Autumn 1992. An unreliable girl I knew in Prague introduced me to Krunoslav, telling me that he was a mournful Bosnian with suicidal tendencies. I met him outside the American Hospitality Center on a rainy night in August where I sat nursing my bleeding temple which I had gashed on a beam in an alley while maneuvering in the dark. He was very young looking and very thin. His straight black hair was oiled and flattened on his narrow head in a low side part like a child’s on Sunday morning. He spoke like a pacifist and seemed depressed but his eyes brightened when I told him I was going to Bosnia and he practically volunteered to go with me and act as my interpreter.

Because the girl was unreliable, because Krunoslav had been described as suicidal and seemed too eager to take me to the front lines of a brutal war where men were dying everyday, and, I suppose, be- cause he was only twenty years old, I was hesitant to use him as an interpreter. If he was suicidal, he would have ample opportunity to get himself killed at the front. A very bad prospect for me since I could not speak a word of Serbo-Croatian.

But I had staked everything on seeing the fighting first hand, and Krunoslav was affordable and eager, so we agreed to make a go of it. I would pay for his cigarettes, liquor, food and any other travel expenses, and he would be my interpreter. We planned to meet in Zagreb, where he was living at the time.

Two weeks later I stepped off the train and into the capital of Croatia. I caught a taxi from the station to the address he had given me. I wasn’t quite sure he’d really be there, but there he was. I found him prepared to go; he’d even gotten himself a flak jacket.

I checked in with the U.S. Embassy and the Foreign Press Bureau. I secured United Nations Protective Force (UNPROFOR) credentials and we surveyed our options.

The Croatian Ministry of Defence told us that foreign journalists are not being granted access to the front through Croat lines. There was the possibility of going to Split on the Adriatic Coast and hooking up with journalists who have armored cars and making the trek to Sarajevo as their tag-alongs. It seemed to me that there was a glut of journalists taking that route. Krunoslav and I headed east. It would be weeks before we made it to the front, but wherever we travelled the menace of war was evident. Even in Zagreb conditions were tainted by the dread and danger of war.

It was in Zagreb that we drank beers with P.J. O’Rourke in the Ban Cafe; where later the same evening we were shot at twice by a drunk outside a clip joint; where we met the Croatian Fascist leader, Dobroslav Paraga, in a cemetery dotted with fresh mounds of raw earth; and where we met refugees who told of rape and torture in the Serbian prison camps.

From Zagreb we drifted out into the countryside, skirting the edges of the shooting war. We went to Osijek, a heavily battered town on the Drava River, where I came to love a nineteen year-old girl named Sneziana. She’d spent three months hiding in a crowded cellar, her young friends lying dead on the street un- buried because of the shelling. The worst of it, she said, was not being able to wash herself.

We visited the regional hospital in Vinkovcy that the Serbians had hit with over four thousand shells. There we saw the injured and maimed soldiers and civilians in the basement where they kept the hospital running throughout the shelling.

We spent the night on a farm near Bebina Greda, where Serb paramilitary units were attacking the Croat lines a scant three or four kilometers away. Lying awake all night, I listened to the shouts and shooting and clanging of artillery. Someone tried to pry loose the boards over the windows of the room I was in. I heard gunmetal scraping against the wall and lay there trying not even to breathe, hoping also Krunoslav wouldn’t rouse or snore—afraid if he did the man might fire into the room or toss in a grenade. But for some reason, the man abruptly stopped and I heard him running away.

We traveled to Slavonski Brod, where we crept along the bank of the Sava River trying to watch the ethnic cleansing take place in the recently defeated Bosnian sister city on the opposite bank, Bosanski Brod. Unable to see much from the light cover along the bank we climbed the stairs of a shell-hammered apartment building. We stood on the roof for hours watching the Serbians go about their business and we received intermittent sniper fire that twice smacked the face of the building beneath our feet. We repeatedly heard screams and the order, “Come out without weapons!”

Atop this building we met a Japanese journalist and an American who said he worked for the Atlantic News Service. With the ANS journalist accompanying us we proceeded that evening by bus (an old model with a bullet hole through the driver’s side windshield) to Zupanja. The city was blacked out when we arrived and the Serbians were tossing shells into the darkness from ten miles away across the river. A pungent fiery smell permeated the air, like the entire city was burning. We checked into the Hotel Jelen and headed out into the night without local escort, feeling our way around the dark city, working toward the Sava, passing houses with bunkers in their front yards, walking toward the sound of gunfire. We could see the flashbulb explosions lighting the sky in the distance. The shooting seemed a lot closer than ten miles. The ANS guy had a microcassette recorder, trying to build a we-are-in-the-war-zone dialogue, saying things like, “Is that a mine? I think it’s a mine,” while pointing to an aluminum can on the side of the road.

A cigarette controversy split us up. Krunoslav wanted to light a smoke and the ANS guy ordered him not to. They argued about it with me in the middle, ANS afraid a sniper would spot us, Kruno saying the snipers were across the River. Kruno lit the cigarette and the ANS guy started back alone, telling us we were both crazy and going to get killed.

Krunoslav and I were halted by Croatian sentries near the River. There is nothing happening here they told us, just a few random shells, the fighting is several kilometers away, on the other side. They said we could not cross with the military. They would be happy to let us go but they had orders. We talked with them for some time, and while we were talking a flare, presumably an artillery marker, floated softly over our heads, illuminating the faces of the soldiers clearly. No shell followed and the soldiers laughed at the Serbs, belittling their ability to shoot. Then we saw the ANS guy walking toward us, the little red light on his cassette recorder clearly visible in the dark.

