Croatia
Dubrovnik
Dubrovnik
In the summer of 2002, I visited Croatia on the offhand advice of an Italian girl I’d met in Paris. I caught a ferry from Italy to Split, Croatia, and then a bus south to Dubrovnik.
When I got there I met a group of Europeans and Australians who invited me to join them at a bar called the Billabong. We had too many people at our table, so we found a guy sitting alone and asked him and his extra chairs to join us.
He was wearing a black shirt with white letters that said, “too busy to fcuk”. I didn’t know ‘fcuk’ were the initials of French Connection UK, a clothing brand, so my first impression was that he was obscene, aloof, and a bad speller.
I noticed a tattoo on his shoulder and asked if it meant anything in particular.
He smiled. “Yeah, those are Cherokee symbols.”
“Are you part Cherokee?”
“Yeah, one-quarter.”
“Me too. I mean, not one-quarter, but my grandfather’s grandma was full-blood.”
“No kiddin’. My granddad met a Cherokee woman when he sailed to America. He fell in love and jumped ship to be with her. They got married and he brought her back to Ireland.”
“So you’re from Ireland?”
“Yeah, I’m from County Cork.”
“What’s your name?”
“Neo.”
We talked for a long time. He bought me drinks, but I didn’t feel like he was trying to pick me up, and I liked that. Sure enough, hours later, when everyone else had left and I was four-sheets-to-the-wind, he caught me a cab, said good-night, and walked away.
It took about half a second for me to get out of the cab and run after him.
He turned around. “Something the matter?”
“Yeah,” I said, searching dimly for an excuse. “The cab was too expensive.”
I couldn’t tell if he was laughing with me or at me, but we found another club, and then another cab, and this time he came with me. We agreed to meet at 7:00 at the Billabong again tomorrow. Before the cab dropped me off, he kissed me on the cheek.
After the cab turned around, Ronan stuck his head out of the window along with seven fingers.
“Seven o’clock!” he said. “See you then!”
not Ronan, just his shirt
I showed up at 7:00 the next day… actually, I showed up around 7:20. I was playing it cool. So, apparently, was he. I found a stand outside the bar selling skirts and hats and pretended to be interested in them while I waited.
He came around the corner practically at a run at a quarter ’til eight.
“Hey, sorry I’m late,” he said. “Jesus, that was just about the most stressful hour of my life.”
“What happened?”
“Border guards in some fuck-off country phoned and said they were trying to take apart my Harley.”
“Why?”
“I don't know, to search for smuggled goods or weapons or something.” He sounded like someone was trying to dismember his child. “We went back and forth for about forty-five minutes, and finally I said, ‘Look, do you have a large screwdriver handy?’ He said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘Good. Turn it around the insert it directly up your ass, because you are not taking apart my Harley.’”
I laughed. “Did it work?”
“Yeah, you know, I had some military connections. I got it cleared through official channels. It’s all right now.”
We found a table in the basement, and I ordered a purple Billabong Dream and he got a Guinness. I asked him, “Is Neo your real name?”
“No,” he said, “my name’s Ronan, but my friends call me Neo. They started calling me that in the Navy.”
“Why?”
“’Cause I wear a black trench coat sometimes, and sunglasses, and they said when I turn around I looked like one of those guys from the Matrix.”
I asked if he played any sports.
“Used to play rugby. You’ve probably never heard of it.”
“Actually, I played rugby my freshman year in college.”
“Really? What position?”
“Inside center.”
“No kiddin’, me too.”
“Yeah, I liked it ’cause you get to run a lot, but you also get tackled a lot.”
He laughed. “Best of both worlds. What did you study in college?”
“Physics. How ’bout you?”
“I studied physics, too.”
We talked all evening. He put me to shame with how many books he’d read and how many places he’d been, and he was only 24, two years older than me at the time. Within hours I felt like I’d known him all my life.
We walked around the walls of the white marble Old City together the next day. A fountain near one of the gates had lions’ heads carved all around it, and the sidewalks were worn smooth and shiny with age.
I saw a vegetarian restaurant from the top of the walls, and we found it and had dinner and desserts there and a sweet Croatian brandy called prosek on an outdoor terrace.
We talked a little about our lives, and he said he’d graduated with honors in physics and math from the University of County Cork. During college he’d worked as a bartender and a model, and afterwards he was offered a 98,000 Euro job in a big company.
