Trusted Mole: A Soldier’s Journey into Bosnia’s Heart of Darkness

‘About twenty minutes.’

‘Any casualties?’ His tone was unmistakable.

‘None as yet. Too early to tell. Everyone’s under cover except …’ except the loony under the table.

‘Right, I’m off to TSG. Get hold of the Chief of Staff in Split. Tell him what we’re up to.’ And with that we swept out of the Ops Room. The Brigadier was right of course. He could hardly sit around in Vitez or, worse still, retire to Fojnica, while his troops were under fire. I told Corporal Fox and Seb what was happening. They’d had the presence of mind to get the vehicles fuelled up.

Ahead of us stretched a long journey: Route Diamond to Gornji Vakuf, around the lake at Prozor and then the long climb up over the ‘mountain’ on Route Triangle. This was the worse of the two main supply routes into Central Bosnia, a hell of frozen ruts, tortuous bends, precipitous slopes and broken-down and stranded vehicles. It would take us hours.

I doubt there was a man among us who didn’t feel a buzz of anticipation.The military is a peculiar profession. It’s crammed full of frustrated people – highly trained, frustrated professionals. Unlike any other profession we rarely actually put into practice what we train for ad nauseam. In a sense, we’re untried, untested, and always there’s that little nagging doubt, that little question – how would I cope? Would I do the right thing? Would I freeze? Panic?

Sometimes there are incidents and soldiers are shot at, attacked, bombed, and they are tested. But it doesn’t happen to everyone. Most of the time nothing happens. I’ve done three tours in Northern Ireland, one in the bandit country of South Armagh, and I’ve never been shot at, heard a shot fired in anger or heard a bomb go off. There are the occasional blips – the Falklands and Gulf Wars, where people really are tested and really do ‘see an elephant’ as the Americans refer to combat: ‘Few people have actually seen an elephant, most have only had one described to them.’

It’s an odd arrogance that underpins opinion on being in combat. The US Army is almost obsessive in this respect. As a visual manifestation of this, soldiers who have ‘seen their elephant’ wear on the right sleeve of their fatigues the patch or emblem of the unit or division with which they served on operations – ‘look-at-me-I’ve-been-there’ symbolism. Those unlucky enough not to have been on operations can only wear on their left sleeve the patch of the division with which they are currently serving; their right sleeves remain bare. Fortunately, we have no such rites of passage badges in the British Army, just medals which we’re required to wear so infrequently that most people can’t remember where they’ve put theirs.

As a very young soldier I remember well one night in McDonald’s in Aldershot. It was June 1982 and 2 and 3 PARA had just returned from the Falklands War. The place started to fill up with a gang of Toms from 2 PARA, all wearing ‘Darwin and Goose Green’ sweatshirts. All were drunk.

‘An’ where were you fookin’ craphats while we were scrapping wi’ the Argies?’ snarled one of them aggressively (some of us had missed out). And then they all rounded on us.

‘Watch who you’re calling a craphat, boyo. I’m 1 PARA,’ spat back Taff Barnes, our corporal, who was from 1 PARA mortar platoon. He was a hulking great bloke – crazy to pick a fight with him.

‘You 1 PARA? Oh, well, that’s okay then.’ Instantly they were mollified and we were all suddenly the best of friends.

‘So, what was it like then?’ I asked our original assailant. I was curious to know.

He looked at me. The drunkenness in his eyes seemed to evaporate. They became focused and intense. ‘It was shit,’ he said evenly. ‘It was pure shit … you’re lucky you weren’t there.’ And then he was gone, staggering off to order his ‘fookin” Big Mac and mega large chips.

His answer had floored me. What had he seen and done that had been so terrible as to humble him in that way, to knock the bravado out of him so completely? I remember feeling pure jealousy at that moment, jealousy born out of a weird frustration that we now had nothing in common. He’d seen his elephant up close.

The majority of people in the Army have never seen an elephant. There are senior officers, even generals, who haven’t got a single campaign service or operation medal. Some only have a Queen’s Jubilee Medal. It’s not really their fault. Put it down to fate or luck. It doesn’t make them any less professional or useful to the system. But it is a source of personal frustration. So much training, so many years learning your profession and yet never been tested. So, it’s not at all surprising that we were all gripped by a horrid fascination to get down to TSG as quickly as possible, in case we missed seeing the elephant.