After two days scouting around Zupanja, talking to soldiers on leave who ate and drank in the hotel lobby during the day and in a bar lit only by candleflame at night, Krunoslav and I chanced one of two little wooden civilian ferry boats and crossed into Bosnia with the help of a seventeen-year old Bosnian fighter and his older friend, an alcoholic with a bum leg who told wonderful stories of the fighting he’s never done.

ORASJE. NE BOSNIA.

In Bosnia we keep a low profile. Here, we experience the real shelling: no discernible pattern and it continues throughout the day in varying levels of intensity.

We move around the village and talk with soldiers, never knowing which one will turn us in, have us immediately kicked out, or worse. Max, the seventeen year-old who helped us cross the river, guides us around.

The first thing we saw was a long procession of tractors and loaded-down wagons waiting for the ferry out of Bosnia. The village is a typical East European hamlet of white stucco houses with red-tile rooftops and a few solemn gray tenement buildings reaching twelve or thirteen stories. In the small business area, what’s left of it, there are a few modern fabrications and they look strangely out of place. Some are barricaded with thick hewn tree trunks propped against their facades. Mostly, there are the white houses with dead gardens and tin-roofed tractor sheds and outhouses around them. Their walls are pocked and punctured by shrapnel and grayed by shell dust, and a considerable number of the rooftops are blown away. Families remain, however, vowing never to leave, but some of them leave ev- eryday. They fear a massive, final Serbian thrust that would overrun the area and drive us all into the River.

There are the ever-present war zone rumors of something big about to go down. The local consensus leans toward a Bosnian break-out offensive that would serve multiple purposes. The most important to the soldiers would be the liberation of several occupied villages, where most of them have lived all of their lives. Secondly, the operation, if successful, could cut the vital Serb supply corridor that runs from Belgrade to Banja Luka. Finally, the Bosnians would like to establish their own corridor. Surrounded and starving Bosnians in three towns, Brcko, Gradacac, and Tuzla, could be reached. (These towns have since been minimally relieved by UN convoys and airdrop; they have become the last Bosnian outposts in the region.)

“Bosnians,” here, refers to Croats and Muslims fighting together against the Serbs. Amidst the incongruity of ex-Yugoslavia, the Croats and Muslims also fight each other, in other regions where their alliance has disintegrated into bitter conflict—due to a Croat land grab encouraged by the Vance-Owen Plan to partition Bosnia.

Additional troops have been arriving daily for two weeks now. I can’t say they are fresh because they have been defeated elsewhere, some in Bosanski Brod. For some time, I am told, there has been talk of this major offensive. Most of the people I meet profess to believe the talk, rationally or not, because it represents hope for a return to their homes. And these new faces fuel this hope. The Bosnians have been pinned down here since May by Serb forces with heavier weapons and air support. During this time they have pushed the lines forward a couple of miles, fending off several Serbian assaults.

The soldiers are very friendly. They talk to us without caring whose permission we have to be here. They say they want their story told in America. They want and need American help but not necessarily the sort of help quick-study Americans think.

“We don’t need your soldiers,” they tell me. “We have enough fighters. We need big guns—heavy weapons. Lift the arms embargo. Enforce your no fly zone. Or give us air support. There is no need to bog down here. We fight for ourselves but they have all the weapons.”

They talk of cutting the Serbian supply corridor. They do not mention taking Belgrade—about one hundred miles a way—as I expected. Mostly, they talk passionately, almost dreamily, of taking back their homes. I say dreamily because from all accounts the homes have been destroyed.

I am shown hand-drawn maps. “That is the village where I was born. Where I lived until last May. My house was destroyed. But it is my land. It is all I have in this world. I can rebuild my house. When we get back there, the war is over for me.”

There are the gung-ho types, as hardcore as any you’d want to meet or hear about. They want to take back what was taken and defend it. Sounds too idealistic or nice, perhaps, coming from these nail-tough soldiers who have on occasion returned from the front with Serbian ears. It is more understandable when you have seen the exodus of women and children and some old men on tractors, carrying with them a prized pig and all of the possessions they can pile on a rickety old farm wagon.

In this immediate area, the people are not starving. It is an agricultural region and the military ferries Western aid from Croatia across the River. Their backs are to the River but the River is their lifeline. There are a few pigs left for roasting, held in reserve for special occasions. “When we take back Vidovice there will be big celebration. Huge. We will roast a dozen pigs. It will be like you have never seen,” says a refugee from the village.

We eat with the soldiers. The food is not so bad, even if it is the same every day: soupy beans and infrequent sauerkraut for lunch and a thick beef stew at dinner. Considering that in those encircled towns of Brcko, Gradacac, and Tuzla the cousins of these moderately fed Bosnians are starving, it is ridiculous to complain.

Max Baotich takes us down the street to show us the destruction of a block by an airplane bomb. He refers to it as a “pig” bomb. A half dozen houses have been effectively destroyed. All others within sight are damaged.

