What made me look at Clark (and then support him) - a story

than many of you don't know of - but should:

http://www.esquire.com/features/articles/2003/030801_mfe_clark_7.html

> "In August 1995, the generalóthree stars, working as J-5 for the Joint
> Chiefsówent to Bosnia as part of the negotiating team Ambassador
> Richard Holbrooke had put together to end the civil war that had
> resulted in the massacre of as many as eight thousand Muslim men and
> boys at the town of Srebrenica the month before. In Belgrade, Clark
> had met for the first time Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, who
> was sponsoring the Bosnian Serbs. Now the team had to travel to
> Sarajevo. Told that the airport in Sarajevo was too dangerous to fly
> into, the team decided to drive and asked Milosevic to guarantee its
> safety on a road held by Bosnian Serbs. Milosevic did not, and so the
> team wound up taking a fortified Humvee and an armored personnel
> carrier on a pitched, narrow, winding mountain road notoriously
> vulnerable to Serb machine-gun fire. Clark and Holbrooke went in the
> Humvee, the rest in the APC. In his book, the general describes what
> happened this way: "At the end of the first week we had a tragic
> accident on Mount Igman, near Sarajevo.
> were killed when the French armored personnel carrier in which they
> were riding broke through the shoulder of the road and tumbled several
> hundred meters down a steep hillside." It is not until one reads
> Holbrooke's book, To End a War, that one finds out that after the APC
> went off the road, Clark grabbed a rope, anchored it to a tree stump,
> and rappelled down the mountainside after it, despite the gunfire that
> the explosion of the APC set off, despite the warnings that the
> mountainside was heavily mined, despite the rain and the mud, and
> despite Holbrooke yelling that he couldn't go. It is not until one
> brings the incident up to the general that one finds out that the
> burning APC had turned into a kiln, and that Clark stayed with it and
> aided in the extraction of the bodies; it is not until one meets
> Wesley Clark that one understands the degree to which he held
> Milosevic accountable."

I could read it over and over again. Although your formatting looks a little weird, up top. :-)

DTH