Teacher Brings Horrors of War Home to Teens

He spoke of genocide and orphans, land mines that indiscriminately maim the innocent and snipers that deliberately target the unwary.

The conflict could have been Germany during World War II or Rwanda today. But Tuesday former Ventura schoolteacher and military journalist Brandon Roth brought the war in Bosnia-Herzogovina home to a Port Hueneme classroom.

“As a teacher I felt like one of the reasons I was sent there out of the blue was to come back and maybe share . . . what actually is going on there because I find most people have no idea,” said the 32-year-old Army reservist.

Roth, a graduate of Columbia University’s School of Journalism, returned to his Ojai home in February after spending 6 1/2 months in Eastern Europe filing radio and television reports from Bosnia for the Armed Forces Network.

Since then he has talked to students in Ventura, Rio Mesa, Ojai and Port Hueneme in an effort to make them understand why American troops are involved in a conflict that has little direct relationship to the United States, but everything to do with a shared concern for people.

On Tuesday, Roth explained to a group of more than 30 students involved in leadership classes at Hueneme High School that if a conflict on the scale of the one in the Balkans occurred in the U.S., half the population would be displaced and millions more killed. He showed unedited footage of a man shot by a sharpshooters’ bullet and orphans whose parents were killed by clinical “ethnic cleansing.”

“It’s really graphic, but you have to understand this is war, it’s not the movies,” he said as the students silently watched the vivid videotapes. “These are real people. Those are real little kids. They’re not just images on TV.”

The immediacy of the footage had an effect on a generation that had never experienced Edward R. Murrow’s radio commentary during the London blitz or Walter Cronkite’s firsthand account of the Vietnam War.

“At first I didn’t think it was any of our business to go over there,” said 17-year-old senior Tammy Campbell. “His speech really got to me. I see [the conflict] on the news once in awhile, but I really didn’t care.”

Senior Jayme Polis, 18, agreed that the presentation gave her a new perspective on a conflict that she too had never really noticed.

“I work on the Navy base, and I had no idea these guys go over there,” she said. “I had no clue what was going on. I was sitting back there crying while the video was on.”

The reactions were precisely what Roth had hoped to provoke.

“You’re a leadership class, it’s important you know this is the kind of thing that happens in the world,” he told the students. “I don’t know why they’re killing each other, but the more we talk about it, maybe they will stop.”