By the time we’d passed through Gornji Vakuf, skirted Lake Prozor, crawled up the ‘mountain’ beyond, shaken ourselves to bits on the winding and hellish Route Triangle, darkness had fallen. At a UN checkpoint, the last British outpost along the route before TSG, a burly Sapper corporal waved us down outside a small cluster of Portakabins in a bleak, rocky and windswept landscape.

Cumming stuck his head out into the freezing night air.

‘Sir, you can’t go any further. There’s heavy shelling in TSG,’ the corporal informed us gravely.

‘I know,’ answered Cumming without a hint of frustration in his voice, ‘that’s why we’re here.’

‘Sorry, sir, I’ve got my orders. No soft-skinned vehicles beyond this point.’

‘But I’m the Commander. No soft-skinned vehicles? Not even me?’ I could tell Cumming was highly amused by the proceedings. The corporal was adamant.

We were saved by the shrill ringing of the car phone.

Evidently, from the conversation which followed, it was someone on the phone from TSG. An arrangement was made to proceed as far as the Croat checkpoint at Lipa in the Duvno valley. There we’d cross-load into an APC for the final couple of miles to the NSE (National Support Element) logistics base.

At Lipa the Brigadier and I donned helmets and leapt into one of two 432 APCs. Corporal Fox would wait at Lipa and only proceed to the base once summoned on the radio. As we clattered along in the APC I felt faintly ridiculous, surrounded by all this armour. Ten minutes later we rocked to a halt in 35 Engineer Regiment’s part of the NSE to be met by the Commanding Officer, Lieutenant Colonel John Field. It rapidly transpired that the shelling had ceased some time ago.

We could see little in the darkness but were given a quick guided tour of the warehouse and the offices where some of the windows had been blown in. Colonel Field described the events of the day. The Serbs had ‘walked’ their artillery fire around the town and it was believed that they had been targeting a Croat gun line which had been set up behind the UN base. A total of one hundred and forty-eight 152mm shells had been counted. A number of buildings in the town had been hit, some of the NSE’s ‘B’ vehicles – soft-skinned trucks and Land Rovers – had been damaged, but no one in the base had been injured. Very lucky. Well-rehearsed drills in the event of such an attack had paid off. The ‘loggies’ next door had had the luxury of taking cover in a huge bunker, while the Sappers had had to seek protection inside their armoured vehicles.

I spotted Corporal Fox emerging from the shadow. ‘How the hell did you get here?’

‘Oh, I came in with you … followed your APC in. I wasn’t going to miss this sitting at that checkpoint!’

‘Nothing here to miss. It ended hours ago.’ I think we both felt a bit deflated. Worse still we were now ‘war tourists’, hanging on every word of those who had undoubtedly seen their elephants that afternoon.

As there wasn’t much else to do, Seb and I found a patch of concrete to kip down on in the TV room. I bought a box of Rowntree’s Fruit Pastilles in the canteen for the journey back the next day and then wandered off to the TV room where CNN was reporting another crisis in Iraq.

The sweep of the second hand jolted me back to the present … twelve seconds … frantic heavy breathing in my ears. It was infectious, unnerving. Others’ terror compounded your own … thirteen seconds … it was hopeless. We were helpless. Unable to do anything to influence fate, to save ourselves. We were completely at the mercy of the Serbian gunners and their thunderbolts, which hammered the earth around us … fourteen seconds ... shit! I felt myself slipping into unchecked panic, muscles taut and trembling … fifteen …

The shell hissed in and missed. We were still alive and not burning to death. Intense relief.

The corporal was still doing his thing up front. ‘Think I got a fix on ’em that time,’ he shouted. ‘Be able to confirm it next time.’

Next time! He was barking mad. But he was keeping himself together by occupying his mind. I doubted I could stomach much more of this. I had to do something quickly. Anything. The fruit pastilles! I clawed at the crushed box in my pocket.

‘Anyone want a sweetie?’ I produced the box in the red half-light expecting to be told to sod off. Absurd really. The reaction was quite the opposite. Hands appeared from nowhere. Passed down the APC – even the corporal got one – the pastilles were feverishly devoured. The chewing seemed to help and at least brought some saliva back to dry mouths. It was a short-lived respite.

‘Here we go again! ’nother one incoming. Should get a fix this time.’