We spend the rest of the afternoon with a Muslim family, having decided to join them after noticing them drinking coffee around a folding table on the sidewalk. They eat pork, drink plum brandy and bear no resemblance to the Middle Eastern Muslims we see on television in America. The patriarch among them is a crusty old character named Machka. In the Croatian language Machka means cat. He tells us that he is very sorry for Americans. “Things are very bad here,” he grants us. “But it must be much worse in America. You are not even at war. Yet it is obvious you have no cows. For you only send us powdered milk.” The Cat drinks off another glass of brandy and contradicts the joke, saying he would come to America tomorrow if he’d had the foresight to start saving up for an airline ticket ten years ago. He asks me to place an ad for him in “the Miami Beach newspaper.” He wants to exchange his home in Orasje for a bathroom on Miami Beach. “Straight up, no cash involved.” And his house is a nice two-story job with only three evident problems. The windows are blown out, there is a shell hole in the roof the size of a small Ford and, as we speak, Serbian artillery is pounding the area.

The bomb shelter is not far from here. The shelling is heavier today because (the Cat is convinced) “our offensive is about to begin. We are firing everything we have and they are firing back two-fold.” People are killed by the shelling almost everyday, either caught out in the open or the unlucky victims of a lucky shot direct hit on a building. They ask us if we want to go to the “safer” place. We have been in the shelter before. It does not seem to offer much security. It is ground level and not as well sandbagged as many of the private homes. I feel as safe here as I would in the shelter. A direct hit and the shelter would quickly disintegrate into a crypt. I tell them this and they agree.

 

MAHALA FRONT.

It is very cold this morning. We have come to one of the command posts, having gotten brave in the light of such friendliness cast on us by the soldiers. Several of them have suggested we approach Juro Jurich.

We wait outside the unimpressive post, a requisitioned farm house. A guard takes my UNPROFOR press credentials inside to show the Commander. Three guards not nearly so friendly as the others we’ve met stand with us. They have nothing to say and stand in a semi-circle as if to prevent our making any sudden move. It is one of those moments when you question why you are really here.

Jurich comes outside. He has the concrete face of Sgt. Rock and the long uncombed hair of Geronimo. He looks us over, stares at the press card for a minute, invites us in to the situation room.

He sits at one end of a dining room table that is covered with a military map of the region. He confers in whispers with his aide. We sit at the table in silence for a long time.

“So you want to go to the front?” he finally asks me through Krunoslav.

“Yes,” I answer as firmly as possible.

He asks me which newspaper I represent. I tell him I am free-lance; that I’m working for myself. He asks me why I would come here when I didn’t have to. I tell him that I want to see firsthand what is happening here and write about it in America.

He shakes his head, asking us if we have ever been in combat before, if we know how dangerous it is. I answer no to the first question, yes to the second.

He tells us there is a better than fifty percent chance we won’t come back. I do not believe the odds are that bad. I tell him it doesn’t matter. We still want to go, if he will allow us.

A courier brings in a dispatch. Jurich reads it without changing his facial expression.

“What informations do you want?” he asks. I figure he is trying to decide what to do with us.

Jurich is the commander of the 3rd Battalion of the 106th Brigade of the HVO, the Bosnian-Croat Army. He is not from Bosnia. He is from Varazdin, near the Hungarian border of Croatia. Before the war he was the technical manager of a printing press in Zagreb and a Major in the reserve of the JNA (Yugoslav National Army). He fought as a guerrilla and later as a commander against the Serbs when they “invaded” Croatia and he fights now in Bosnia, because he realizes “that if they are not stopped now the fighting will come to Croatia again.”

The battalions are composed of “about 1050 people.” He does not confirm or deny reports that the total Bosnian troop strength in the area is between 5000 and 7000. Another courier comes in, accompanied by an older officer who looks at us cautiously before speaking with Jurich.

When they leave he gets up and says, “Let’s go.” With that simple command we stand up and go forward, into the breach.

On the way out he asks about my green bandana. I reply that I spent yesterday with a Muslim family. Green is the symbolic Muslim color here. He points to a green patch on his fatigues. “Solidarity,” he says, in English. Jurich is Catholic.

Five of us pile into an old Toyota. They do not have enough jeeps here to look official all of the time. Jurich and his aide sit up front. Max and Krunoslav sit squeezed on either side of me in back. Max carries a Spaagen machine gun. I am holding the aide’s AK-47. Jurich holds his Croatian-produced sniper rifle that is almost too long to fit in the car.

The muddy road cuts through a field of dead corn stalks. We drive fast, the car bouncing over the road. It is misting rain and shells have been falling all morning. The weather conditions change very little from day to day.

Jurich confirms that they are preparing an offensive. He says no more than that. We park the car a hundred meters from the edge of the gray forest. Sporadic machine-gun fire bops through the trees.

We walk at a brisk pace into the woods along a foot trail cut deep with boot prints in the mud. It is hard to maintain footing. It would help if I had on boots. As it is, I am wearing dirty bucks and khaki pants, a navy cotton shirt and leather bomber jacket.

We enter the trench and encounter soldiers who are only slightly hunkered down and not firing back. “We have scouts operating between the trenches,” the Commander’s aide tells us as we continue walking. The soldiers casually wield their weapons. Smoking cigarettes, greeting us as we pass. There is no snapping to attention or rigid saluting as the Commander passes them. It is more like they are happy to see him and the protocol discipline is unnecessary.

Word spreads that I am an American. I shake a few hands and nod to the soldiers who look at me expectantly. The clothes I have on give the impression that I am an important observer instead of an eager, slightly overdressed, writer.

