Kosovo’s Unlikeliest Casualties

When David and Penny McCall left their Manhattan penthouse for Albania eight weeks ago, they knew they were headed to the poorest country in Europe, they knew getting around wouldn’t be easy, and they knew the depth of suffering they’d see in the refugee camps along the northern border with Kosovo. But the difficulties and the potential risks of the trip didn’t really matter to them.

What did matter was the possibility of doing something to ease the pain of families driven from their homes by the Serbian army. What mattered was their mission, their excitement about it, and their determination not to waste even one more day. They left on short notice only hours before the party celebrating the sixth anniversary of David’s marketing-and-communications company. There was no way they could have known they’d never see any of their friends and colleagues again.

Working as volunteers for Refugees International, an independent advocacy group they’d been involved with since the early nineties, the McCalls were rushing to Albania to test a newly designed radio receiver about the size of a small boom box with a three-inch satellite dish on it. The receivers could be used to help reunite exhausted and traumatized refugee families. They might even provide some small measure of psychic comfort by broadcasting CNN and Albanian music. The McCalls were so taken with the project, they not only wanted to be there for the trial run but also committed $150,000 of their own money to buy receivers for the refugee camps.

“The McCalls had been looking for something they could do, some way they could have an impact on the suffering,” says Dennis Grace, former vice-president of Refugees International. “This project was simple and could be done relatively quickly. It was exactly the kind of microproject David was attracted to. It was an idea he could fund for something less than an enormous amount of money and that gets some kind of aid directly to those who need it.”

It’s hard, at first glance, to imagine two more unlikely aid workers. There was Penny, 57, the tall, lean thoroughbred from Greenwich, the granddaughter of one of the founders of the 3M company, with her blonde coif, upper-class bearing, nipped-and-tucked face, drop-dead clothes, Manolo Blahnik heels, and personal trainers.

Then there was David, 71, who spent his early childhood in France and went to Hotchkiss and Yale, and whose grandfather was a founder of the New York Life Insurance Company. David grew up to be an unassuming, slope-shouldered advertising copywriter who, as co-founder of McCaffrey and McCall and the creator of such memorably flossy lines as “coffee that tastes as good as it smells,” became a legend in the advertising business.

Yet it was this same David and Penny, with their impeccable pedigree, who had traveled extensively over the past eight years to places where there were people in need – Malawi, Rwanda, Eritrea, Mozambique, Thailand, Cambodia. This same David and Penny with their magnificent house on Sagg Pond in Bridgehampton, nicknamed the Taj McCall, with its panoramic water views, Tuscan tower kitchen, and climate-controlled art gallery, who were creating an international center devoted to the overwhelming problem of land mines.

“People of their station, the McCalls’ peers, who are interested in philanthropy,” says Balkans expert Richard Holbrooke, who is also the chairman of Refugees International and President Clinton’s nominee to become ambassador to the United Nations, “usually go the more traditional route. They attend black-tie dinners and write checks to support things like the Met or the library. They’re not interested in sweaty causes. Refugees are a sweaty cause. You can understand George Soros – he’s a refugee himself. But the McCalls? Well, the McCalls were just different.”

So different that there they were, this wealthy Manhattan couple who clearly had an enormous appetite for the good life, spending what would have been a lovely spring weekend in Bridgehampton among the Kosovar refugees in Albania. The McCalls flew to London, then on to Bologna, where they met up with Yvette Pierpaoli, a revered international-aid worker from France. Then they all flew on to Tirana, Albania’s capital.

On their first full day together in Albania, they went to a town called Durres, not far from Tirana, to test the satellite receivers at a refugee camp. It was a Saturday in mid-April, and that night Pierpaoli called the Washington headquarters of Refugees International. “She told us the receivers worked beautifully,” Dennis Grace remembers, “and they were all in high spirits. They believed this was something special, something that could, in all the madness, really help put families back together.”

But the equipment had to pass one more critical test: Would it work in the mountains? The plan was to drive north to the town of Kukes. Located only minutes from the Albania-Kosovo border, Kukes has been virtually overrun by more than 300,000 ethnic Albanian refugees in recent months.

The McCalls had been to Albania the previous summer, and they knew that even in good weather the drive to Kukes would be a grueling eight-hour ordeal, most of it through the mountains on precarious, heart-stoppingly narrow roads.

