there, anyway?” What they were doing, the families argue, is living the Gospel.
“Maybe its hard for some people to understand that there are people that truly love God and think it’s important to serve him by working with his poor,” Julia Clarke Keogh said. “And that’s what Maura was doing when she was murdered in El Salvador.”
Surviving the death camps
My proudest day at Newsday was the day Roy Gutman won a Pulitzer for revealing the existence of death camps in the former Yugoslavia. Roy's stories saved lives, and I wrote this story about two brothers who suffered through the death camps. The Islamic Center of Long Island honored Roy for his lifesaving stories, and both Karcic brothers joined in the celebration—Arsad in person and Edin on a video screen. It was a great evening for a great journalist.
Newsday, December 22, 1997
As the nightmare of nationalism exploded in the streets of Sarajevo in early 1992, the Karcic family decided to leave, seek shelter with relatives in another part of Bosnia and wait for the whole mad episode to end.
Everything in their experience persuaded them that it would only be a short time before the fighting stopped, sanity prevailed and everyone—Serbs, Muslims and Croats—went back to living in peace together.
Then the family could return to its upper middle class life of achievement and culture. The parents, Abdulah and Emina, could resume the retirement that they had recently begun, capping Abdulah’s distinguished career in industry and international trade and Emina’s years as a biochemist. The elder son, Edin, could return to practicing pediatric medicine, and the younger, Arsad, could finish medical school.
“We thought, Oh, this is an incident. It will be over in five days,’ ” Edin said. “We couldn’t believe there would be a war.”
In the weeks that followed, however, events spiraled out of control and the Karcic family tumbled into the dark, chaotic tunnel of war and ethnic cleansing.
The war claimed all their possessions—from the small and intensely personal, such as Abdulah’s photographs of his sons’ childhood, to the financially valuable, including two vacation homes that Abdulah and Emina had inherited from parents, three apartments and Abdulah’s life savings after 40 years of work.
Edin lost his hospital, which was virtually destroyed in the shelling, and came close to losing his life in a notorious concentration camp, Omarska.
Though Arsad had the luck to be transferred quickly from Omarska to a less-murderous camp, he suffered a long separation from his brother and a jarring break in his medical education.
Perhaps worst of all, for nearly four years, wrenched apart by the cruel illogic of the war, the family lost its most precious gift: life together.
Now, all four live in a small apartment in East Meadow, while Edin and Arsad work as internal medicine residents at the nearby Nassau County Medical Center. Though Edin had finished his pediatric residency in Bosnia, American practice requires that foreign-trained doctors go through residency here. He is a year away from finishing his residency and Arsad is a year behind him. Like all residents everywhere, their lives are a whirl of work and sleep deprivation. Their only real social life, apart from the hospital and the apartment, centers on visits to the Islamic Center of Long Island in Westbury. IT IS, for the moment, a claustrophobic existence compared with the cosmopolitan life they enjoyed in Sarajevo. But they do not complain. “What is a pleasant surprise for me, knowing what they have gone through, is how well they have adapted and accepted,” said Dr. Faroque Khan, chairman of the department of medicine at the center. “There is no bitterness.”
Rather, the family has become a living lesson in both the unfathomable geography of hate that swallowed them up and the mysterious power of love that kept them going.
“There were a bunch of people that made our lives miserable, but there were even more people that helped us along the way to come back,” said Edin, who suffered more physically than the rest of his family, but somehow manages to relate the horror dispassionately, calmly, even wittily. “So all this paranoid experience didn’t really make us too paranoid.”
In fact, it has left them closer than ever. “You can hardly find as happy a family in the United States as we are, because after four years of separation, we are again together,” Abdulah said. “We are happy, all of us, to be in a country where we really feel safe, and real freedom.”
Still, the Karcic family is in the difficult and familiar position of beginning all over again. “In our case, every generation starts from zero,” said Abdulah, 67. His parents lost everything in World War II, as his grandparents had in World War I. So he can understand what his sons feel. “I, as a young boy like them, had to start from zero.”
The disruption seems almost inevitable, because of the region’s location on the borders of historically feuding civilizations, such as the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Warsaw Pact and NATO. “So there’s always a flash point of big empires clashing there from time to time,” Edin said.
As Abdulah’s sons grew up, in the Cold War period after World War II, they did not experience military conflict. Josip Broz Tito, the wartime military leader and later president of Yugoslavia, kept the nation peaceful and reasonably prosperous.
On the dark side, the Communist system suppressed personal freedoms, discouraging any public worship. “Officially, there were mosques and churches and synagogues,” said Edin, 34. “If you were ever sighted in one of them, you would pretty much end up losing your job, could never get a place at the university, and that sort of stuff.” So the Karcic family had to express its Muslim faith privately.
