I was in Moscow on a Friday in the spring of 1992, planning a trip to South Ossetia, a region of Georgia, to write a report on the plight of refugees from the civil conflict that had erupted there the previous year. The area was now supposed to be relatively calm.

But that day, the U.S. Embassy called me: You can't go to South Ossetia, I was told. The war was starting again.

Two translators and I had plane tickets for the next day. Our early morning flight was scheduled to land in Vladikavkaz, the capital of North Ossetia, in the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains. The city had the airport closest to South Ossetia. From Vladikavkaz, we had planned to find ground transportation to Tskhinvali, South Ossetia's capital. After hearing the embassy's warning, I figured the three of us would remain in Vladikavkaz to talk to South Ossetian refugees there.

How wrong I was.


War broke out between South Ossetians and Georgians in 1991. South Ossetians wanted either independence or the right to join North Ossetia and become part of Russia. As the Soviet Union was falling apart, the Ossetians had become nervous about Georgian nationalism, and they believed the country was treating them as second-class citizens.

The war officially ended in June 1992, when the parties to the conflict agreed that peacekeeping troops — made up of Russians, Georgians and Ossetians — would police the area.

After the war, parts of South Ossetia enjoyed de facto independence, but the United Nations never recognized that independence. "South Ossetia has existed in recent years almost as a satellite of Russia," The New York Times says.

Thomas de Waal, writing recently for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, called South Ossetia "a tiny and vulnerable place." In the years that followed the 1990s war, he writes, the enclave became "a shady backwater and a smugglers' haven. The region was outside control of Georgia's capital, Tbilisi, but Ossetians and Georgians went back and forth and traded vigorously with one another at an untaxed market."

War broke out again in the region earlier this month when Georgia attempted to "wrest control of South Ossetia from separatist rebels ... ," as the Times put it. "Since then, reports of atrocities and desperate fighting have trickled out of South Ossetia."

Russian officials have estimated about 2,000 South Ossetians were killed in the fighting, and another 34,000 fled their homes — about half the region's population.


One of my translators, an 18-year-old American student at a university in Tbilisi, arrived in Moscow the day before we were to leave for South Ossetia and spent the night partying with young Russians. He arrived at my hotel in the early morning hours too inebriated to function. I found him asleep on a sofa in the hotel's lobby.

At the airport, we met up with the second translator, Galena Oleinik, a young Russian woman who had grown up in Tskhinvali. Aboard the plane, the American student had passed out again. I told Galena the embassy had forbidden us to go to South Ossetia. "You do what you have to do," she said, "but I'm going to Tskhinvali."

When the plane landed in Vladikavkaz, I had no idea whether my inebriated interpreter would ever be able to function, and Galena was obviously headed for South Ossetia. A bus outside the airport was waiting to take passengers to Tskhinvali, the first such vehicle in months. I made an instant decision. "What does the embassy know about this war?" I stupidly reassured myself. "No one at the embassy will know I went to South Ossetia."

Galena and I jumped aboard, and the student somehow got himself on the bus before passing out again. Not long after the bus took off, Galena realized the woman sitting in front of me had once been the best friend of her now dead mother. They greeted each other warmly, and the older woman began passing us apples as well as an Ossetian version of Greek spanakopita, a spinach and phyllo concoction. It didn't take long for others on the bus to realize an American was on board, and they began telling me what kind of animals and plants were hiding in the mountains surrounding us.

When we reached a small village with a few stores, the bus stopped, and almost everyone bought vodka. They opened the bottles and began to drink. "The only way you can survive this trip," they said, laughing, "is by getting drunk." After much discussion, they decided I didn't have to imbibe their vodka. I could drink wine.

As they drank more and more, they laughed louder and louder. Clearly, they were having a good time. And before long, they were punning in three languages: Ossetian, Russian and Georgian. Their puns were so off-color, Galena said, she refused to translate them for me.