Nevertheless, on Sunday morning they began the long journey. There were two jeeps. The one in front had a local driver; an Albanian man who had handled logistics for the trip; a German technician named Max, who worked for World Space, the company that developed the receivers; and Yvette Pierpaoli. In the second jeep were another local driver and the McCalls.

When the convoy left Tirana, the weather was fine. But about two hours into the trip, it began to turn ugly. Sheets of rain pounded the jeeps. Pierpaoli decided she should be with the McCalls and asked the driver to stop. Once she switched jeeps, they drove on through the storm for several more hours. The roads were steep, narrow, and winding, often rutted, unpaved, and without guardrails. Not very good to begin with, the roads had gotten even worse from all the truck and heavy-vehicle traffic since the war in Yugoslavia started.

By the time they reached a tiny town high in the mountains called Puke, the rain had turned into a raging hailstorm that was periodically blinding. Concerned now about the deteriorating weather and road conditions, the Albanian point man asked the driver to stop in Puke. He walked back to the second jeep to suggest that perhaps they should spend the night in town. Quickly, however, he returned to the first jeep and told his companions the word was to press on.

“All of us in refugee work deal with bad weather and crummy roads,” says Grace. “You expect it.”

As they moved out of Puke along a winding stretch of road, the jeeps were proceeding carefully. Within five minutes, however, it was so bad that the first jeep just stopped. But when the driver looked in the rearview mirror, there was nothing. The second jeep wasn’t there. They waited and waited, but still there was nothing.

Finally, they turned around and headed back to Puke. Still no second jeep. In town, they went to the police station to report the disappearance, thinking at first that maybe – given northern Albania’s Wild West atmosphere – their comrades had been kidnapped. Then they went back out along the road and even went past where they’d initially stopped. Nothing. Once again, they turned around and covered the same ground back to Puke, but there was still no sign of the second jeep. On the third time out, however, they spotted several other vehicles stopped along the roadside.

Max, the World Space technician, took out his binoculars and looked down over the edge; there, 1,200 feet below at the bottom of a ravine, was the jeep. Using helicopters, it took several Swiss Army medics several hours to reach Penny and David McCall, Yvette Pierpaoli, and their Albanian driver. But given the height of the drop and the wreckage visible with the binoculars, there was never any hope of finding survivors. The McCalls were the first American casualties of the conflict in Kosovo.

It was one o’clock East Coast time when Dennis Grace got the call on his cell phone. It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon, and he was out walking with his wife and son on Connecticut Avenue in Washington. “It simply tore the heart out of us,” he says.

Grace immediately called Lionel Rosenblatt, the president of Refugees International. “Are you driving?” he asked him. “Well, pull over.” Rosenblatt, who’d just finished interviewing two Kosovar refugee women who’d come to the U.S. to detail some of the atrocities committed by Slobodan Milosevic’s army, had gone out to buy flowers to plant in his yard. Quickly, he pulled into a Roy Rogers parking lot and Grace told him the devastating news. Rosenblatt drove straight home and began to pack. Barely twelve hours later, he was in Tirana. The French authorities were taking care of Yvette Pierpaoli’s remains, and Rosenblatt went to the morgue to I.D. the bodies of David and Penny McCall.

“Advocacy work on behalf of refugees is about trying to give a voice to the most voiceless people in the universe,” says Rosenblatt, who took the McCalls on their maiden aid trip in 1992 when they all traveled to Cambodia. “It’s fighting for the underdog in a bare-knuckled way, and the McCalls understood this completely. A lot of people in their situation want credit or recognition. They want publicity, and they want to see their name on a hospital or something. But not the McCalls, though Penny certainly looked like someone who’d want recognition. For David and Penny, doing the work was always satisfaction enough.”

In fact, their charitable works had, over the past decade, come to occupy more and more of the McCalls’ life. Penny and David still skied at Sporthotel Lorunser in Austria along with Felix and Liz Rohatyn and stayed at the Gritti Palace in Venice every year. They still had long, entertaining lunches and dinners with people like Bob Dash and Rafi Ferrer every weekend at their house in Bridgehampton. They even still threw raucous parties that often as not would end with a giant conga line snaking its way down the moonlit drive outside the house.

But they had this whole other side, this other element of their lives. And their widely diverse efforts to help people, their humanitarian work, had, as much as any business success or social circle, come to define who they were. When the McCalls became interested in a cause or a person or an institution, they rolled up their sleeves and went to work. This was participatory, first-person philanthropy.