The troops do not literally duck as often as I expected. When they do it is more of a casual stoop and this is disturbing because the trench is not nearly so deep as it appears in war movies. Standing up straight there is cover in places, brush clumps and some sandbags on the trench lip—in other stretches you are completely exposed and the gunners across the pasture will open up, bop bop bop bop bop, and you can tell you’re being shot at, and I mean really feel the passing whispering bullets until you are doubled-over out of sight, still hearing them slash and smash things overhead and beyond. The veteran troops will pass these open areas bolt upright. To me, they seem foolishly exposed. To them, it is the daily routine of their lives.

The shells come in at a steady pace. They range in size from small grenades to large tank and artillery rounds. The large shells make that trademark whistling sound. The small rounds do not.

They land fore and aft of our muddy, breast-high trench. Rarely, we are told, do the shells actually land within the five-foot wide span. A small comfort. The shock waves rock our rib cages and our eardrums are filled with a continuous ringing. The violent smell hangs on the mist and smoke in the air.

The Commander’s aide points out that the Serbian front lines are a few hundred meters away. He also reminds me with a smile that as a foreign journalist, I am worth five hundred dollars as bounty to a Serb sniper.

We leave the trench and move forward toward the Serbians. Nothing is said. The Commander walks fast ahead of us. Three other soldiers have joined our original group of five. Just in front of the trench several machine guns open up. A row of scarred trees provides the only semblance of cover. We don’t really use it. The soldiers in front of us stoop a little and quicken their pace. A whistling shell cruises overhead. It erupts, feels like it almost got us, and I am tightened inside by a desire to hit the ground. A soldier behind me grins when I look back. The soldiers in front keep moving. We follow, for we are the ones who asked to be brought here.

After walking the length of a football field we cut to the right behind a long row of brush and trees. The Serb gunners keep firing bursts in our direction. Another shell lands well behind us. Several more follow it in rapid progression. Another, landing very close, causes a spray of dirt to shower us. One of the soldiers flinches perceptibly and I squat to the ground, using one hand to steady myself. From this level I establish eye contact with Krunoslav. He lies flat on his belly, his head cocked to the side, looking at me. He doesn’t look suicidal at all.

The forward Serbian positions are now just over a hundred meters away through the forest in front of us.

The Commander says nothing. He stands in the midst of thick undergrowth, sighting through the scope of his sniper rifle. He is dead serious, moving the barrel of the rifle and sighting methodically, his long hair pulled back over his ears.

His aide hands me a pistol. I look at it, nod to him and stick the pistol in my jacket pocket.

One of the soldiers is dispatched back to the trench.

“He’s going back to get the RPG,” Krunoslav tells me, his teeth clattering in the stiff morning chill. “They are blowing up a bunker over there.”

He and the Commander’s aide exchange words. Krunoslav turns to me. “He says do you want to go back to the trench? He says we probably should. It is very dangerous now.”

“Do you want to go back?” I ask.

“As you like,” he says. He has picked up this saying from one of the soldiers and I notice he has been wearing it out.

“Then tell him we’ll stay,” I reply half-heartedly.

• • •

The soldier comes jogging back from the rear, accompanied by two others, one of them a tall skinny guy wearing a blue watchcap. The soldier wearing the watchcap carries the RPG, a Russian built bazooka-style weapon, skinny like him, with the firing end flared out like a Pilgrim’s blunderbuss. The Soldiers pull out binoculars and join the Commander. I move over and stand behind them. The other soldiers around us move about, pointing their guns. I cannot really see anything of the Serbs from where I stand until one of the soldiers hands me a pair of field glasses. I can make out a mound of dirt and logs with brush piled around. It looks similar to the bunkers we saw in front of Croatian houses back in Zupanja. A Serb moves in front of the bunker, looks askance in our direction and disappears into the black hole of the entrance.

The Commander’s aide ushers me into heavier cover.

The soldier fires the RPG and all pretenses of observing movements and soaking in the realities of war cease. The field explodes into an intense firefight. I stand with my back against a thick tree. I take out the little pistol and hold it, chambering a cartridge, wondering if they are coming at us or just shooting, gripped by the heavy pumping adrenaline rush of fear. The noise rages and in it I can hear clips slammed into place. The Bosnians in back of us lob mortar rounds over our heads. The shooting tapers into measured bursts.

Enthusiasm sweeps over our group. The soldier in the watchcap has hit the target. Jurich is sighting with the sniper rifle again. Two Serbians have now taken up positions in front of the bunker.

“Juro’s got a Chetnik in the scope,” someone says in a low voice.

I am motioned over, and position myself beside him. With the binoculars I can see one of them crouched in front of the smoking mound of earth and wood, his gun ready. He has a long beard. Another Serbian is moving around behind him, pulling something from the remnants of the bunker. As quickly as I find them the sniper rifle roars and the front man in the frame of my binoculars is thrown backwards, a foot rearing up and I hear the bolt action and the rifle roars again and this time I don’t see anything. The Serbs we cannot see open up on us and I crouch and hear the bolt and the singular loud roar of the sniper rifle several more times.

Signals are made. Jurich reloads. He and two of the soldiers move forward, crouched and running.

The aide leads us back to the trench jogging, running. We stick close to the tree line. The soldiers in the trench are standing in anticipation.

Some of the soldiers pat me on the shoulder, as if we are comrades. I listen intently to the pounding in my chest and feel a weird sort of elation, triumphant and encouraging. Grenades explode successively, cleaving and popping in the treetops off to the right. A stray bullet zings, caught in a downward spiral around a trunk.