“So why’d you join the Navy?”
“Well, one day I was smoking pot, watching The Hunt for Red October, and I thought, you know, that would be a fuckin’ cool thing to do, wouldn’t it? So I joined the Navy the next day.”
I laughed. “But why?”
He shrugged. “Ah, you know. It’s what my grandfather did, and he was my hero. And I just realized I was the type that wouldn’t be happy without his hair on fire and both guns blazing. The navy board kept asking me all these fuck-off questions, and I was like, ‘Look, I’m three-quarters Celt and one-quarter Cherokee warrior. I can do your fuckin’ job, OK?’”
“Did they like that?”
He laughed. “I got the job, didn’t I? I was top of my boot camp class. They gave me a gun during training, first time I ever shot a gun in my life, and I could hit everything they put in front of me. Distance, wind, hot, cold, it didn’t matter. I could hit anything. So they picked me up for a Ranger unit—”
“Who?”
“The UN. For special operations. That’s why I get posted to so many fuck-off places around the world. I have a partner, this guy Scott, African-American guy from Arkansas, and we go on all our missions together. He’s my spotter. Excellent guy. First time I met him, swear to God, I fell madly in love with him.” He laughed. “Platonically, of course.”
Scott later wrote to me about their first meeting. He wrote:
I got posted from a nice chilled-out unit in Germany into a Ranger unit. I had been told that the sergeant was a ball breaker and I was replacing a burned out guy who quit the squad because of this sergeant.
I stepped off the transport jet and was met by Ronan. He wasn’t wearing rank markings so I thought he was one of the lads. I asked him about the asshole sergeant, and he agreed that the guy was a pain in the ass.
I showered, changed and reported to HQ to meet him. I walked into the office and saw my future best mate smiling at me.
“Well,” he said, “told ya I was an asshole.”
By the time we finished dinner it was getting dark. As we left the Old Town I saw a giant illuminated white cross shining high on a nearby mountaintop, up among the stars. Ronan made fun of me because it made me feel slightly nervous even though I’d given up organized religion long ago. It was beautiful anyway, vying with the crescent moon for dominion over the heavens.
Walking the next day among the white marble walkways, red-roofed buildings, emerald waters, and churches and fountains of Dubrovnik, I had a prickly, creeping feeling that war had just touched this place. The feeling was heightened because of how peaceful, friendly, and beautiful it was now. I could see rocket holes in the roofs of some buildings in the Old Town, and the main bridge into town was brand new because the previous one had been demolished in an air strike a few years earlier.
The Old Town itself had been in the sights of a massive bombardment that sat on a hair trigger. The fact that the Pearl of the Adriatic wasn’t destroyed was probably a mixture of good luck and strategic expediency.
It was the first place I traveled where the signs of war were so recent and so raw. I said to Ronan in naive surprise, “You know, when there’s a war, it’s these people who suffer. These people who just want to drink coffee and swim in the sea.”
The next morning we took a ferry to Hvar Island together. The main town of Hvar is built between some pine tree hills and the sea, and its white marble avenues are pedestrian-only. Lavender, rosemary, and heather are the main cash crops of the island, and the scents are everywhere.
Lavender fields
We found a cafe called Gromit where we could drink all day on a marble terrace with sapphire sea views.
“What are you doing in Croatia anyway?” I asked him after we sat down.
“Exorcising old demons. I was in Bosnia a while back, Sarajevo, Kosovo. I just wanted to see how things were around here, remind myself that… things are kind of OK sometimes.”
“Sounds like it really affected you.”
“Yeah, after all that shit I couldn’t bring a cup of coffee to my lips without shaking all the liquid out. I couldn’t do it anymore. So I’m taking a few months off, trying to find myself again.”
“Where were you before you came here?”
“I biked around Russia for a while, that’s where I was shipping my bike from.” He laughed. “When I was in the south I kept seeing a word on all the signs. I looked it up in my phrase book, and it was Chechnya! I never turned my bike around so fast in my life.”
He also made it up north to Murmansk, a town as far from Moscow as it is from the North Pole, home of Russia’s nuclear submarine and icebreaker fleets. He met a Russian officer there named Yuri.