And so, when they became interested in the international refugee crisis earlier this decade, they took out their checkbook, but they also took out their luggage. They went to the Cambodian refugee camps along the Thai border to assess the situation themselves. They traveled the back roads in Southeast Asia with Lionel Rosenblatt to see what was going on, to find out what the people needed, to understand what Refugees International did, and to offer ideas of their own.

When they were in Cambodia in 1997, for example, they visited a number of remote villages whose only source of fresh water was rain. This lack of water resulted in a great deal of preventable sickness and death, particularly among the small children, from malaria and dengue fever. Penny asked what would have to be done to get fresh water to the villages. Wells would have to be dug and pumps put in, she was told. How much would this cost? she asked. One hundred fifty dollars for a well and a pump for each village. The McCalls were incredulous. Within a week, ten villages had new wells and what became known as “Penny Pumps.”

Though David was scheduled to replace Richard Holbrooke as chairman of Refugees International if and when Holbrooke’s nomination for the U.N. job was confirmed, his charitable interests and Penny’s extended well beyond refugee issues. The McCalls were fully engaged in creating something called the Independent De-mining Assessment Center. After meeting so many men, women, and children in Southeast Asia missing limbs, David was determined to find practical technology to do something about the millions of land mines scattered mostly in Third World countries.

They were also in the very early stages of funding a performing-arts center for Harlem, an idea that came from a casual comment the Reverend Calvin Butts had made to them: “You only have a community if you have culture.” One possible location was the famed but now abandoned Renaissance Ballroom.

For her part, Penny had started 14 Angels, an organization created to teach the students at the Thurgood Marshall Academy on 135th Street in Harlem – a public school established under the New Visions program six years ago – how to start and run a business. The business was fashion and the kids were going to design, manufacture, and sell the clothes.

Penny and her partner in the project, an educator and activist named Naomi Barber, came up with the idea after several trips to Bahia in Brazil. There they saw innovative programs being used to save street children. Penny was so impressed, she took Butts and Thurgood Marshall’s principal, Dr. Sandye Johnson, down to Bahia to see the programs for themselves. “The thing about Penny,” says Johnson, “is she was genuine. There was no hidden agenda. She simply wanted to help.” (Penny’s 31-year-old daughter, Jennifer McSweeney Reuss, has said she is determined to follow through with 14 Angels as a tribute to her mother.)

And then there was the Bridgehampton Day Care Center, the Abyssinian Development Corporation, the New Museum, sports programs for New York City schools, artist residences in Harlem, the Central Park Conservancy, Citymeals-on-Wheels, and literally dozens of artists Penny funded with individual grants from her eponymous foundation – started with $1 million in seed money David gave her as a birthday present. Among the artists were avant garde sculptor Nari Ward, who uses everyday objects; black sculptor Willie Cole, whose work mocks racial stereotypes; performance artist Ann Hamilton; and Colombian sculptor Doris Salcedo. (Ann Hamilton, who represented America at this year’s Biennale in Venice, has dedicated her exhibition to Penny.)

On top of all this, David was still actively involved in the advertising business. Though he and Jim McCaffrey had sold their agency to Saatchi & Saatchi nearly twenty years ago, David was the chairman and one of the founding partners of a six-year-old advertising, marketing, and communications company called SS&K (Shepardson, Stern, and Kaminsky). Located in SoHo, SS&K counts Ralph Lauren and Time Warner among its clients.

When they were in Cambodia in 1997, for example, they visited a number of remote villages whose only source of fresh water was rain. This lack of water resulted in a great deal of preventable sickness and death, particularly among the small children, from malaria and dengue fever. Penny asked what would have to be done to get fresh water to the villages. Wells would have to be dug and pumps put in, she was told. How much would this cost? she asked. One hundred fifty dollars for a well and a pump for each village. The McCalls were incredulous. Within a week, ten villages had new wells and what became known as “Penny Pumps.”

Though David was scheduled to replace Richard Holbrooke as chairman of Refugees International if and when Holbrooke’s nomination for the U.N. job was confirmed, his charitable interests and Penny’s extended well beyond refugee issues. The McCalls were fully engaged in creating something called the Independent De-mining Assessment Center. After meeting so many men, women, and children in Southeast Asia missing limbs, David was determined to find practical technology to do something about the millions of land mines scattered mostly in Third World countries.