Despite the tight control of religion, the system showed flexibility. Even the lowliest employees of most firms had to be members of the Communist Party, but Abdulah never joined. “It was just opposite to my personal feelings,” he said. But that did not hurt his career at Energoinvest, the largest company in the former Yugoslavia. “They needed me, because I was fluent in foreign languages and I had two university degrees.” Nor did his lack of party membership hinder him when the government tapped him for a trade commission post.
In that job, he worked in Pakistan, where Edin began his schooling and picked up his perfect, British-accented English, and where Arsad was born. Later, Edin began medical school in Berlin and finished in Sarajevo, moving on to practice pediatrics at a large teaching hospital there. By 1992, Arsad had entered the clinical phase of his medical training.
Throughout their youth, their country had remained stable and offered promise for their future.
“Yugoslavia was a country with a relatively good living standard,” Edin said. “I had a job in Germany, and I realized that my living standard would be better in Yugoslavia. I would earn three times less, but the costs of daily living are five times less.”
The Tito era also kept a lid on local rivalries. “No one wanted to talk about nationalism,” said Arsad, 28. “No one knew about nationalism. No one even cared. I mean, no one cared: Are you this, are you that? Who cares? It was so unimportant.” But Tito’s death in 1980 began to change that equation.
Before the Serbs began shelling a city where Serbs, Muslims and Croats were living side by side, the Karcic family could not even tell the groups apart—by appearance, by the sound of their voices, by the shape of their names, or even by their religion, since public worship had been suppressed.
Though the Serbs are primarily Orthodox, the Croats Catholic and the Bosnians Muslim, the struggle was not about theology. “There is nothing religious about it,” Edin said. “It’s all induced through the declining Communist politicians, who, when they realized that they are going to lose power, redirected the frustrations of the population toward the other nations, rather than having it against themselves.”
Nor was it really about ethnicity. “They are really one and the same national stock,” Edin said. “So you really can’t tell who’s who.”
For Arsad, the inability to see ethnic differences is almost a passion. Fiercely intelligent, like his brother, Arsad is more soft-spoken than Edin, but he cannot suppress his astonishment and outrage over what happened.
“What was most shocking for all of us—and still we cannot recover—is that your own neighbors, that your own cousins can turn against you,” Arsad said. “You start thinking, what does actually ethnicity mean, or what does religion mean? Is it only an excuse to kill other people? I cannot explain to someone, I’m Serbian, I am Muslim. I never thought this way.”
With that mindset, they didn’t see the shelling of Sarajevo as the start of the long, bloody orgy of hate that it became. So, in April, 1992, the family left Sarajevo for Prijedor, in northwest Bosnia, where they had relatives. Abdulah, Emina and Arsad, who lived in an apartment in the center of the city, left first. Edin, who had his own apartment, just a short walk away, encountered complications.
At his pediatric teaching hospital in central Sarajevo, near the stadium that had hosted the 1984 Winter Olympic Games, Edin found himself trapped by the shelling. For days, he couldn’t get out, and other doctors couldn’t get in. Finally, during a brief lull, others arrived to staff the hospital. “And then my boss told me, OK, now you go home and come back in 10 days.’ “ So he joined his family in Prijedor.
“Things were calm,” Edin said. “Life was normal, other than people watching news obsessively.”
A few weeks later, that changed. The police, the army and Serb civilians began rounding up people. “They went from home to home, arresting everyone who was not Serbian,” Arsad said. “They did not care if you were religious or if you were not religious, or if you were old or sick.”
On May 31, 1992, the Karcic family became a target. “There was a friendly neighbor, who was just the previous night swearing to God that he would never fall for that sort of thing, like nationalism, and he would be the first to help us, if anything happened,” Edin said. “Next day, he was coming with the police and pointing at us. That’s how we were arrested.”
The authorities offered reassurances: They were just looking for a few “extremists,” and they would detain people, check them against a list and release them in a day or two. “They won’t tell you, We will put you into a concentration camp,’ and you don’t dream that your neighbor and your brother will do something like this,” Arsad said. For the most part, people went quietly.
Together, Edin and Arsad got on a bus, leaving behind their parents, who were not of military age and posed no threat. The bus took them to Omarska, an open-pit mine near Banja Luka, in northern Bosnia. Once they arrived, they realized that this would not be an easy administrative process.
“They killed a few people on the spot,” Edin said. “They started beating people. Then we knew.”
The brothers did not see the open pit, where people stood in the rain and mud, dying from disease. Instead, they ended up indoors, in offices and storage rooms. One space was about the size of the small living room in their East Meadow apartment.
“You wouldn’t believe that 50 people can squeeze in here,” Edin said. Packed together, people slept standing up, leaning against each other. “There was a toilet, but half of the time, they would beat anyone up who would go to the toilet. So you would rather do it in your own boots and then empty the boots later on, if you had boots on, rather than go out and be beaten or killed.”
