had also begun marking my place in whatever I was reading with a new bookmark: the coaster on which Laura Pitter, the war correspondent, had written her phone number.
My mother supported everything I had ever done—until I decided to become a war correspondent.
“Journalism is a fiercely competitive business,” she told me in late 1993 when I called to inform her that I planned to move to Croatia. “Very few people who try actually make it.”
Her conservative counsel was out of character for someone whose every major life choice—from becoming a doctor to running away with Eddie to America—had defied the odds. “Mum, since when have you ever decided whether or not to do something based on an assumption that you will fail?” I asked. “If I think everyone else will be better than me, then you’re right, I shouldn’t try. But if that is my approach, maybe I should just preemptively admit defeat and retire now.”
The back-and-forth grew heated and unpleasant, and the conversation finally ended when one of us hung up on the other.
I knew that the real source of her worry was my safety. But I thought I could bring her around if she could see my growing interest in US foreign policy as something resembling the passion she had for medicine. Thirty years into her career, though her hours remained punishing, Mum seemed almost to skip to work—such was her love of caring for patients. I had always longed to find a job that would likewise allow me to find joy in the task itself. Before working for Mort, I wasn’t sure I was capable of such dedication. But now I was beginning to feel differently.
Within a few weeks, I found myself standing beside her at a Manhattan electronics store as she handed her credit card to the clerk to buy me my first laptop computer. “I can’t believe I am facilitating this,” she mumbled.
Part of my strategy to wear Mum down had been projecting an air of inevitability about the entire endeavor. But as I exited the store, toting my new Toshiba laptop, I was racked with self-doubt. Was she right? Would I fall flat on my face, run out of money, and return home in defeat? Worse, would I allow myself to get sucked into life as a war correspondent and end up getting killed?
Mort was initially skeptical of the move, but knowing he didn’t have a job to offer me after my internship ended, he came around; indeed, he dedicated an entire afternoon to telephoning all the newspaper editors he knew to tell them I was going. He also connected me to the foreign editor of National Public Radio (NPR), who told me, as U.S. News had done, that she would take my calls if I had a story idea.
Working for Mort had made me realize just how American I had become. Beyond my accent, which no longer bore traces of a lilt, I now thought like an American, reacting to problems in the world—like the Bosnia war—by asking myself, “What, if anything, can we, America, do about it?” I also wanted to vote, which, still an Irish citizen, I had been unable to do in the 1992 presidential election.
During high school, I had failed the driver’s test several times (hitting various cones), and I still felt the sting of humiliation from admitting to my classmates what had happened. I was determined to avoid a similar embarrassment on my citizenship test, and wildly overprepared, using a Barron’s citizenship guide to create flash cards with every conceivable question I might be asked about American government and civics. Unlike many of those applying, English was my first language, and I had the benefit of learning US history in school. Still, I felt relieved when, in the fall of 1993, I learned I had passed.
Mum and Eddie had been sworn in as Americans the previous year, and, because they had made no fuss about their naturalization ceremony, I didn’t think to invite them to the courthouse in Brooklyn to see mine. However, the other new Americans participating treated the day like the momentous event that it was, donning their finest suits and dresses and surrounding themselves with family.
During our collective Oath of Allegiance, we pledged, “I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Looking around the courtroom, seeing emotion ripple across the faces of those whose hands were raised, I was struck by what America meant as a refuge, and as an idea. All of us gathered that morning had reached the modern Promised Land. We weren’t giving up who we were or where we came from; we were making it American. I hugged an elderly woman from Central America on my left, and a tall man from Russia to my right. We were all Americans now.
AS MY DOUBTS about whether to move to the Balkans lingered, I devised a test for myself that I have used many times since. The test, as I put it then, was as follows: If I end up not making it as a journalist, will something else I learn in the process make it worth trying? I would come to call this the “in trying for Y, the most I accomplish is X” test, or the “X test.” This was a kind of self-protective exercise—designed to minimize my sense of risk by preemptively establishing a positive spin on even a negligible potential outcome.
Since I was fascinated by Balkan history, I had my answer. If the most I achieved by moving to the former Yugoslavia was to learn the history and language of the region, I thought, it will have been worth it (provided I did not die).
The Irish people are a famously emotional bunch, but tend to avoid displays of sentimentality. Frank McCourt, who spent his childhood in Ireland, wrote in his magnificent memoir Angela’s Ashes:
If I were in America I could say, I love you, Dad, the way they do in the films, but you can’t say that in Limerick for fear you might be laughed at. You’re allowed to say you love God and babies and horses that win but anything else is a softness in the head.
When I read this passage a few years after my move to the Balkans, I dog-eared the page, as I felt it unlocked one of the mysteries of my childhood in which love was tacitly communicated but almost never directly expressed.
Nonetheless, at the airport with Mum and Eddie before I boarded my flight to Europe, we all teared up as we said goodbye. In the back of our minds, we knew that relatively peaceful Zagreb would not hold me long. The human toll of the Bosnian war—and the possibility of being able to do something to draw more attention to it—would be too great a gravitational pull.
I DECIDED NOT TO DIVE IN as a freelance journalist from the start, but instead to sign up for an intensive Croatian language and culture program. I would pay a small fee to live with a host family in Zagreb rather than immediately having to find an apartment of my own. If I could get a handle on the language, I thought, I would need to spend less on expensive interpreters when I started actual reporting.
My arrival in Zagreb was not unlike that of an American college student in a study abroad program. My Croatian host family greeted me at the airport. They encouraged me to try out my rudimentary Croatian,[fn1] and I went out for drinks with their daughter, a vivacious university student who offered tips for exploring the city. But within no time, I found myself put off by the family’s nationalism and the way the parents denigrated Serbs. This was not the first time I had seen how kindness toward a favored “in-group” (I was Catholic like them) could coexist with bigotry toward those who were not included. The situation reminded me of my experience as a new Lakeside student when the parents of a few of my white high school friends had generously embraced me while disparaging the other newcomers, the African Americans who were bused to school.
I soon learned that expressions of anti-Serb animus were fairly commonplace around Croatia. Croatians had felt subjugated by Serbs in the former Yugoslavia and had very recently suffered ruthless Yugoslav Army bombardments. When I tried to argue that the whole ethnic group could not be blamed, several said out loud, “The only good Serb is a dead Serb.”