In the dark musty dugout of a .30 caliber machine-gun emplacement we learn from the grey-haired commander of one hundred and fifty of Jurich’s troops that the real offensive has not begun but will within the next few days. The operations this morning are among the final preparations, knocking out bunkers and surveying the points of strength and weakness in the Serbian lines. Similar operations are taking place along the entire length of the Bosnian front line.

Ahead of our relative sanctuary they are shooting like hell. I think of Jurich and the others still out there.

The soldier who mans the .30 caliber offers me a cracked walnut.

“It’s good for the nerves,” he says with a laugh. I take out my pocket knife and start to pick out the pieces. He gives me a handful to crack for myself. We light cigarettes, snap some pictures.

 

Something has happened close by. A group is gathered near the lone trench mortar emplacement forty or fifty feet away squatting. Walking stooped over in the rain I slowly approach the crowd that has fallen silent. I can see someone lying on his back, his head resting in the lap of another. The lap of the crying man holding him is soaked with blood. A blond-haired soldier who only a short while ago had patted me on the back has been struck in the head. He lies quite still, his mouth open wide, slack-jawed. The unquiet realities of where we are again settle over me, brutally pushing away one brief moment of distraction.

 

NEAR DARK.

Jurich returned to the trench a few minutes ago, having beaten what he called an “heroic retreat” followed by heavy incoming fire and for the first time the Bosnians alongside us opened up with “everything they had.” Smiling and upbeat until he was notified that a man had been killed, he quickly returns to the stony-faced-all-business soldier of the days’ early hours. He issues some orders and heads forward once again. His aide signals to us. I once again fall in with the group, again not knowing where we are headed or the purpose.

We snake along the row of trees. The guns are uncharacteristically silent. It turns out we are taking a different route back to our car. The day is ending and the long hours suddenly seem to have been minutes. We cut to the right behind the thick, thinning, now thick again, brush from where Jurich killed the two Serbians this morning. We learn happened after we were hastened back to the trench. Jurich and the others had attempted to collect weapons from the downed Serbs. They killed or wounded three more Serbs during the afternoon skirmishing. None of the commandos were hit but they were unable to collect the weapons. It sounds like a win for the Bosnians until you recall the dead blond soldier and hear that a shell has landed in the trench a quarter of a mile east of our position, killing one and wounding two.

We trek on, entering an old farm road with large anti-tank mines on the opposite side, between us and the Serbs. The rain has picked up and we are all soaked as we trudge along the grass-patched road. I notice Jurich’s aide and another soldier in front walking in a crisscross, with Krunoslav directly behind them, following their twisted, awkwardly stepping path. I look down, freezing and staring at the buried anti-personnel mines with only their flat green tops visible through the dead grass and weeds partly concealing them. I look over my shoulder at Jurich, who grins at me. I take a tentative step, pausing until he puts a hand on my shoulder and points at a clear spot. With him pointing and holding my shoulder I walk through. The quickened passing of time grinds into surrealistic slow motion. The minefield is small, covering at most twenty yards.

 

THE OLD TOYOTA IN SIGHT.

Somehow at this moment it doesn’t seem right to be leaving. It is like being twelve again and heading to the house after fighting pitched battles against the Vietnamese across the cow pasture behind my great-uncle’s house, leaving behind imaginary comrades to hold the line. Today I feel a lingering regret at leaving these very real young men behind, holding this very real front line, holding out in anticipation of their long-awaited offensive.

“So what do you think of the front?” Jurich asks, holding the seat back forward so I can climb into the car.

“I think...that I just walked through a minefield and I did not like it. But now that I am through it, I feel...pretty goddamned good.”

• • •

In the kitchen of the Command Post a pretty staff clerk whom we did not see this morning serves us coffee. Jurich says something to the effect of, “She’s built like a brick shithouse, no?” I can only agree.

Jurich’s aide leans over, drying his drenched hair in front of the small electric space heater sitting on the counter top. Reports of the day’s events around the area roll in by courier. Jurich chooses not to share this information with us.

We learn that Jurich has a wife and a nine year-old son; that he would like to hang out in Malibu for a while but wouldn’t want to live there; that, like many people here, he doesn’t long for American troops to suddenly appear and save the day. “Americans wouldn’t understand the type of fighting that goes on here,” he says, sounding like a student of the Vietnam war. “The problem,” he says, waving an Opatija cigarette, “is the quality of the equipment. Their Serb artillery aimed at the villages. The tanks. We have enough people, small arms here. We don’t have the heavy weapons. A .30 caliber is useless against their tanks. With the right weapons, we could bring an end to the fighting. Without them, there will be no peaceful solution. The Serbs will not get tired and quit killing us. And we will not let them take everything we have. We will all die first. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool.”

Jurich does not espouse any grand illusions about the impending attack. “It will be a start. All we can do. We will see how it goes.” He speaks with the authority of a man who has been through it all before. 

 

ORASJE.

Word of the offensive is no longer questioned on the street. The speculation now centers on when it will start. There is a flurry of activity. Lorries seem to have materialized out of nowhere, shuttling ammunition and singing, confident troops in every direction. Old men are cleaning hunting rifles, though they will not be part of the attack. They are getting ready to return to their villages once the attack has shoved the enemy from their occupied homes.

Quietly we are ushered to a feast, a last supper, if you will. At 4:00 A.M. tomorrow the attack will begin. Every able soldier will report. We drink beer and Sljivovica, a plum brandy, by candlelight in a long building that is a cross between a hunting lodge and the fellowship hall of an old church. Two pigs are roasted outside.