The brothers were together in Omarska for just a day or two, and they saw each other only once after their separation. About a week after they arrived, Arsad was interrogated. “I told them the truth, that I’m from Sarajevo, that I escaped the war, that I was staying here with cousins, just waiting for this nonsense to stop.”
In the interrogation, Arsad acknowledged that he was a medical student. As their stay in the camps continued, they learned that their captors were targeting intellectuals, like doctors and lawyers. Other than the admission to the one interrogator, they were careful not to divulge their professional background. Arsad even hid his glasses, to avoid looking intellectual.
Somehow, unaccountably, in the chaos of Omarska, telling the truth at that interrogation didn’t hurt him. Edin believes that one of the captors had simply swallowed the soothing cover story about the search for extremists, and he allowed Arsad out of Omarska because he wasn’t one.
“They didn’t tell every Serb person involved that everyone is supposed to be killed in this camp,” Edin said. “So Arsad was in that one bus only that went out of Omarska.”
Whatever the explanation, Arsad went to a far less threatening camp, Trnopolje. “I’m the luckiest person in this world,” Arsad said. “It’s unbelievable.”
About a week after Arsad reached Trnopolje, his parents arrived there after a roundup. “Of course, we didn’t tell anybody that we are one family,” Abdulah said. The reunion was a source of strength for them, but they had to live with an aching fear about Edin’s fate.
At Omarska, like the other prisoners, Edin suffered random beatings and routine malnutrition.
“Initially, we didn’t get any food or water for a few days,” Edin said. Eventually, they got one meal a day: soup and bread. “While queuing up for that, if something happened on the front line, they would be in a very bad mood, and they would beat up everyone in the queue. That’s how I got my hits. They would beat you with metal bars, with wooden sticks. Compared to some other people, I was very lucky.”
On one occasion, he asked the camp authorities for disinfectant, because the lack of hand-washing was spreading dysentery and death. He made that request as a spokesman for the group, not as a doctor, but he paid for it.
“I ended up being beaten by the guards, which taught me a lesson: to keep a low profile,” said Edin, who managed to keep his profession a secret. “There were 12 other physicians that I know of that were in that part of Omarska, and all of them were killed. I’m the only one, as far as I know, that has survived.”
During more than two months at Omarska, his salvation was that he was not from that area, and his captors didn’t know him. The guards were too busy settling petty personal scores with prisoners who had offended them before the war. So they had no time to plan misery for an unknown prisoner.
“If you were a policeman and gave a parking ticket to someone, that was a reason for them to kill you,” Edin said. “If they knew that you had a little business, they would come and beat you up until you tell them where the money is.”
His low profile did not keep him from witnessing one of the worst atrocities at Omarska. It involved a guard named Dusan Tadic and a policeman who had been a friend of Tadic before the war. One day, before a large group of other prisoners, Tadic beat the policeman severely with a metal bar.
“Then he forced him to drink motor oil and then to eat a dead pigeon,” Edin said. Tadic also beat the policeman’s cousin. Finally, Edin said, Tadic ordered the cousin to bite off the policeman’s testicles, and to prove that he meant business, Tadic shot a third prisoner.
Under that duress, the cousin did as ordered, inflicting horrifying pain on the policeman. “His screams had a pretty profound effect on everyone there,” Edin said. “It was the worst fear I ever had in my life.” Hours later, Edin said, the policeman bled to death, and two weeks afterward, the cousin hanged himself.
The UN’s Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal heard evidence about that act, among others, at Tadic’s trial. This May, he became the first person convicted of war crimes in a half century. The judges found him guilty of watching, but not of leading, the mutilation. For 11 crimes, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Edin was willing to testify, but was not called. He has no doubts, however, that Tadic did it.
Eventually, Edin’s condition deteriorated. He developed beri-beri, a Vitamin B-1 deficiency that paralyzed his legs. After two months in Omarska, his weakened state put his survival in doubt. The world didn’t know about the plight of the prisoners, and the Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, was not acknowledging the existence of a concentration camp.
“And then, thanks to Roy Gutman, it was revealed,” Edin said. In a series of Pulitzer Prize-winning Newsday articles, Gutman bared the atrocities of Omarska and other camps. “Karadzic said, ‘Okay, look, it really isn’t an extermination camp. You’re most welcome to come and to see the site,’ ” Edin recalled. “Once he said that, they had 48 hours to clear the place. And suddenly, there was this running around, cars, buses coming….It was such a panic.”
At the time, the prisoners didn’t know that this was a liberation, because they didn’t know where they were going. Some went to the camp at Trnopolje, some to another camp, Manjaca. “Some of us were just killed, God knows where,” Edin said.