In the afternoon, Galena pointed to a road she said headed to our destination. "Tskhinvali is 30 minutes away down that road," she said. "But we'd have to pass through some Georgian villages, and they'd shoot at us." So we were going to take a rugged detour up the mountainside to avoid the gunfire.

Part way up the mountain, we ran into a mud bog. With all of its passengers, the bus couldn't make it through the bog. We got off and, of course, sunk down into knee-high mud. Still the bus couldn't surmount the bog.

But waiting for us on the other side was a large, open-air truck. We jumped in, and as we drove off, all of us standing up, I remember thinking: "Wow! This is exciting life."

Then, as darkness fell, a car leaving Tskhinvali passed us. "The war has started again," the driver said. And as we drove into town, red tracers streaked across the sky. The student, now more or less sober, said one of his legs had begun to shake, and he couldn't make it stop.

The bus let its passengers out a short walk from the apartment of Galena's mother-in-law, where we were spending the night. The next morning, Galena and I left the American student with her in-laws, and we headed off to the South Ossetia Parliament. Part way there, we started running. Bullets were whizzing around us.

At the parliament, we interviewed its speaker, whom the Georgians had recently released from several years in jail. He said he had been imprisoned for his role in South Ossetia's independence movement.

Then we went to the meeting of the South Ossetia Parliament. There, the speaker announced he would resign his position so the new head of the region could appoint his own people. It was a surprise. He had not told us he intended to do that.

"Who's the new head guy?" I asked Galena.

"I don't know," she said. "He has a North Ossetian name."

The new leader, it turned out, was a good-looking man, probably in his 40s, with a neatly trimmed beard, who was wearing an expensive brown tweed suit. He had recently given millions and millions of rubles to South Ossetia to aid refugees and refill the city's shops with goods. In those days immediately after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, not a lot of Russians had that kind of money. He was possibly a weapons dealer who had just bought himself a region where he thought he might be relatively safe. How long he remained in South Ossetia — only briefly, I think — is not clear.

While the politics of Ossetia might be fascinating, on this Sunday I was more concerned with what I had just done: brought an 18-year-old American to a war zone.

Galena took care of that problem: She called the Russian military, which sent a helicopter to pick up the student and fly him back to his school in Tbilisi.

It is possible — my colleagues said likely — that Galena was or had been a KGB agent. A fair number of former Soviets were or had been. Most interpreters still were. And while Galena was not an exact translator, she was a first-rate fixer. Even though I suspected her KGB connections, I liked her immensely. Furthermore, I had no secrets to hide from anybody — except the American Embassy in Moscow.

Although we had arrived in Tskhinvali by bus, no buses were now leaving the city. Galena offered me a helicopter ride to Tbilisi with the student interpreter. I was seriously worried about being in a war zone. I had been in Kuwait and Iraq the previous year, shortly after the Iraqis had pulled out. That war, however, was over when I arrived. This one was not. But I figured the last thing I needed to do was arrive in the Georgian capital on a Russian military helicopter.

So Galena set about trying to find us both rides back to North Ossetia. Obviously, I was pretty ignorant about ongoing wars. I thought the chances were awfully good that we were going to have to hike back to North Ossetia on foot. Finding a ride out wasn't easy. But Galena eventually found a car that would take us halfway there, and from that point, we caught a bus to Vladikavkaz.

That same week, Georgians killed a small group of South Ossetians trekking through the mountains, trying to get to safety in North Ossetia. I kept thinking — realistically or not — we could have met that exact fate.


This week, a friend from my humanitarian days arrived in Santa Fe and invited me to join him at a local restaurant. We talked briefly about South Ossetia, and he remembered my story. But he reminded me of something I had forgotten. When I first told him my tale, he said, I had given it a title: "Never Take a Bus to a War Zone."

Contact Pat Reed at preed@sfnewmexican.com.

Editor's Note: Pat Reed was an international disaster management consultant with an American contractor in the former Soviet Union in 1992. Galena Oleinik, one of Reed's interpreters in South Ossetia, was killed in Chechnya in 1995 along with Reed's boss, Fred Cuny, and two Russian doctors.