Another fifteen seconds of clock-watching, bowel-churning gripped us. I was raging. We had nothing to fire back at them with. Where was DENY FLIGHT? Where were the jets that were supposed to be somewhere up there? Why couldn’t a couple of Sea Harriers whip off Ark Royal in the Adriatic, zip over here and drop a couple of cluster bombs on the bastards?

It then occurred to me that this was only my tenth day in theatre. Snuffed out on day ten by the Serbs of all people. My parents would love that one! Day bloody ten. This hadn’t been part of the plan at all. Mentally, I cursed my youth, my wretched impetuosity, and my pig-headed unwillingness to listen to my father, whose dire words of warning were spinning around in my head – ‘Son, listen to your father. You don’t know what you’re getting into. You don’t know the mentality of the people there … all of them, they’re rotten, rotten, rotten … dangerous people and they’ll get you, they’ll kill you in the end just for what you are.’

I hadn’t listened to him. And now that arrogance had led me up this blind alley and there was no way out.

I felt myself slipping off the edge of sanity. Again the earth rocked. Another miss. Someone grunted in relief, another whimpered. Perhaps me.

‘They’ll send a runner round soon.’ The staff sergeant sounded as though he was being strangled.

‘A what?’ A runner! He must have cracked. A runner, round all the vehicles? During the shelling?

He nodded. ‘They did it this afternoon … to find out who was in each vehicle in case one of them got hit.’ It sounded mad but also made sense.

‘Right, I want everyone’s ID card now. Pass them down.’ I got out my notebook, stuck a Maglite torch in my mouth and started scribbling down numbers, ranks and names. At last I was doing something positive. It was a great tonic and, I’m convinced, stopped me from losing it. As I scrawled my mind retreated a step or two back from the edge of panic. There was one card missing.

‘He hasn’t got one. The boilerman’s a local.’ The staff sergeant nodded towards the youth next to me.

‘Kako se zoves? What’s your name?’ The boy was trembling. He half whispered something, Darko, Dario, Mario or something. I couldn’t quite get it so simply wrote down boilerman – local.

The shelling continued sporadically, the gaps between the salvos increasing. Five minutes passed. Nothing. Another couple of minutes. Still nothing. For the first time I noticed it was freezing in the vehicle. Suddenly the door lever sprang upwards. A helmeted soldier poked his head in.

‘Who’s in this one?’

‘Here you go. It’s all there, if you can read it.’ He grabbed the slip and tore off into the night.

We sat there in silence waiting for the corporal’s words to throw us into terror. They never came. Eventually, the door was opened. It was the runner again.

‘All clear,’ he announced cheerfully. ‘It’s all clear. You can come out now.’

I was stunned. All clear? Just like that! ‘I suppose someone’s rung up the Serbs and asked them if they’ve finished for the night!’ I quipped, more out of relief than sarcasm. But he’d already disappeared.

Stiffly we eased ourselves out of the Spartan. I expected devastation. There was nothing. The sky was cloudless and the moon had risen higher, casting its chilling rays, illuminating soldiers who were clambering out of other vehicles and walking slowly back to the warehouse clutching their sleeping bags.

‘Well, I don’t know about you, but if they do it again I’m not taking cover in that fucking thing – it’s full of petrol.’ I was shocked at what we’d done. The staff sergeant mumbled his agreement. There was more to it than just the petrol and the exposed position of the vehicle. The worst of it had been the claustrophobic and narcotic effect of being in close proximity to other people’s terror. We’d all set each other off.

Next to the boiler room door stood a large square chimney running up the outside of the building but offset from the wall by about two and a half feet. Where it disappeared into the ground, between wall and chimney, was a concrete-lined well about four feet deep. Perfect for two people. That’s where we’d be going next time.

Together we found a couple of hefty slabs of concrete, a manhole cover and some sandbags, enough to create some form of overhead cover against splinters. Twenty minutes of grunting and heaving warmed us up considerably. I was pleased. The chances of a shell actually landing on us were slim. Satisfied that we knew where we’d be going next time, we retraced our steps into the warehouse and parted company.

In the warehouse I spotted Brigadier Cumming, Colonel Field and his RSM, Graeme Furguson. They were chatting and laughing, an encouraging sign. Someone had produced an urn of sweet tea. There was plenty of nervous chatter and laughter, a strange but perfectly normal reaction to stress. I asked the Brigadier where he’d got to.

