John McCarroll, recently named director of university relations, is used to dealing with the media, although he’s never depended on media coverage as much as he did in the past months.

McCarroll and his wife Debbie spent much of March watching television and reading newspapers for information about their son Matt, who was one of 74 Peace Corps volunteers evacuated under fire from Tirana, Albania. The troubled country has fallen into a state of lawlessness, observers say, over the last few months.

Last week, John sat quietly beside Debbie in the living room of their Des Moines home and listened attentively while Matt did the talking.

Matt returned to the United States late last month. He spoke Friday about his life in the war-torn Balkan country.

In the fall of 1993, Matt, a Ripon College alumnus who majored in political science with an emphasis in Eastern Europe, studied in the Czech Republic.

“He encountered some situations there where he had to display his ingenuity, his independence, his fortitude, and his bullheadedness,” John said with an easy laugh. “So we knew that Matt had the ability to take care of himself.”

Transfer relief

After three months of intensive language and technical training in Tirana, Matt was stationed in the more dangerous southern part of Albania. John and Debbie said they were relieved when he was transferred to a safer area in early 1997.

“I think the time when we just sort of lost it, if you will, here, was right before the evacuation, when literally overnight the situation in Albania went to chaos,” John said. “Whatever control there had been just seemed to disappear and the violence spread quickly from the South into the capital city itself.”

Matt was in Albania for just more than nine months of a two-year Peace Corps tour. He had many duties, including planting apple trees to improve and standardize orchard root stock, organizing an environmental youth camp and infrastructure projects such as school building renovations and road and canal construction.

Schemes

From his vantage point in the countryside, Matt saw the Albanian economy begin to fail.

“It’s a complex situation, and it’s still unfolding,” he said. “The trigger point was indeed the collapse of several pyramid schemes. The opinion of people there is that the government was involved in the pyramid schemes. I agree with that. There was a lot of corruption.”

Matt lived and worked in three parts of the country with three families and saw people investing in the schemes daily. He said the president of the country never heeded the warnings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank which advised him to shut down the schemes as early as mid-1996.

“The 1996 elections were rigged and election observers were kicked out,” Matt said. “I was there. I stood and watched as four policemen in one village intimidated 5,000 voters. The collapse of the pyramid schemes was just the last straw. The people finally took things into their own hands.”

When the Peace Corps tried to protect its volunteers by restricting travel, Matt said he sometimes avoided the restrictions in order to effectively do his job. Peace Corps officials eventually recalled all of the volunteers as the violence escalated.

Two days before the recall, an Albanian school director was shot and killed by secret policemen because of his politics. Matt had met him for coffee two days before his murder.

Language skills a plus

In the end, it was Matt’s language skills and calm demeanor that most benefited his Peace Corps colleagues. Matt organized transportation to Tirana for himself and his colleagues by van and insisted the hired drivers carry only Americans to maintain the convoy’s neutrality.

Getting the two vans past rifle-armed civilians, police and army roadblocks wasn’t easy, Matt said, but the Midwesterner is matter-of-fact about his efforts.

“We were stopped at gunpoint a few times, but I never thought they were going to shoot us,” Matt said. “Giving them some [grape liquor], some bread, some money — we talked our way through it. It helped to crack a joke about the guys at the previous checkpoint, because they were usually on opposite sides.”

The volunteers waited in Tirana for several days as Peace Corps officials assessed the situation and made plans.

Finally, the volunteers were confined to the Peace Corps compound, where Matt and two other volunteers left to buy food for their colleagues. It was then that he witnessed first hand the banditry, random gunfire and looting in the streets of the country’s capital.

The violent scenes Matt described were typical of news footage from the country.

Evacuation

On Friday, March 14, Peace Corps volunteers were bussed to the U.S. Embassy compound where Marine Corps helicopters evacuated them to the aircraft carrier USS Nassau.

“There was gunfire, a lot of it, but it wasn’t directed at the compound,” Matt said. “Once we lifted off the ground, it began to sink in, what we were up against. It was a great relief to land on that carrier. Every marine and sailor was saying ‘Welcome to America; you’re safe now.'”

After debriefing on the USS Nassau, the volunteers flew to Brindisi, Italy, and then traveled to Bari, Italy, where they boarded a chartered airliner to Bucharest, Romania for 10 days of counseling and processing out of the Peace Corps.

Back home

Now, back in Des Moines and safe with his family, Matt is philosophical about his experience.

“I would like to go back as an election monitor, but I don’t think there are going to be elections any time soon,” Matt said. “I think the situation is going to get worse before it gets better. It’s probably going to be a violent summer in the Balkans.”

Matt said he doesn’t see any easy solutions to Albania’s pressing problem.

“They have a saying in the Balkans: ‘A man isn’t a man without a gun.’ So, it’s going to be difficult to get all those kalishnikovs [machine guns] back,” Matt said.

As for himself, Matt is in the “job-hunting mode.”

“I’d like to represent a Midwestern company overseas,” Matt said.

If that doesn’t work out, Matt said he’s contemplating a few other options.