They were also in the very early stages of funding a performing-arts center for Harlem, an idea that came from a casual comment the Reverend Calvin Butts had made to them: “You only have a community if you have culture.” One possible location was the famed but now abandoned Renaissance Ballroom.

For her part, Penny had started 14 Angels, an organization created to teach the students at the Thurgood Marshall Academy on 135th Street in Harlem – a public school established under the New Visions program six years ago – how to start and run a business. The business was fashion and the kids were going to design, manufacture, and sell the clothes.

Penny and her partner in the project, an educator and activist named Naomi Barber, came up with the idea after several trips to Bahia in Brazil. There they saw innovative programs being used to save street children. Penny was so impressed, she took Butts and Thurgood Marshall’s principal, Dr. Sandye Johnson, down to Bahia to see the programs for themselves. “The thing about Penny,” says Johnson, “is she was genuine. There was no hidden agenda. She simply wanted to help.” (Penny’s 31-year-old daughter, Jennifer McSweeney Reuss, has said she is determined to follow through with 14 Angels as a tribute to her mother.)

And then there was the Bridgehampton Day Care Center, the Abyssinian Development Corporation, the New Museum, sports programs for New York City schools, artist residences in Harlem, the Central Park Conservancy, Citymeals-on-Wheels, and literally dozens of artists Penny funded with individual grants from her eponymous foundation – started with $1 million in seed money David gave her as a birthday present. Among the artists were avant garde sculptor Nari Ward, who uses everyday objects; black sculptor Willie Cole, whose work mocks racial stereotypes; performance artist Ann Hamilton; and Colombian sculptor Doris Salcedo. (Ann Hamilton, who represented America at this year’s Biennale in Venice, has dedicated her exhibition to Penny.)

On top of all this, David was still actively involved in the advertising business. Though he and Jim McCaffrey had sold their agency to Saatchi & Saatchi nearly twenty years ago, David was the chairman and one of the founding partners of a six-year-old advertising, marketing, and communications company called SS&K (Shepardson, Stern, and Kaminsky). Located in SoHo, SS&K counts Ralph Lauren and Time Warner among its clients.

So it’s not as if David McCall needed to find ways to fill his time. What, then, pushed him to maintain such a large and remarkably varied portfolio of charitable projects? And what about Penny? What would motivate a woman with her background, a woman who had her grandchildren call her “duchess,” to trek through the backwaters of Southeast Asia or Albania – or even Harlem, for that matter?

“They were creatures of the sixties,” says writer Linda Bird Francke, whose most recent book is Ground Zero: The Gender Wars in the Military and who was one of Penny’s best friends and a Bridgehampton neighbor. “David was an absolute liberal Democrat, and he did not deviate from that. He was 71, but he hadn’t mellowed one bit.”

There was more to it than that, however. The McCalls were a unique pairing of quirky personality traits. David was always interested in politics, always ready to side with the underdog, and always instinctively ready to do the right thing. These characteristics were in evidence even when he had a lot to lose.

“In 1963, when he started McCaffrey and McCall,” says Jerry Traum, McCall’s lawyer for more than 30 years, “tobacco advertising was the industry’s largest category. However, David pledged that the fledgling agency would not take tobacco business. (Decades later, he even produced the haunting anti-smoking ad with Yul Brynner that ran after his death from lung cancer.)

“And it was the same with his ‘Unsell the War’ campaign during Vietnam,” Traum says. “At that time, most of bedrock industrial America were hawks. Somebody once said to me that there’s no real integrity without pain. Anybody can do the right thing when it doesn’t cost anything.”

Before she met David, Penny was socially rebellious and unconventional as well, but in a less overtly political way. “She used to say to me,” says Naomi Barber, ” ‘I’m the only one who left Greenwich. All my friends stayed and married the men next door.’ ” Penny, on the other hand, was married and divorced twice before she was 30, and had her daughter Jennifer when she was 26. (Penny and David were together for twenty years.)

Several of David’s friends told me that he was determined to make a difference, while Penny was determined to have the best time possible. But it was her life lust, her manic energy, and her hunger for thrills and adventure – she was a horsewoman, she jumped out of airplanes, she lived on a boat in Puerto Rico – that probably had as much of an impact on the kinds of philanthropic projects they chose as David’s politics.