There is a Bosnian battle cry that I have learned: “Za Dom.” It means, “For the home,” and calls forth a robust, “Spremne!” which means, “Ready!”

I stand up and say, “Za Dom!” and the mood ap- proaches frenzy as the soldiers get to their feet, saluting with their bottles, shouting, “Spremne!" cheering and slapping my shoulders.

For the people here it is a holocaust, a genocide the world has once again failed to stop in its infant stages; a military conflict the world has once again confronted with harsh words and little else, hoping the perpetrators will listen to reason in the face of pleas for human rights—a failed policy of the past that historians have labeled appeasement; a policy that is without question failing here, as the Serbs have taken thirty percent of Croatia, seventy percent of Bosnia, and have proceeded to brutally eliminate all non-Serbs from the land they have taken—all without punishment beyond that inflicted by these battered but undefeated Croatians and Muslims and an embargo that merely serves to keep the balance of power tilted heavily toward the Serbian aggressors. For the people here, outgunned and under siege, they are their own last best hope. In a few hours they will throw themselves and their hope against the Serbian lines.

 

Through the night we sit talking with Mikell in the apartment where we have been sleeping, an abandoned dwelling on the second floor of an old stone building. Mikell is our host and has replaced Max Baotich as our guide. He is a twenty-five year old fighter whose hand was severely injured during a Serbian attack forty-five days ago. Thirty others in his company were hit the same day. He is not sure if he will ever have any use of the hand again, he tells us. “Luckily,” he adds, “It is my left hand.”

When the war started he was studying at the University in Osijek. His village, Jenjic, occupied and ethnically cleansed by the Serbs, lies only a few kilometers behind their front lines. He is a slight man with jet black hair who looks more like a boy of eighteen until you look into his eyes. Considering his injury he does not seem bitter. He does not drone on and on about his wound and about what he’d do if he were able, like others I’ve met.

 

Big Berthas have opened up from across the river behind us, Mikell tells me. The Croatian Nationals have two of them. I’d heard this, but not seen them. They fire the 203mm cannons only when Serbian shells are landing in Zupanja.

 

War in the present tense is such a difficult thing to grasp that individuals caught in its midst constantly seek parallels to the past. Hence the reference to the World War One nickname for the heaviest artillery pieces. Serbian atrocities parallel those of the Waffen SS. Milosevic has become Hitler. Back in Slavonski Brod the staffer in the press office spoke of a “well-organized” Serbian Fifth Column working the shadows of the shell-shocked river town.

While we were drinking brandy with a Bosnian Croat family several evenings ago the term fifth column had been tossed about. A Serbian, married to one of three Croat sisters who sat on the couch grinding coffee with a little hand-held grinder, had been pointed out as the sole member of the Serbian fifth column here in Orasje. He quickly fired back drunkenly that he was, in fact, head of the ultra-secret Seventh column, and that we would all have to be shot, now that his identity had been compromised.

“Is there a Serbian Fifth Column operating here?” I ask Mikell with Krunoslav’s assistance.

He laughs, maintaining his chain smoker’s loose grip on the Crotia cigarette, shaking his head.

 

We try to sleep while waiting for the offensive to start. There are two rooms in the apartment. In the main room there is a fold-out couch and two reclining chairs. At one end of the couch lies Mikell’s recently unused combat gear. An AK-47 had been propped in the corner until yesterday, when another soldier came for it. There is even a broken television that sometimes comes on like a poltergeist, broadcasting Serbian news reports and music videos into our quarters. A jam box sits in repose on the coffee table, beside a scratched, faded chessboard. The jam box had been our link to news from Croatia until it burned out during one of the power surges. In the other room there is part of a sectional sofa. I sleep there, in my clothes. On the floor are two single mattresses. Krunoslav sleeps on one of them. In my own effort at assimilation I recall the scene from The Godfather when Clemenza tells Michael Corleone that, “Sonny’s gone to the mattresses.” A small sign that there will be no peaceful settlement here.

 

At 3:45 in the morning two of the young soldiers from the feast last night stop by on their way to the front. Mikell lights a couple of fresh candles and gives the soldiers some cigarettes. We sit and smoke and try to give them a “go kick some ass” pep talk. They are in that grimly excited frame of mind, hand grenades hanging on their chest straps, ammo clips bulging in the utility pockets of their bdu’s. In spite of their drinking late yesterday, they are fresh-faced and clear-eyed, already in the grasp of the ultimate hangover cure.

They say nothing memorable, as departing would-be heroes are supposed to; they simply leave as calmly as they came, chins up, rifles slung.

Mikell cannot hide his disappointment. Perhaps it is only a physical pain flaring up, I think, as he sits on the edge of the couch-bed, rubbing the awkward thick cast on his left hand with his head bent forward in the candlelight. I suggest a game of chess, in lieu of anything else to do, with the thought of going back to sleep seeming ludicrous. We play, saying nothing, until sunrise.

The explosions we have heard since the all-night barrage in both directions began in earnest are punctuated by rifles and machine guns speaking to each other across the no man’s land between the trenches. Old trucks with their engines straining roar past the window. The sound of heavy boots on the stairs gives us  a start.

One of the soldiers who had stopped by earlier comes in, dejection and uncertainty drawing his face. He starts to talk to Mikell. They converse rapidly. Anxious, I rouse Krunoslav from his sleep.

Only half the soldiers have been taken forward from the staging area. The soldier does not know what it means. Maybe the attack has been scaled back or called off. Or maybe the Serbs have launched the preemptive assault that many feared. No one knows what is happening. All that is known is that half the soldiers have been sent back to the village, to wait for orders.