The Serbs used Manjaca as a showcase, to prove that they were humane. So, getting into Manjaca was a blessing—but a risky one, precisely because the captors knew the prisoners would be safe once they got inside, where the International Red Cross visited regularly.
“If they had a few scores to settle, that was the last time they could do it,” Edin said. “So many people were killed waiting to enter the gates of Manjaca.” No one had a score to settle with him, but he did not escape a beating. “I was knocked unconscious, and I woke up in Manjaca.”
Arriving there in early August, Edin still had weeks of captivity ahead. But the worst was over. Late in September, a Red Cross delegation arrived—including a Swiss pediatrician he had met—and chose the cases most in need of medical attention. Edin’s paralysis qualified, and he was one of 68 prisoners flown to Britain by a Russian pilot, who volunteered, after regular airlines had declined to risk the flight. “He was drunk, but he was the dearest person I ever saw, because he took us out,” Edin said.
At a hospital in Orsett, near London, he began his long rehabilitation. It was nearly two years before he could walk normally. “I still have some deficiency in my nerve function,” Edin said.
Just before his transfer to England, he was able to exchange a brief message with his family through the Red Cross. All he learned was that they were still alive, and that was all they learned about him. After he reached England, they were able to communicate more freely and to begin the process that led to their reunification.
In November, Abdulah, Emina and Arsad were allowed to leave Trnopolje and departed by bus to Zagreb, Croatia. “This particular trip to Zagreb was the most beautiful thing that ever happened to me,” Arsad recalled. “It was like leaving hell and escaping death and starting new life—just like you were reborn. You left this darkness back there in Bosnia, where there was no food, there was no water, there was no electricity.”
Arriving at Zagreb in the middle of the night, Arsad savored the contrast between the darkness behind and the bright lights ahead. “You had this feeling, Oh, thank goodness, I’m going to live,’ “ he recalled. “Whatever happens, you are alive, and so many hundreds, thousands of people had died.”
In Zagreb, as in Sarajevo, he rose to the top of his medical school class and attracted the attention of a faculty member, Dr. Izet Agenovic. Arsad needed all the help he could get.
“I could not stay in Croatia,” he said. “I was a foreign national, and they had many unemployed physicians. So, after graduation, they wouldn’t give me a job.”
Then, on a trip to America, Agenovic visited Faroque Khan, the chairman of the department of medicine at the Nassau County Medical Center, who had previously met him at an international conference in Istanbul. Agenovic told Khan about his brilliant Bosnian student and his need for a job. “He said, You’ve got to do something about it,’ “ Khan recalled.
As it happened, Khan had a research position available, and he offered it to Arsad, who arrived here in November, 1994, with virtually no money. “So, basically he told me, ‘You will live with me,’ ” Arsad said. For five months, he lived with Khan and his wife, Arfa. “They were angels. They never saw me and they helped me so much. Really, the best people I ever met.”
Arsad was quiet and serious, studying assiduously, but his demeanor gave away his concern about his family. “Obviously, his mind was somewhere else,” Khan said.
Edin was still in England and his parents in Zagreb. “We were living with a Christian family who did not know us before that,” Abdulah said. “They actually knew some of our friends in Bosnia, and those people told them what sort of people we are. So they said, ‘Look, we have never met you, but we know who you are. You come and you live with us.’ ”
The Christian family had recently arrived in Zagreb as refugees. “They are poor people,” Abdulah said. “They did not have much to offer, but they shared with us what they had.” Now, the Karcic family is returning the kindness by sending them money when they can.
In June, 1995, Abdulah and Emina joined Arsad, who by then had an apartment near the hospital. Then, in May, 1996, almost exactly four years after the war had torn the family apart, Edin arrived from England, reuniting them and ending Emina’s long months of crying over his fate. “If all the tears could be put together,” Abdulah said, “it would be a big lake.”
Like Arsad, Edin was first in his class in medical school, and he had little difficulty qualifying for the residency. “The best investment is in education,” Edin said. “We lost everything. The only thing we had: We were still doctors.”
Now that they are here, with no immediate plans to return to Bosnia, they have found much to like. “Everywhere in Europe, if you’re a Frenchman who comes to England, for the rest of your life you’re a foreigner,” Edin said. “That’s the amazing thing in this country. I didn’t feel any different treatment in my working place, compared to an American guy whose family lives here for 300 years.”
Through Khan, a former president of the Islamic Center of Long Island, they connected with the mosque and have begun making friends there. But they still feel a reticence about expressing their faith publicly—a remnant of the Communist years. “We are still mentally in that kind of attitude,” Edin said. “I believe, with time, we will overcome.”