What made their choices so interesting is that the McCalls weren’t bleeding hearts. They made no pretense of being embarrassed by their good fortune. And it is hard to imagine Penny’s being satisfied working the benefit circuit, with its boring dinners, stilted small talk, and gassy speeches.

Not this woman, who used to delight in saying, “There isn’t an inch of my body someone isn’t assigned to,” and whose collection of edgy contemporary art included torture chairs with spikes; the shoes of disappeared women; phallic paintings; and a beautiful white frock that hung on the wall of her apartment and looked, from several feet away, like a rich girl’s communion dress. However, a closer inspection and an enthusiastic explanation from Penny revealed the smocking to be made of male pubic hair.

“She and David had this remarkable ability to transform themselves from these very rich, very New York people,” says Lionel Rosenblatt. “With her phenomenal enthusiasm, her blonde hair, and her body English, she had a mesmerizing effect in the camps.”

As soon as David and Penny found out the satellite-receivers were ready to be tested, they made the decision to go to Albania, only two days before their departure. Penny immediately called Linda Bird Francke and practically everyone else she knew. “Guess where I’m going,” she said, in her best stretched-out, overarticulated, trust-fund-baby voice. “You’re just going to be green with envy.”

David and Penny couldn’t have been more different. She dressed as if her life depended on it, while he wore the same frayed, faded polo shirt all summer. David was unpretentious, almost painfully shy, while Penny was radiant, kinetic, and disarmingly gregarious. She collected people with the same energy she devoted to collecting contemporary art. Everyone became her friend, at least for a time, including the people who cooked for her, drove her around, or worked on her body.

She offered one of her personal trainers a face-lift as a wedding present. At a party, she walked across the room when she saw Carole and Richard Rifkind, the chairman of the Sloan-Kettering Institute and his wife, and said, “I want to know you.” Being her friend was thrilling and always a little risky. People fell out of favor like last season’s fashion. Penny was demanding and quick to pass judgment. She was also an insatiable gossip. “It was very much like being friends with the most popular girl in high school,” says someone who was close to her. “She’d always be challenging you to do something, and everyone would think you were so lucky just to be her friend.”

“Penny wanted to see everything and she wanted to know everything,” says Naomi Barber, her partner in 14 Angels. “She was extremely unsparing and demanding as a friend. She forced you to be completely open all the time. If you didn’t feel like being open, then you couldn’t be with her. At times, being her friend could be a little scary. But she wasn’t afraid to engage people, whether she was at a Hamptons party or sitting on the floor with the students at the Thurgood Marshall Academy and telling them where she bought her sunglasses or explaining some cashmere wrap thing she had on.”

And David apparently loved every moment of her exciting, often outrageous behavior. He called her Pansy. “He always looked at her as if he were seeing her for the first time,” Barber says.

For his part, David was, at 71, remarkably enthusiastic about new experiences for someone who’d been married three times, fathered six sons, had so much success in business, and generally done as much in life as he had. Though he was at an age when most people have long since strapped on the blinders and shifted into cruise control, David was still reaching to bring new people into his life. He brought this fresh outlook to politics as well.

“When you’re young and you get involved,” says Lenny Stern, one of David’s partners at SS&K who has a background in politics, “you’re all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and you do it because you think you can change the world. But when you work in politics for a while, you can get pretty jaded. Well, all these years later, David still believed that while the system wasn’t perfect and it could be enormously frustrating, you could do wonderful things.”

It is always difficult to accurately uncover the cause and effect of someone’s life, particularly someone as complicated as David McCall. But in his case, there are a handful of events and circumstances that shaped the basic architecture of his personality. His grandfather was a man so wealthy he had his own eighteen-hole golf course. David’s father, consequently, lived the luxurious, leisurely life of a rich man’s son, essentially roaming from estate to country club to yacht.

But the family’s fortune was decimated by the Depression, and David’s parents moved everyone to France, where the money they had left would last longer. David learned French before he spoke English. When they moved back to America, however, David, who was 5 years old, didn’t fit in.

Even worse, while he still lived among the rich, his family no longer had real wealth. David found himself in a kind of socioeconomic purgatory where he wasn’t really comfortable with either the rich kids or the middle-class kids. He was a member of the genteel poor. He spoke French, he had nannies, and he went to private school. His father, meanwhile, was forced to take a job as a receptionist at Metropolitan Life. “His mother was ferocious about keeping him in the best private schools,” says Lenny Stern. “She managed to do this even though they didn’t have the money.”