“Yuri told me there were electricity shortages after Communism fell, and one time the rolling blackouts hit the cooling mechanisms of the nuclear ships and submarines. The reactors were heating up everywhere, everything was starting to melt down, and they called Moscow and told them the situation. Moscow still didn’t get its ass in gear until they were about 30 minutes from a major fuckin’ thermonuclear incident. I said to Yuri, ‘Holy Jesus, I bet that didn’t make the news.’ He just smiled and said, ‘Yes, we in Murmansk almost had very big sun tan.’”
Ronan laughed. “Can you believe that son of a bitch? Fuckin’ Chernobyl almost happens in his backyard and he calls it ‘very big sun tan’.”
I laughed, too, but with a funny feeling in my stomach.
I ordered us another round of drinks and asked him, “What does the Irish Navy do these days? Any pirate wars going on with England that I don’t know about?”
“Naw, but there’s this one godforsaken piece of rock sticking up out of the ocean that we have to patrol sometimes. It’s not clear who has a claim on it, England or Ireland, and England patrols it sometimes, so we have to patrol it sometimes, you know, to establish a presence. Bunch of bullshit if you ask me. It’s not even big enough to build a house on.”
“Why do they bother?”
“They think there’s oil under it or something. Fuck if I know. But mostly I do Coast Guard stuff. Deep sea rescues, up in the North Atlantic. You know that movie A Perfect Storm? That’s where we are.”
“Wow. Have you been in any really big storms?”
“Sure, yeah. We were in this one storm with 30 meter waves—”
“Thirty meter waves?!”
“Yeah—”
“A hundred feet?”
“Yeah, from sea-level to crest.”
“So… two hundred feet from trough to crest?”
“Yeah.”
“Jesus!”
“Yeah. Pardon my language, but that’s balls to the wall sailin’. And some shit happens there you wouldn’t believe. One time one of the lads was piloting this little rescue boat, and we were trying to rescue a big trawler that was going down. One of the men fell overboard on the wrong side of the ship. We never would have gotten to him in time. So this kid, he just says, ‘Hang on,’ and skids up the side of a wave and jumps over the fuckin’ trawler with the little boat.”
“Did you get the guy?”
“Yeah, we got him. And I asked the kid, I said, ‘How in the hell did you do that?’ He just shrugged and said, ‘I don’t know. I just knew I could.’”
We woke up the next morning and found another cafe, and I ordered us two bijela kavas, white coffees. While I was stirring sugar into mine, I asked Ronan, “How do you deal with some of the things you see out there?”
He said, “There’s stuff I still have no idea how to deal with. You wanna know the worst thing I ever saw? I was in southern Lebanon with the UN, as a peacekeeper, and we weren’t supposed to fire unless fired on. So we just had to watch all this shit going on, it was…” He looked disgusted.
“Like what?”
“Like the Israelis kept bulldozing people’s houses. And there’d be the family, standing there watching, with babes in arms, while their house was being destroyed. I kept saying we have to do something, but the UN wouldn’t let us. When I got paid I gave one family my months’ salary, but what is a months’ salary when your house has just been bulldozed?”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah, no kiddin’, and that wasn’t the worst. One time an Israeli soldier came by with four civilian prisoners tied up in the back of his truck. We stopped him and asked him what the hell he was doing. He said, ‘It’s none of your goddamn business.’ We said, ‘Listen, you better tell us what you’re holding these people for and where you’re taking them.’ One of them was a four-year-old kid. This soldier said, ‘I don’t have to tell you anything and there’s nothing you can do to me.’ So we radioed back to base and said, ‘We have a soldier with four civilian prisoners tied up, and we don't know what he’s planning on doing with them. We want clearance to intervene.’ The base calls back and says, ‘Come back to base, this is none of our business. You can’t intervene unless fired upon.’ The Israeli fucker hears this and goes, ‘Ha, does that mean you can’t intervene if I do this?’
“The son of a bitch leveled his gun and shot one of the prisoners in the head. We couldn’t fucking believe it. We radioed to base again and said, ‘For God’s sake, this guy just executed a prisoner! We have to intervene!’ Base said, ‘No, no, you can’t intervene.’ So the guy shoots another prisoner in the head. We radio again, ‘Base, base, for Christ’s sake, we have to intervene!’ He shoots the third prisoner in the head. I grabbed the last one, the little boy, and held him to my chest. With tears in my eyes I said, ‘Base, I’m bringing this boy in for his protection.’ Base radioed back and said, ‘If you bring that boy back, it’s international kidnapping and your career.’ I couldn’t fucking believe it. God knows I should have brought him back anyway, but I’d just disobeyed an order about a week before, I was hanging by a thread anyway, and disobeying the last order had been a mistake on my part. Anyway, I didn’t think anyone—anyone—could shoot an innocent kid in cold blood. I let the kid go, and… he shot him in the head.”