‘Oh, I had a marvellous time. I was in the command APC. They even made me a cup of tea!’ He seemed quite relaxed about things. I recalled the 432s clustered somewhere round the back of the building. At least he would have been spared the running commentary and the clock-watching.

The CO and RSM were doing their leadership bit, moving among the soldiers and chatting. It all helped. It was time to try and get some kip so I wandered back to my sleeping bag only to be confronted by a disturbing sight.

Standing in the half-shadow, just beyond our bergens and sleeping bags, were three soldiers. With them was a young Sapper lieutenant supported by two others. He seemed to be trying to get away from them. But, they weren’t so much trying to restrain him as calm him. One was holding his left arm and patting his shoulder while the other was attempting to soothe him. He seemed oblivious to them both. His eyes, unfocused, wild and staring, said it all. His lips trembled slightly. Occasionally he’d gulp hard and nod his head, but his eyes just kept staring. He’d had it. Genuinely shell-shocked.

‘He all right?’ I asked, approaching.

The one on the left shot me a glance. ‘He had a bad time of it this afternoon. This last lot …’ He didn’t bother finishing the sentence.

‘He’ll be fine,’ chimed in the second, which really meant ‘leave us alone’. I was only too glad to. It was unnerving seeing someone’s soul stripped bare, so starkly reminding me of my own terror.

I thought the Serbs were bound to shell us again so I didn’t bother taking anything off. Somehow I managed to cram myself into the sleeping bag still wearing the flak jacket, but I couldn’t zip the bag up over the bulk. It was a wretched night and I suppose I was still edgy. I dozed fitfully on the cold concrete while freezing air seeped into the bag. They had the last laugh: there was no more shelling that night.

Breakfast was a subdued affair. I found a place opposite Seb at one of the wooden trestle tables in the makeshift canteen in one of the halls. He was talking about the shelling, banging on as if none of us had been there. I suppose it was just a delayed reaction or just his way of getting it out of his system but it was irritating and he was making me distinctly nervous. I didn’t need an action replay over breakfast.

‘Seb, it’s over, it’s passed. Just drop it.’ It was precisely the wrong thing to say. He rounded on me angrily.

‘Yeah, that’s right, rufty tufty Para. Easy for you to play it cool, especially if you’ve been through it loads of times. For some of us it was our first time.’

I was stunned by his presumption. Suddenly, I didn’t feel like breakfast, got up and walked off. In the following six months Seb and I could barely stand to be in the same room as each other. The atmosphere would always be tense and uncomfortable. Was it because he thought I’d seen him lose it that night? Who knows. It’s strange and sad what these things do to people.

Before we left Brigadier Cumming inspected the night’s damage. In the compound where we’d taken cover in the Spartans stood a row of four-tonne trucks some thirty metres forward of the APCs. Nearly all were shrapnel-damaged and sagging forlornly on punctured tyres. The walls of the warehouse were deeply scarred. To one side of the warehouse two Land Rovers had been completely destroyed. A shell had landed fifteen metres on the other side of the compound fence and shrapnel had ripped through their soft aluminium sides, turning them into sieves. It was a sobering sight.

Not one shell had landed within the compound. Further analysis revealed that the shells had landed some 100 metres forward of the camp with the nearest landing about seventy metres away. How could the Serbs have managed to converge all their guns on one spot and yet drop all the rounds short? Maybe it had been deliberate, a warning – stop allowing the Croats to fire their guns from behind UN buildings. Another suggestion was that they’d intended to hit the warehouse but had been working from old and inaccurate maps. I doubted it; they’d recorded that particular DF during the day and would have known to ‘add one hundred’.

In all some thirty-three 152mm shells had been fired that night. Astonishingly, no one had been hit. Two things had saved us. The first was the row of four-tonne trucks which had absorbed some of the shrapnel, the second that the Serbs had been using old stocks of shells which had burst into large lumps of jagged metal. Although these looked menacing, they travelled less far and quickly lost their energy. Modern artillery rounds fragment into splinters one third of the size and travel three times further. We’d been lucky. The TSG incident so disturbed the politicians back home that a Naval Task Force, including a regiment of 105mm light guns, was quickly dispatched to the Adriatic.