It sounds like the typical hurry-up and wait of military operations, I tell them. No need to be disappointed yet. They accept this as they should—as the meaningless speculation of an armchair observer. In fact, I am wondering what will happen and what to do about it if the Serbians have indeed surged toward the un-bridged river.

 

10:00 A.M.

We know no more than we did at dawn. Loaded-down trucks sail past as we walk around the otherwise deserted village streets, ducking inside the sandbagged facades of battered apartment buildings and houses as the shells drone into the area. Mikell expresses concern that we are foolishly exposed.

We end up on the fifth floor of what Mikell refers to as a secure building. A dislocated family from Vidovice lives here. Vidovice is six kilometers east of Orasje, near Mikell’s home of Jenjic. Both villages could be liberated if the attack succeeds.

Anto Matanovic is the head of the family. He pours brandy while his wife prepares coffee. We sit around an oak-framed glass-topped coffee table in the crowded living room, a transistor radio humming on the middle shelf of an entertainment center they could have bought at a local Wal-Mart. Matanovic speaks of the fall of Vidovice.

The fighting started on April 28, 1992. The village collapsed on May 1st. He escaped with his family before the collapse, but two hundred and fifty of the defenders had to cross the River to get out, some by raft, some swimming. He points to his oldest son, named Paki, who sits reared back in a straight chair, wearing camo pants, a black sweater and a black skull cap, eyeing us sullenly. “Paki was one of the last out. And he has been fighting since. He was wounded some weeks ago by an anti-aircraft clustering round. Show them,” he says, before I can ask if he actually swam the River.

Paki pulls up the sweater and shows us the unbandaged purple disfigurement over his left shoulder blade. “It’s nothing,” he says.

His father says, “He thinks it is nothing. He wants to be fighting today. But I say no. He can barely use his arm.”

The kid raises his arm, frowning, to show he can use it. His father dismisses the defiance and turns to me.

“Have you been to Serbia? Have you seen the concentration camps?”

“No, I haven’t, but I hope to,” I tell him.

His excitement shows.

I prod Krunoslav to tell me what he is saying before he finishes.

“He says, ‘Would you like to interview someone who was held prisoner in one of the camps?”’

 

Paki has gone to fetch a survivor of one of the Serbian prison camps. Around 1:00 P.M. those soldiers who were sent back this morning are called forward. A clamor rolls through the village. The attack is underway and going well. At 2:05 we hear that they have punched through at Lepnice. West of there, Juro Jurich’s battalion has driven the Serbian center backwards more than a kilometer. So far, there is no sign of a Serbian counterattack.

Old Matanovic does a little dance and fills everyone’s shot glass. Lepnice is one kilometer from Vidovice. “We may be home by sundown,” he tells everyone.

 

I expect the former prisoner to be emaciated. Instead he is a sturdy man in his mid-fifties with a bushy moustache who looks something like Jim Harrison, the American writer. Adam Knezevic was a farmer before the war, raising corn and melons and pasturing ten cows on twenty-five acres of land. He also collected milk daily from his neighbors, some of them Serbs, for sale to a Croatian dairy in Zupanja. He started collecting milk at 6:00 A.M. and returned home at noon to wait for the truck from Croatia to pick-up the day’s quantity. At 4:30 P.M. on April 28th the truck from Croatia had not arrived. The war in other regions of Bosnia had begun but residents of Vidovice and the surrounding area still believed that they would be able to stay out of the conflict. When someone behind him said, “Raise your hands,” Knezevic thought it was children playing. He turned laughing and saw two men in uniform, one of whom he knew and considered a friend, aiming rifles at his head.

Without knowing what happened to his family he was taken to Pelagicevo. He was thrown into a room that measured about sixteen square meters. By the end of the first day seventeen others had been thrown in with him, one of whom had been wounded in the stomach and chest. There was no toilet in the room, not even a hole in the floor and they were not allowed trips to the outhouse.

The first three days they were slapped and beaten with rubber truncheons. They thought this was the torture. Then the Serbs began to remove their teeth with pliers. “I had eight good teeth and they removed them all,” Knezevic says.

After eleven days the Serbians took the wounded man and another outside and killed them. Other prisoners were taken away blindfolded and handcuffed. He says that he doesn’t know what happened to them.

The number of prisoners in the room fluctuated between thirteen and twenty-two. There was usually one loaf of bread for the lot of them, never more than two.

The Serbians led Knezevic out one day and told him he was about to be shot. His captors fired above and beside his head. On five different occasions they played this game. The fifth time one of the bullets nicked his ear. He shows me his ear flap, with a dime sized chunk missing.

Knezevic’s jaw was broken during the torture and re-broken after it had begun to heal. The big man drops his voice and levels a gaze on us, explaining that he and the other prisoners were forced to have sexual intercourse. He tells us that even fathers and sons were degraded in this way, and that if the prisoners could not perform, they were hit repeatedly in the groin. “I thought I’d never be of any use again. But...” He pauses for a long time, “Everything heals.”

He weighed 102 kilos the day he was captured. He was held at Pelagicevo for two months and two days. He was then taken to Bosanski Samac along with one hundred and thirty-five others to recuperate. They were to be exchanged for a like number of Serbian prisoners. For six weeks they were given medical attention and not beaten and reasonably fed. The day before the exchange was to be completed the Serbs decided to keep thirty-four of the younger prisoners, and they shot one of them. No reason was disclosed. Knezevic and one hundred others were taken to Lipovac on August 15. That afternoon he was free. He was reunited with his family, which had escaped to Orasje. He weighed 60 kilos.