Ronan was silent for a moment. “I held that little boy…” He looked me in the eyes in horrified disbelief. “That’s the death of innocents.”
I had nothing to say. I’d never imagined anything like that.
He said, “I belted him in the face with the butt-end of my gun. I should have killed him. I went back to base and I was shaking and crying. I walked toward the commanding officer, the one who wouldn’t let us intervene, and Scott grabbed my shoulder and turned me away. He knew I’d hit him. And then I heard a crack and looked back, and Scott had just leveled him.”
I looked down. “So… what happened?”
“Well, later some generals and top brass from the UN came by the base to check on our morale or some bullshit, and they gave a nice speech, and afterwards we were supposed to file by and say thank you and drop a couple of dollars in a plate so they could buy a commemorative mug for their generous visit. I’d taken some photos, of the destroyed houses and the families, and of the kid who was killed, and when I went by I dropped the pictures in the plate.”
“Holy shit, you did?”
“I wanted them to see what happened because of their fucking policies. You should have seen ‘em. They didn’t want to see it. They didn’t think it was any of their goddamn business.”
“Jesus Christ... What did they do to you?”
“Some of them wanted to court-martial us and get us kicked out of the service. They knew we were good soldiers, though, and in the end we pulled some tricks and just got kicked out of Lebanon.”
“For telling the truth?”
“Yeah. For telling the truth.”
I thought about that for a while, and I felt sicker and sicker. “Ronan?” I finally asked.
“Yeah.”
“How can we enjoy ourselves when other people can’t and so many bad things are happening to people?”
He looked up at me through his eyelashes in his serious way and said, “I’ll tell you how. You have to. They’re counting on you to. They’d give anything to be in your shoes.”
I nodded. “But we also have to try to help them, right?”
“Sure. But you owe it to them to enjoy yourself as much as you can. Not many people can do what we do. It’s disrespectful to them if you waste it.”
After dinner that night, we walked back to the room we had rented in a private home. While he was lying beside me, Ronan silently took my right hand and placed it on his heart.
I was stunned. I had done the same thing with my first boyfriend. For me it had been a quiet cry: I am here. My heart is beating. There’s no way to express that. You just have to know, you have to sense it, you have to look for it.
I felt his heart beating with my hand, and then I put my ear to his chest, and I heard it. I met his eyes and smiled.
The next day we went for a swim in the clear waters of the harbor and watched some kids diving off tall rocks. We were lounging in another beachside cafe drinking iced cherry vodkas later, and I asked him where else he’d been.
He said right after he got booted out of Lebanon, he decided to accept a posting in East Timor. “I feel like I owe more to kids than most people. I let a child be killed on my watch, and I swore I’d never let it happen again. And kids were getting some of the worst of it in Timor, getting their limbs hacked off and everything.”
East Timor is an island north of Australia which tried to declare independence in 1975 after the Portuguese finally left, but Indonesia invaded and annexed it with American support. All the usual trappings of war and occupation followed for nearly 25 years: torture, rape, murder, theft. About 200,000 people died, a quarter of the island’s population.
Unexpectedly in 1999, Indonesia’s new president Habibie said he’d hold a referendum on East Timorese independence, and the UN sponsored it. The vote was overwhelmingly in favor of independence.
Almost immediately Indonesian soldiers, supported by Habibie, began razing towns, slaughtering civilians, and destroying Timor’s infrastructure to try to crush their bid for independence. Later the UN formally apologized for encouraging the East Timorese to exercise their democratic rights and then failing to protect them from the inevitable aftermath. After enormous international pressure, Indonesia finally allowed UN forces to be deployed to try to help clean up the mess.
“When I got to Timor, one young American soldier had drifted apart from the others and looked kind of down. I went over to ask him if he was all right, and he said, ‘I’m about to ask a really dumb question.’
“I said, ‘Naw, ask anything.’
“He looked up at me and said, ‘Where is East Timor?’
“Can you believe that? I got out a map and showed him. The US government didn’t even go to the trouble of getting out a map and showing this kid where he was going.”