They have already overcome much, learning vivid lessons along the way: that the horror they survived can happen anywhere, and even “civilized” people commit atrocities. “So, it’s not civilized versus barbaric,” Edin said. “It’s good versus evil.”
Above all, they learned the lesson that Arsad recites with quiet passion. “One should not really look at people, what religion they are, what ethnicity they are, what race they are,” Arsad said. “This can only lead to trouble.”
Newsday, December 22, 1997
As the nightmare of nationalism exploded in the streets of Sarajevo in early 1992, the Karcic family decided to leave, seek shelter with relatives in another part of Bosnia and wait for the whole mad episode to end.
Everything in their experience persuaded them that it would only be a short time before the fighting stopped, sanity prevailed and everyone—Serbs, Muslims and Croats—went back to living in peace together.
Then the family could return to its upper middle class life of achievement and culture. The parents, Abdulah and Emina, could resume the retirement that they had recently begun, capping Abdulah’s distinguished career in industry and international trade and Emina’s years as a biochemist. The elder son, Edin, could return to practicing pediatric medicine, and the younger, Arsad, could finish medical school.
“We thought, Oh, this is an incident. It will be over in five days,’ ” Edin said. “We couldn’t believe there would be a war.”
In the weeks that followed, however, events spiraled out of control and the Karcic family tumbled into the dark, chaotic tunnel of war and ethnic cleansing.
The war claimed all their possessions—from the small and intensely personal, such as Abdulah’s photographs of his sons’ childhood, to the financially valuable, including two vacation homes that Abdulah and Emina had inherited from parents, three apartments and Abdulah’s life savings after 40 years of work.
Edin lost his hospital, which was virtually destroyed in the shelling, and came close to losing his life in a notorious concentration camp, Omarska.
Though Arsad had the luck to be transferred quickly from Omarska to a less-murderous camp, he suffered a long separation from his brother and a jarring break in his medical education.
Perhaps worst of all, for nearly four years, wrenched apart by the cruel illogic of the war, the family lost its most precious gift: life together.
Now, all four live in a small apartment in East Meadow, while Edin and Arsad work as internal medicine residents at the nearby Nassau County Medical Center. Though Edin had finished his pediatric residency in Bosnia, American practice requires that foreign-trained doctors go through residency here. He is a year away from finishing his residency and Arsad is a year behind him. Like all residents everywhere, their lives are a whirl of work and sleep deprivation. Their only real social life, apart from the hospital and the apartment, centers on visits to the Islamic Center of Long Island in Westbury. IT IS, for the moment, a claustrophobic existence compared with the cosmopolitan life they enjoyed in Sarajevo. But they do not complain. “What is a pleasant surprise for me, knowing what they have gone through, is how well they have adapted and accepted,” said Dr. Faroque Khan, chairman of the department of medicine at the center. “There is no bitterness.”
Rather, the family has become a living lesson in both the unfathomable geography of hate that swallowed them up and the mysterious power of love that kept them going.
“There were a bunch of people that made our lives miserable, but there were even more people that helped us along the way to come back,” said Edin, who suffered more physically than the rest of his family, but somehow manages to relate the horror dispassionately, calmly, even wittily. “So all this paranoid experience didn’t really make us too paranoid.”
In fact, it has left them closer than ever. “You can hardly find as happy a family in the United States as we are, because after four years of separation, we are again together,” Abdulah said. “We are happy, all of us, to be in a country where we really feel safe, and real freedom.”
Still, the Karcic family is in the difficult and familiar position of beginning all over again. “In our case, every generation starts from zero,” said Abdulah, 67. His parents lost everything in World War II, as his grandparents had in World War I. So he can understand what his sons feel. “I, as a young boy like them, had to start from zero.”
The disruption seems almost inevitable, because of the region’s location on the borders of historically feuding civilizations, such as the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Warsaw Pact and NATO. “So there’s always a flash point of big empires clashing there from time to time,” Edin said.
As Abdulah’s sons grew up, in the Cold War period after World War II, they did not experience military conflict. Josip Broz Tito, the wartime military leader and later president of Yugoslavia, kept the nation peaceful and reasonably prosperous.
On the dark side, the Communist system suppressed personal freedoms, discouraging any public worship. “Officially, there were mosques and churches and synagogues,” said Edin, 34. “If you were ever sighted in one of them, you would pretty much end up losing your job, could never get a place at the university, and that sort of stuff.” So the Karcic family had to express its Muslim faith privately.
Despite the tight control of religion, the system showed flexibility. Even the lowliest employees of most firms had to be members of the Communist Party, but Abdulah never joined. “It was just opposite to my personal feelings,” he said. But that did not hurt his career at Energoinvest, the largest company in the former Yugoslavia. “They needed me, because I was fluent in foreign languages and I had two university degrees.” Nor did his lack of party membership hinder him when the government tapped him for a trade commission post.