We departed TSG at 0900 hours. Brigadier Cumming was keen to get back to Tac in Fojnica as quickly as possible. Another crisis was brewing. While we’d been racing down to TSG, a French APC transporting the Bosnian Deputy Prime Minister, Hakija Turajlic, to the airport in Sarajevo had been stopped by Chetniks, Serb irregulars. After a stand-off, they’d gained access to the APC through the rear door, machine-gunned the interior and murdered the Deputy. The UN’s future in Bosnia looked short-lived.

We crossed the almost featureless Duvno plain before picking up the road which ran along the plain’s eastern edge. At the Lipa checkpoint the Brigadier decided that we’d reach Fojnica quicker if we took Route Square along the Dugo Polje valley and thence drop down off the ‘mountain’ to Jablanica. It was a favourite route and spectacularly beautiful. We drove for half an hour in silence. Eventually Corporal Fox broke it.

‘Well, I don’t know about you … ,’ he drawled, addressing no one in particular,‘… in a way I’m glad we went there, but I wouldn’t ever want to go through that again.’ We said nothing. There was nothing to say. He’d spoken for us all.

We’d begun the descent into a breathtakingly steep valley – a wild, almost prehistoric place of towering black mountains, jagged rocks and shimmering ice, both bleak and forbidding. Some of the previous night’s terror entered my thoughts. How on earth had I got myself into this mess? Almost a year earlier, amid the arid wastes of Iraq and Kuwait, I’d been desperate to get to Yugoslavia. Now I wasn’t quite so sure I hadn’t made a terrible mistake – one all of my own making.

THREE Operation Bretton

October 1997 – Ian, UK

I’m sitting down, leaning forward, my stomach a fire of anger and fear. Legs crossed, one foot kicking uncontrollably.

I’m fiddling like mad with my watch strap. I can feel the fire welling up about to engulf me. I’m struggling to suppress tears of rage and frustration. I’m trying to explain but I’m just burbling incoherently. The man opposite me is a saint. I’ve met him before – in a past life. I mean, he’s seen me before, after the first time. He’s a lieutenant colonel, also a psychiatrist, the only one worth seeing. His name is Ian. He’s got a clipboard and a pen, but he’s not writing. He’s just looking at me, listening to me ranting.

‘I should have come to see you a long time ago, but I couldn’t. You just can’t … I mean, you try and get on with your life, put the past in a box and sit on the lid by busying yourself … of course, they’ll always tell you that the support is there – all you have to do is ask. But it’s not really there at all … let me tell you, your sort of help is virtually inaccessible.’

‘How do you mean, Milos?’ He’s frowning.

‘It’s the culture … it’s a cultural thing.’

‘Culture?’

‘Culture, macho Army culture. Can you understand what I’m saying? Y’know, you’re a major in the Parachute Regiment or whatever. In that culture you can’t show weakness or flaws. No one can. You’re supposed to be strong. So you wander around keeping it all inside, pretending everything’s okay … you bluff those around you, you bluff yourself …’ I’m close to tears now, ‘… but deep down you know you’re not well. You’re ill and need help but you can’t ask for it because you’re trapped in a straitjacket which is put on you by your peers, by the culture, by yourself … because you are the culture …’

‘So, why are you here now, Milos?’ his voice is soft and gentle, probing. ‘Why did you ask to see me?’

I stare out of the window at the sea. Why indeed? It’s choppy and green-grey. The waves are flecked with white horses. Why? The nightmare of the last five days flashes through my mind. It had been an unimaginable nightmare – it still is – and had it not been for Niki, my girlfriend, I’m not sure I’d be sitting here with Ian.

I’d held myself together long enough to answer their questions. They hadn’t finished with my house until past six in the evening. The questioning – in an interview room, all taped – had started at six thirty. Fortunately Issy, my solicitor, and I had been able to see the questions beforehand. It was all about phone numbers, phone calls to the former Yugoslavia, just as I’d expected. Most were instantly explicable and innocuous. It boiled down to three which weren’t. I told them the truth, but not all of it. I couldn’t bring myself to start talking about the List and about Rose and Smith. They’d have to find that out for themselves. The interview had lasted for no more than about twenty minutes, after which one of the policemen unexpectedly announced that I was on police bail. Just like that.

Curiously, he’d looked at his watch. ‘We’ll get this thing wrapped up by Christmas, so, let’s say bailed until eleven o’clock on 11 December – back here at Guildford police station.’ I was stunned. Oh, you’re confident of yourself, mate. Think you’ll get this cracked in a couple of months? You’re about to open up a real can of Balkan worms.