Wild Stories The Best of Men's Journal Ten Years of Great Writing

AS LONG AS WE WERE TOGETHER, NOTHING BAD COULD HAPPEN TO US Scott Anderson Jon saw the stack of articles about the war in Chechnya on my coffee table and looked up at me appraisingly. "You thinking of going back?" "Oh, I don't know," I said, glancing around my living room, "not really." But my older brother knew me too well to believe that. "I guess so." As journalists who always seemed to cover dangerous places, Jon and I had both had some close calls over the years, but a high percentage of mine had come during a single three-week period in Chechnya in 1995, and I'd returned from there quite rattled. Now, in February 2000, the Russians and Chechens were at war again, it was at least as vicious as before, and for reasons that weren't clear even to me, I wanted to return. "You think it's a bad idea?" I asked. Jon pondered this. "Remember Sarajevo?" He saw the puzzled look on my face. "The land mine?" I laughed. In the summer of 1996, I'd done an astonishingly stupid thing in Bosnia. The war had ended six months earlier, but there were still mines everywhere, and one day I'd gone hiking in the hills above Sarajevo. Walking down a dirt trail I didn't know, I'd nearly stepped on a partially exposed mine in the path. On trembling legs, I'd spent the next two hours gingerly making my way back up the trail. I'd told Jon about it as a kind of humorous, embarrassing anecdote. "But that was just idiotic," I said. "I got careless." "Yeah, but you almost got yourself killed in peacetime. Don't you think that's kind of an omen?" By the time of that conversation in my living room, Jon and I had spent most of our adult lives writing about the worst people and places in the world. That month, I had recently returned from northern Albania, where I'd reported a story on blood vendettas, while Jon was about to head off for war-ruined Angola. When we got togetherwhich, given our schedules, was only about every six monthswe talked of where we had just been, where we were thinking of going next. What we did not talk aboutat least not directlywas how any of this affected us. Instead, we had developed a kind of verbal shorthand with each other, the sharing of anecdotes, like mine about the ill-advised hike in Bosnia, that had no real punch lines: "And then I walked back to the hotel," or, "For a while it looked like they were going to shoot us, but then they waved us on and we drove to the capital." We didn't need punch lines; we'd both had enough of these moments to know what the other had felt. Yet the sharing of these oblique stories served a purpose. My brother and I had both become increasingly superstitious over the years, convinced that all the narrow escapes in our past made it less likely that we would escape in the future, and we relied on each other to tote up the odds. "Is this bet too risky?" "Do I walk away from this story now?" And the reason we sought this guidance from one another was because, in a peculiar way, our stakes were joined, rooted in a secret fear that had held us all our adult lives: that something would happen to the other when he was off in the world and alone, that one of us would die on the other's watch. The seed of this, I believe, had been planted twenty-five years earlier, in the first great journey my brother and I shared. Whether coincidence or not, that journey also marked the first time we began to regard each other with anything more than contempt. Summer afternoons are always brutally hot in Gainesville, Florida, but this one, in the middle of June 1975, had been downright perverse. I'd come home from soccer practice wanting nothing more than to lie in front of the air conditioner, only to find my parents huddled close togetheMen's Journal Editors is the author of 'Wild Stories The Best of Men's Journal Ten Years of Great Writing', published 2003 under ISBN 9781400048304 and ISBN 1400048303.