In that job, he worked in Pakistan, where Edin began his schooling and picked up his perfect, British-accented English, and where Arsad was born. Later, Edin began medical school in Berlin and finished in Sarajevo, moving on to practice pediatrics at a large teaching hospital there. By 1992, Arsad had entered the clinical phase of his medical training.
Throughout their youth, their country had remained stable and offered promise for their future.
“Yugoslavia was a country with a relatively good living standard,” Edin said. “I had a job in Germany, and I realized that my living standard would be better in Yugoslavia. I would earn three times less, but the costs of daily living are five times less.”
The Tito era also kept a lid on local rivalries. “No one wanted to talk about nationalism,” said Arsad, 28. “No one knew about nationalism. No one even cared. I mean, no one cared: Are you this, are you that? Who cares? It was so unimportant.” But Tito’s death in 1980 began to change that equation.
Before the Serbs began shelling a city where Serbs, Muslims and Croats were living side by side, the Karcic family could not even tell the groups apart—by appearance, by the sound of their voices, by the shape of their names, or even by their religion, since public worship had been suppressed.
Though the Serbs are primarily Orthodox, the Croats Catholic and the Bosnians Muslim, the struggle was not about theology. “There is nothing religious about it,” Edin said. “It’s all induced through the declining Communist politicians, who, when they realized that they are going to lose power, redirected the frustrations of the population toward the other nations, rather than having it against themselves.”
Nor was it really about ethnicity. “They are really one and the same national stock,” Edin said. “So you really can’t tell who’s who.”
For Arsad, the inability to see ethnic differences is almost a passion. Fiercely intelligent, like his brother, Arsad is more soft-spoken than Edin, but he cannot suppress his astonishment and outrage over what happened.
“What was most shocking for all of us—and still we cannot recover—is that your own neighbors, that your own cousins can turn against you,” Arsad said. “You start thinking, what does actually ethnicity mean, or what does religion mean? Is it only an excuse to kill other people? I cannot explain to someone, I’m Serbian, I am Muslim. I never thought this way.”
With that mindset, they didn’t see the shelling of Sarajevo as the start of the long, bloody orgy of hate that it became. So, in April, 1992, the family left Sarajevo for Prijedor, in northwest Bosnia, where they had relatives. Abdulah, Emina and Arsad, who lived in an apartment in the center of the city, left first. Edin, who had his own apartment, just a short walk away, encountered complications.
At his pediatric teaching hospital in central Sarajevo, near the stadium that had hosted the 1984 Winter Olympic Games, Edin found himself trapped by the shelling. For days, he couldn’t get out, and other doctors couldn’t get in. Finally, during a brief lull, others arrived to staff the hospital. “And then my boss told me, OK, now you go home and come back in 10 days.’ “ So he joined his family in Prijedor.
“Things were calm,” Edin said. “Life was normal, other than people watching news obsessively.”
A few weeks later, that changed. The police, the army and Serb civilians began rounding up people. “They went from home to home, arresting everyone who was not Serbian,” Arsad said. “They did not care if you were religious or if you were not religious, or if you were old or sick.”
On May 31, 1992, the Karcic family became a target. “There was a friendly neighbor, who was just the previous night swearing to God that he would never fall for that sort of thing, like nationalism, and he would be the first to help us, if anything happened,” Edin said. “Next day, he was coming with the police and pointing at us. That’s how we were arrested.”
The authorities offered reassurances: They were just looking for a few “extremists,” and they would detain people, check them against a list and release them in a day or two. “They won’t tell you, We will put you into a concentration camp,’ and you don’t dream that your neighbor and your brother will do something like this,” Arsad said. For the most part, people went quietly.
Together, Edin and Arsad got on a bus, leaving behind their parents, who were not of military age and posed no threat. The bus took them to Omarska, an open-pit mine near Banja Luka, in northern Bosnia. Once they arrived, they realized that this would not be an easy administrative process.
“They killed a few people on the spot,” Edin said. “They started beating people. Then we knew.”
The brothers did not see the open pit, where people stood in the rain and mud, dying from disease. Instead, they ended up indoors, in offices and storage rooms. One space was about the size of the small living room in their East Meadow apartment.
“You wouldn’t believe that 50 people can squeeze in here,” Edin said. Packed together, people slept standing up, leaning against each other. “There was a toilet, but half of the time, they would beat anyone up who would go to the toilet. So you would rather do it in your own boots and then empty the boots later on, if you had boots on, rather than go out and be beaten or killed.”
The brothers were together in Omarska for just a day or two, and they saw each other only once after their separation. About a week after they arrived, Arsad was interrogated. “I told them the truth, that I’m from Sarajevo, that I escaped the war, that I was staying here with cousins, just waiting for this nonsense to stop.”
