In a war zone, what you don’t under­stand is poten­tial­ly as dan­ger­ous as bul­lets, bombs and shrapnel.

Body armour, com­mon sense and luck will help keep you safe from the lat­ter. But the only pro­tec­tion from the per­ils of igno­rance or mis­read­ing of local cul­ture is a smart, loy­al interpreter.

For jour­nal­ists that also includes fix­ers and dri­vers, whose val­ue often seri­ous­ly exceeds the job title, and pay scale.

I can­not begin to count the num­ber of times I was saved by a local employee’s read­ing of a sud­den turn for the worse I hadn’t ful­ly picked up on.

To cov­er start of  NATO airstrikes in the mid­dle of the night against Serb forces in Koso­vo (March 24, 1999), five of us took over a cou­ple of rooms with a bal­cony on the top floor of the five-star (actu­al­ly three burned out and two twin­kling) Grand Hotel in Pristina.

As soon as the bomb­ing began, car­loads of armed men raced through the streets, shoot­ing at the sky and any­thing that moved. A cou­ple of hours into the mad­ness, our long-time Balka­ns dri­ver Dra­gan Drag­ic climbed ten flights of unlit stairs and warned us to hide. Serb para­mil­i­taries were in the hotel, look­ing for for­eign journalists.

It was an extra­or­di­nary act of courage, and loy­al­ty to us. Dra­gan is a Serb. If his kith and kin prowl­ing the dark­ened cor­ri­dors caught him, he’d be beat­en him to a pulp.

                                             DIRE CONSEQUENCES

Afghans who work with U.S. and oth­er NATO forces face far worse if they are found out by the Tal­iban when the last U.S. troops leave the country.

Short­ly after Pres­i­dent Biden announced the final with­draw­al, inter­preters staged a des­per­ate protest in Kabul.

“They absolute­ly are going to kill us,” Moham­mad Shoaib Wal­iza­da, a for­mer inter­preter for the U.S. Army, said in an interview.

Gen. Mark Mil­ley, chair­man of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowl­edged as much when he recent­ly announced that “there are plans being devel­oped very, very rapid­ly here, not just inter­preters but a lot of oth­er peo­ple that have worked with the Unit­ed States,” for poten­tial evac­u­a­tion, by both the Defense and State departments.

That seemed to be news to the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil, however.

A spokesper­son told NBC News: “I can tell you we have no plans for evac­u­a­tions at this time.” SIV (Spe­cial Immi­grant Visas) were being processed in Kab­ul, with a focus “on ensur­ing that the sys­tem func­tions quick­ly and con­sis­tent with U.S. secu­ri­ty and oth­er appli­ca­tion requirements.”

It wouldn’t be the first time the U.S. has become mired in bureau­cra­cy that amounts to betrayal.

                WHEN POLICY BECAME DUPLICITY

In 1996, Amer­i­can mil­i­tary and civil­ian per­son­nel aban­doned the “safe haven” in Iraqi Kur­dis­tan, and an esti­mat­ed 2,000 peo­ple who worked for them. Amer­i­can staff fled the Office of For­eign Dis­as­ter Assis­tance (OFDA) in the dead of night, in secret.

It took two weeks for OFDA local employ­ees — all of who were under death threat from the Sad­dam regime — to orga­nize their own evac­u­a­tion. At the Turk­ish bor­der, we watched as hus­bands, wives, and chil­dren, car­ry­ing an allot­ted three bags per fam­i­ly, stood in batch­es of 50, in sear­ing heat, to have their names checked off a list.

For the most part, the Kurds who worked for the Amer­i­cans were skilled, edu­cat­ed, often Eng­lish-speak­ing, the upper stra­ta of their soci­ety. A one-hun­dred-yard walk over a bridge and into a Turk­ish mil­i­tary camp, guard­ed by tanks, reduced them to a sin­gle, unen­vi­able sta­tus: Refugee.

Their reward for serv­ing U.S. relief oper­a­tion dubbed “Pro­vide Com­fort” was to lan­guish in a tent city while bureau­crats who’d nev­er set foot in Iraq, and had no idea of what they had been through, mulled whether and when to let them move on and begin to rebuild their lives.

                                        AS FOR THE REST…

Back in Kur­dis­tan, an anguished, vis­i­bly fright­ened man gave me a long list of names of trans­la­tors, fix­ers and oth­ers, along with their fam­i­lies, and begged me to alert the U.S. embassy in Ankara that they too, want­ed out.

The embassy staffer who took my call said noth­ing could be done “because there are no U.S. per­son­nel in Kur­dis­tan to deal with them,” and, added, “if you’ve just come from there you know why.”

I asked him if the word “craven” rang any bells.

He said I was being “unfair”.

U.S. offi­cials insist that this time they will do what is right, with the caveat that “it takes time”.

One might be for­giv­en for won­der­ing if the bureau­crats under­stand how things work in a war zone.

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