It was, however, a mixed blessing for David, who was always embarrassed by his comparatively shabby clothes and, when he got a little older, his inability to buy his friends drinks when they went out. “He was forced by his early life,” says Jerry Traum, “to face a lot of issues related to money and class.”

David went to Yale in 1948 but dropped out after his first year when his father died. He needed to go to work to help his family. “David really was an outsider when he was younger,” says someone close to the family. “He felt and experienced something all the rich people who give to the library could never understand.”

After a very brief shot at the insurance business, he went to work in the mailroom at Young & Rubicam, where success came quickly. Eventually, he became chief copywriter at Ogilvy & Mather, and then in 1963 co-founded McCaffrey and McCall, whose clients included Mercedes-Benz, Tiffany, Norelco, and Exxon.

“He often discussed how wonderful it felt not to have to worry about money,” says Traum, “but he always had strange ideas about it. He was afraid he’d leave his sons too much money. He’d seen the debilitating effects money had on people around him. So he set up a family partnership in which the boys would gain increasing shares as they got older. They wouldn’t be rich, but they’d always have money if they needed it.”

Throughout his career, David enjoyed a kind of serendipity that was, almost Hollywood-script-like, born of his determination to stick to his principles. In 1972, when he came up with the idea for Schoolhouse Rock, the Emmy-winning animated television shorts designed to help kids with math by using pop music, he needed to show it to one of the networks. Though he could have taken it to someone high up at any one of the three, McCaffrey and McCall was, at the time, doing work for ABC.

And through this work, he’d met a young man just coming into middle management who’d been assigned the then-lowly position of head of children’s daytime programming. David took the idea to him, rather than go over his head, because he felt it was the right thing to do. The man was Michael Eisner, who gave Schoolhouse Rock the green light. Years later, after David sold McCaffrey and McCall to Saatchi & Saatchi, he took some of the profits and bought Disney stock.

“It was just at the time when Eisner was going to take charge at Disney,” says Traum. “David’s investment decision was easy. He knew Eisner, he believed he was talented, and he felt if Eisner was going there it was to do something with the company. And of course he was right. But it was this way throughout David’s career. By reaching principled decisions, through some act of the cosmos, it always paid off.”

Unlike David, Penny had always had money, and she was always ecstatic about it. “Penny used to love to say, ‘Oh, my God, we got so rich today,’ ” says Naomi Barber. Last June, Penny was honored by the Abyssinian Development Corporation at the annual Harlem Renaissance Day celebration. “I can’t tell you how much fun it is to have money,” she said when she stood up to accept the award. The laughter was so loud on 138th Street, the crowd almost missed the second half of her sentence: “But it’s an even greater kick to give it away.”

A few weeks after the McCalls died in Albania, on a rainy Friday morning, there was a memorial service at the Abyssinian Baptist Church. Dark limos and Town Cars were triple-parked on Odell Clark Place (138th Street) from the middle of the block all the way out to Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard and the old Renaissance Ballroom. The church started to fill at 10:30, and by 11, when the Reverend Calvin Butts rose to speak, there were nearly 2,000 people packed inside the intimate, horseshoe-shaped sanctuary.

Some of the tasseled-loafer crowd from Connecticut thought having the service at Abyssinian in Harlem was a bit over the top, but those who were closest to the McCalls knew the choice was just right. David and Penny often said it was the only church in which they’d ever felt comfortable.

Richard Holbrooke talked about their courage and commitment; family members recalled small poignant moments, the moments that define a life and a family; and the kids from Thurgood Marshall sang a stirring version of the old spiritual “Elijah Rock.” Butts acknowledged that the McCalls weren’t believers, but he said, “They must have had a lot of God inside them to do the work they did.”

“We put a positive spin on their deaths,” Linda Bird Francke told the mourners near the end of the service, “by saying they went out at the top of their games. Or, isn’t it wonderful that they went together? But it isn’t wonderful. Not one bit. A great hole has opened in all of our lives, and I want them back.”

But just when you could feel a great and heavy sadness begin to settle over the church, Francke took back the moment. She knew Penny wouldn’t have wanted her to leave it that way.

“Wherever they are,” Francke continued with the hint of a smile, “Penny is addressing a new captive audience. And she can’t wait to get to the payoff. ‘You’ll never guess where we died,’ she is saying. ‘We died in Albania.’ “

Kosovo’s Unlikeliest Casualties