In the interrogation, Arsad acknowledged that he was a medical student. As their stay in the camps continued, they learned that their captors were targeting intellectuals, like doctors and lawyers. Other than the admission to the one interrogator, they were careful not to divulge their professional background. Arsad even hid his glasses, to avoid looking intellectual.
Somehow, unaccountably, in the chaos of Omarska, telling the truth at that interrogation didn’t hurt him. Edin believes that one of the captors had simply swallowed the soothing cover story about the search for extremists, and he allowed Arsad out of Omarska because he wasn’t one.
“They didn’t tell every Serb person involved that everyone is supposed to be killed in this camp,” Edin said. “So Arsad was in that one bus only that went out of Omarska.”
Whatever the explanation, Arsad went to a far less threatening camp, Trnopolje. “I’m the luckiest person in this world,” Arsad said. “It’s unbelievable.”
About a week after Arsad reached Trnopolje, his parents arrived there after a roundup. “Of course, we didn’t tell anybody that we are one family,” Abdulah said. The reunion was a source of strength for them, but they had to live with an aching fear about Edin’s fate.
At Omarska, like the other prisoners, Edin suffered random beatings and routine malnutrition.
“Initially, we didn’t get any food or water for a few days,” Edin said. Eventually, they got one meal a day: soup and bread. “While queuing up for that, if something happened on the front line, they would be in a very bad mood, and they would beat up everyone in the queue. That’s how I got my hits. They would beat you with metal bars, with wooden sticks. Compared to some other people, I was very lucky.”
On one occasion, he asked the camp authorities for disinfectant, because the lack of hand-washing was spreading dysentery and death. He made that request as a spokesman for the group, not as a doctor, but he paid for it.
“I ended up being beaten by the guards, which taught me a lesson: to keep a low profile,” said Edin, who managed to keep his profession a secret. “There were 12 other physicians that I know of that were in that part of Omarska, and all of them were killed. I’m the only one, as far as I know, that has survived.”
During more than two months at Omarska, his salvation was that he was not from that area, and his captors didn’t know him. The guards were too busy settling petty personal scores with prisoners who had offended them before the war. So they had no time to plan misery for an unknown prisoner.
“If you were a policeman and gave a parking ticket to someone, that was a reason for them to kill you,” Edin said. “If they knew that you had a little business, they would come and beat you up until you tell them where the money is.”
His low profile did not keep him from witnessing one of the worst atrocities at Omarska. It involved a guard named Dusan Tadic and a policeman who had been a friend of Tadic before the war. One day, before a large group of other prisoners, Tadic beat the policeman severely with a metal bar.
“Then he forced him to drink motor oil and then to eat a dead pigeon,” Edin said. Tadic also beat the policeman’s cousin. Finally, Edin said, Tadic ordered the cousin to bite off the policeman’s testicles, and to prove that he meant business, Tadic shot a third prisoner.
Under that duress, the cousin did as ordered, inflicting horrifying pain on the policeman. “His screams had a pretty profound effect on everyone there,” Edin said. “It was the worst fear I ever had in my life.” Hours later, Edin said, the policeman bled to death, and two weeks afterward, the cousin hanged himself.
The UN’s Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal heard evidence about that act, among others, at Tadic’s trial. This May, he became the first person convicted of war crimes in a half century. The judges found him guilty of watching, but not of leading, the mutilation. For 11 crimes, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Edin was willing to testify, but was not called. He has no doubts, however, that Tadic did it.
Eventually, Edin’s condition deteriorated. He developed beri-beri, a Vitamin B-1 deficiency that paralyzed his legs. After two months in Omarska, his weakened state put his survival in doubt. The world didn’t know about the plight of the prisoners, and the Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, was not acknowledging the existence of a concentration camp.
“And then, thanks to Roy Gutman, it was revealed,” Edin said. In a series of Pulitzer Prize-winning Newsday articles, Gutman bared the atrocities of Omarska and other camps. “Karadzic said, ‘Okay, look, it really isn’t an extermination camp. You’re most welcome to come and to see the site,’ ” Edin recalled. “Once he said that, they had 48 hours to clear the place. And suddenly, there was this running around, cars, buses coming….It was such a panic.”
At the time, the prisoners didn’t know that this was a liberation, because they didn’t know where they were going. Some went to the camp at Trnopolje, some to another camp, Manjaca. “Some of us were just killed, God knows where,” Edin said.
The Serbs used Manjaca as a showcase, to prove that they were humane. So, getting into Manjaca was a blessing—but a risky one, precisely because the captors knew the prisoners would be safe once they got inside, where the International Red Cross visited regularly.