He chuckled. “Not long after that, me and Scott were humping 50 lb. packs in the fuckin’ jungle, sweat pouring off our faces, sore and tired and everything else, and suddenly beside me I hear Scott mumble, ‘This is the last goddamn time I vote Democrat.’” He laughed. “And then later on he was lagging behind, and I yelled back, ‘Hey Scott, you comin’?’ And he goes, ‘Naw, I’m just breathing hard.’”
While he was telling his story, it struck me that the water was sapphire blue here in Hvar, while it had been more aquamarine in Split and kind of emerald green in Dubrovnik.
I opened my mouth to say so but was interrupted by the appearance of a blonde in high heels wearing almost nothing, her bleached hair piled high on her delicate head. We silently watched her pass.
Ronan leaned close to me and said, “That girl has two brains. One’s missing, and the other’s out looking for it.”
I giggled. He knew how to make a brunette in flip-flops feel good.
I hoped there might be a scuba diving center nearby and asked Ronan if he had ever dived. He said he’d done it professionally with the Navy. We found a little outfit not far from Hvar and signed up for a shipwreck dive the next day.
After a three-hour boat ride over choppy waves with a bunch of Germans and Hungarians, we found our cove and jumped in.
About 100 feet down we came within visual contact of the sandy bottom and our shipwreck. When I got closer, it resolved itself into about half a rotting canoe. I shook my head and followed an interesting fish around until the divemaster tugged on my fins and signaled that we were surfacing.
When we got to the surface, Ronan was holding his tank, which had come loose while he was diving. His mouthpiece wasn’t watertight, either. I tried to release his tank strap so he could hold it at a less awkward angle, but I grabbed his weight belt release by mistake. I would have lost it or been dragged down to the bottom if I hadn’t grabbed it and inflated my BC in time. As it was I couldn't put my head above water, and Ronan had no idea what I was doing thrashing around like that until I thrashed my way over to him and put the weight belt in his hand and bobbed back up.
Back in town we laughed and said, “Worst dive ever.”
We were drinking beers and brandies later, and I mentioned that I’d studied in Russia and met some soldiers there.
He said, “Man, I sympathize with those guys. I was in a port in northern Germany one time, in a pub with the lads, and we noticed a bunch of Russian soldiers trying to barter their medals for mugs of beer. It was awful. We called the bartender over and told him to give the lads a round on us. They were happy to keep getting rounds of beer, of course, but before long they started getting worried they’d have to wash a fuckload of dishes or something, so we told them they were taken care of. They invited us to tour their ship and… man. It was sad, let me tell you. Everything was dirty, falling apart, in bad condition. They said they’d only had enough money to redo the outside or the inside of the ship, and of course the generals wanted it to look nice, so the sailors got a nice-looking ship they could hardly stand to live in. And when they toured our ship, Jesus! They thought they’d entered God’s paradise.”
I thought for a minute. “Ronan? Will you be sailing to America any time soon?”
“Actually, yeah, next spring we’re supposed to sail into San Jose, California, at some point. I think.”
I nodded, thrilled.
We took a ferry from Hvar back to Split the next day. It was time for him to catch a bus back to Dubrovnik and me to go to Italy and fly home.
Ronan had two thick yarn braids attached to his backpack, one red, black, and white and the other red, red, and white. One was his school colors and the other was his county colors. He smiled and said, “I believe you always oughta carry your colors with ya.”
Before he left, he untied one of the braids and gave it to me. I gave him the red bandanna I’d been using to keep my hair tied back. We kissed good-bye.
Ronan boarded his bus, and I waved at him, and he waved from his window. I waved again, and smiled. Still the bus didn’t move. So I got on it myself. I tapped Ronan on the shoulder, and he spun around and smiled.
“Hey, I was starting to get worried you’d left.”
I should have told him he was a moron, and leaving was the furthest possible thing from my mind. I just smiled and said, “Of course not.”
The bus driver got on board soon and I had to kiss him quickly and sprint out between the closing doors, and we laughed, waved again, and he was gone.
As soon as his bus was out of sight, I felt like the world had been hollowed out to an empty shell. I’d never felt like that before. I staggered to the nearest tree and sat under it until I had the strength to walk across town and sit in an isolated beachside cafe. I ordered a peach nectar and watched some kids play in a park, trying to console myself. He said he might be in San Jose next spring… it was an eternity to wait, and not even a certainty. I was already counting the days.
