From the current Esquire: On Sept. 1, 2004, The New York Times reported a new form of terror unfolding at School No. 1 in Beslan, Russia: "Heavily armed insurgents, some with explosives strapped to their bodies, seized a school here in southern Russia on Wednesday." Fifty-two hours later, the Times correspondent in Beslan, C.J. Chivers, witnessed the end: The gym exploded and a battle broke out, killing more than three hundred people and wounding more than seven hundred others, all on school grounds the size of a small park.
Months after the siege, much about it remained unknown. Chivers, a former Marine infantry officer who reported from ground zero on September 11 and covered the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for the Times, made many trips back. The culmination is "The School," a reconstruction of the horrors inside School No. 1.
ESQ: It's been nearly two years since the siege. Why write the story now?
CJC: Beslan had become like the Kennnedy assassination, a mystery burdened with nonsense, conjecure, and lies. I became interested in finding what actually could be known and demonstrated as fact, and I wanted to create a narrative in real time, a museum of words, of the hostages' experiences inside that claustrophobic space.
ESQ: What was your approach?
CJC: I built my basic understanding through interviews with many of the less injured survivors in the immediate after math. As I returned, I was passed from hostage to hostage. I would interview them at length, sometimes for as long as ten hours, have them make diagrams, and then go through the school with them step-by-step. When they were not able to do that, I had a photo record of every room and all the major damage points. I could sit with a victim and ask, "Where were you standing as a human shield? What did you thihk at this moment?"
ESQ: Did your experiences as a marine and wartime correspondent affect your reporting?
CJC: It helps to have experience with weapons and tactics and with writing about crime and terorimsm and war to ask the right questions and sort through the chaff. I wanted to perform, as close as possible, a forensic examination of the school and its weapons damage. This means looking at every bomb crater every burn mark, every shrapnel scratch and assembling a record. Then I wanted to stand beside each point with the hostages and say, "What happened here?"
ESQ: Besides interviews, what other sources did you use?
CJC: My own memories, which are a check against some of the absurd things I've read since, such as the widely reported claim that the tanks didn't fire until the evening. Investigators' photos and videos, outtakes from TV crews. I met with photographers who had the best time-sequence picures, investigators from the federal and regional governments, local journalists, and Chechen fighters and past and current members of the underground government. I conferred with military exposive specialists. I probably walked the school room by room thirty times. The story has driven me pretty hard.
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