“If they had a few scores to settle, that was the last time they could do it,” Edin said. “So many people were killed waiting to enter the gates of Manjaca.” No one had a score to settle with him, but he did not escape a beating. “I was knocked unconscious, and I woke up in Manjaca.”
Arriving there in early August, Edin still had weeks of captivity ahead. But the worst was over. Late in September, a Red Cross delegation arrived—including a Swiss pediatrician he had met—and chose the cases most in need of medical attention. Edin’s paralysis qualified, and he was one of 68 prisoners flown to Britain by a Russian pilot, who volunteered, after regular airlines had declined to risk the flight. “He was drunk, but he was the dearest person I ever saw, because he took us out,” Edin said.
At a hospital in Orsett, near London, he began his long rehabilitation. It was nearly two years before he could walk normally. “I still have some deficiency in my nerve function,” Edin said.
Just before his transfer to England, he was able to exchange a brief message with his family through the Red Cross. All he learned was that they were still alive, and that was all they learned about him. After he reached England, they were able to communicate more freely and to begin the process that led to their reunification.
In November, Abdulah, Emina and Arsad were allowed to leave Trnopolje and departed by bus to Zagreb, Croatia. “This particular trip to Zagreb was the most beautiful thing that ever happened to me,” Arsad recalled. “It was like leaving hell and escaping death and starting new life—just like you were reborn. You left this darkness back there in Bosnia, where there was no food, there was no water, there was no electricity.”
Arriving at Zagreb in the middle of the night, Arsad savored the contrast between the darkness behind and the bright lights ahead. “You had this feeling, Oh, thank goodness, I’m going to live,’ “ he recalled. “Whatever happens, you are alive, and so many hundreds, thousands of people had died.”
In Zagreb, as in Sarajevo, he rose to the top of his medical school class and attracted the attention of a faculty member, Dr. Izet Agenovic. Arsad needed all the help he could get.
“I could not stay in Croatia,” he said. “I was a foreign national, and they had many unemployed physicians. So, after graduation, they wouldn’t give me a job.”
Then, on a trip to America, Agenovic visited Faroque Khan, the chairman of the department of medicine at the Nassau County Medical Center, who had previously met him at an international conference in Istanbul. Agenovic told Khan about his brilliant Bosnian student and his need for a job. “He said, You’ve got to do something about it,’ “ Khan recalled.
As it happened, Khan had a research position available, and he offered it to Arsad, who arrived here in November, 1994, with virtually no money. “So, basically he told me, ‘You will live with me,’ ” Arsad said. For five months, he lived with Khan and his wife, Arfa. “They were angels. They never saw me and they helped me so much. Really, the best people I ever met.”
Arsad was quiet and serious, studying assiduously, but his demeanor gave away his concern about his family. “Obviously, his mind was somewhere else,” Khan said.
Edin was still in England and his parents in Zagreb. “We were living with a Christian family who did not know us before that,” Abdulah said. “They actually knew some of our friends in Bosnia, and those people told them what sort of people we are. So they said, ‘Look, we have never met you, but we know who you are. You come and you live with us.’ ”
The Christian family had recently arrived in Zagreb as refugees. “They are poor people,” Abdulah said. “They did not have much to offer, but they shared with us what they had.” Now, the Karcic family is returning the kindness by sending them money when they can.
In June, 1995, Abdulah and Emina joined Arsad, who by then had an apartment near the hospital. Then, in May, 1996, almost exactly four years after the war had torn the family apart, Edin arrived from England, reuniting them and ending Emina’s long months of crying over his fate. “If all the tears could be put together,” Abdulah said, “it would be a big lake.”
Like Arsad, Edin was first in his class in medical school, and he had little difficulty qualifying for the residency. “The best investment is in education,” Edin said. “We lost everything. The only thing we had: We were still doctors.”
Now that they are here, with no immediate plans to return to Bosnia, they have found much to like. “Everywhere in Europe, if you’re a Frenchman who comes to England, for the rest of your life you’re a foreigner,” Edin said. “That’s the amazing thing in this country. I didn’t feel any different treatment in my working place, compared to an American guy whose family lives here for 300 years.”
Through Khan, a former president of the Islamic Center of Long Island, they connected with the mosque and have begun making friends there. But they still feel a reticence about expressing their faith publicly—a remnant of the Communist years. “We are still mentally in that kind of attitude,” Edin said. “I believe, with time, we will overcome.”
They have already overcome much, learning vivid lessons along the way: that the horror they survived can happen anywhere, and even “civilized” people commit atrocities. “So, it’s not civilized versus barbaric,” Edin said. “It’s good versus evil.”
Above all, they learned the lesson that Arsad recites with quiet passion. “One should not really look at people, what religion they are, what ethnicity they are, what race they are,” Arsad said. “This can only lead to trouble.”