That was two and a half months ago. He has regained his health and now, living here in Orasje with his family, he visits the Serbian prisoners several times a week, taking them cigarettes.

• • •

The skies have turned grey once again. It’s flooding outside. Paki sits on the balcony, cleaning his rifle, pausing to wipe the wind-blown rain from his lightly pimpled cheeks. He eyes us suspiciously, having asked earlier why we weren’t covering the attack. Our answer, that even our friends had told us we absolutely could not go, had not satisfied him. “I could take you,” he said, looking to his father and trailing off toward the balcony when his father signaled him an emphatic no.

It is frustrating, sitting here while the fierce fighting rages a few miles away; sitting here in perhaps as much danger from the shelling leveled on the village as we would be were we attached to an advancing unit. Adam Knezevic’s story of Serbian methods has renewed the urges inside to take up this fight, a foreign, suddenly idealistic, great cause to me. Krunoslav whispered to me as an aside during Adam’s rendering, “Perhaps I’ll stay here and join the army, goddamnit.” I knew exactly how he felt.

At first we think the whining distant noise is the general alert siren cranking up. Then we hear a vehicle approaching, sloshing up the street, its horn bleating a staccato summons. The vehicle stops on the street below. Someone, still working the horn, is shouting up to Paki. Old Mastanovic rushes to the balcony, starts hollering, now leans back inside, clinging to the sliding glass partition, “They are street fighting in Vidovice.”

Paki’s AK-47 explodes into an automatic burst from the balcony. One of his little brothers quickly gathers a handful of banana clips from the next room and carries them to the balcony. Matanovic takes the AK and fires a happy burst of his own, giving the rifle back to this son and shuffling, almost moonwalking into the den.

Knezevic sits calmly on the couch, waving off Matanovic as he starts to fill his brandy glass. “This is good. But they shouldn’t waste the ammunition,” he says to me.

“We are going home,” Matanovic shouts at his wife, who remains quiet, sitting in her straight chair at the end of the couch, still working the little silver handle of her coffee grinder.

• • •

I am holding an AK-47 around midnight, in the back seat of a speeding Yugo with police markings. It is pitch dark and raining hard. The driver is all over the road. The sky ahead is illuminated regularly by shell bursts that we cannot hear because of the noise of the engine and the rain.

The young policeman driving the car so fast and recklessly had happened along and on hearing I was a journalist and friend of Knezevic offered to take us to the forward command, directly behind the advancing troops, boasting that he could secure permission for us to be there. Several times I’ve noticed him veering off the pavement and I’ve shouted tentatively, causing him to jerk the wheel and laugh. He and Krunoslav are talking incessantly. I sit silently ignorant, trying to watch the scarcely visible road that the driver seems to be ignoring. Finally, he wheels the car into a narrow drive with deep muddy sluices that prevent him from driving on. He gets out of the car, first telling us to come with him, then telling us to wait in the car. Climbing back into the seat, I snap at Krunoslav, “What’s wrong with this guy?”

“He’s drunk like shit, man,” Krunoslav replies, laughing. We fall into a fit of uncontrollable laughter. I look toward the building up the drive. The door is open, light pouring out. The drunk policeman stands just inside out of the rain, pointing and gesturing toward us. Another man stands beside him, looking. I am still laughing, choking from it, as I try to tell Krunoslav that they are going to arrest the drunk bastard and us along with him. The door closes.

“This was a stupid move,” I say, settled now and unsure.

“At least you have the gun,” Krunoslav says.

“What all did he tell you?”

“I don’t know anything he said. He’s so damned drunk I just kept saying yes to this babbling. He asked who you work for and I told him the New York Times. Then he starts giving me his name and shit, his heroic fighting and that’s all I understood.”

I now realize how serious the situation is. We have just rolled up to a command post with a drunk cop in the middle of the night. We contemplate, seriously for a moment, getting out of the car and striking out on foot.

“I wonder how close we are to the lines,” I say. “We should be close. We drove for quite a while.”

“Yes, but a lot of that was from side to side,” Krunoslav says.

The drunk policeman jerks on the door, wrestling it open and falling into the seat. He sits up very straight and looks at Krunoslav.

“What does he say?”

“He says we must go back. Only Croatian journalists are allowed here.”

“That’s all they said?”

After a few squeals from the engine, the cop gets the car to move but he is now driving the wrong way. He swears and laughs and shifts into reverse before coming to a stop. We stall briefly, gears grinding, before shooting backwards, into a roadside ditch. The rear bumper slams into a tree.

The policeman and I stand in the mud and water, pushing. Krunoslav drives. Somehow, the car lurches free.

I hope the policeman will let Krunoslav drive. He doesn’t and we swerve helplessly in the dark along the cratered road back into Orasje.

• • •

After two days of heavy street-fighting Vidovice has been liberated. Elsewhere along the front the attack has stalled but they are holding the ground gained. There are wild casualty reports. Hundreds and hundreds of Serbians killed and captured. Only a few Croats and Muslims. Even as we hear these optimistic figures, notices of the recent dead are taped and tacked to the sides of buildings throughout the village. The memorials are typed on stark white paper, with black crepe borders for Croats, green for Muslim. The dead are honored with individual notices. There are too many to count.

The incoming fire is light today. The Serbs are training their guns on Vidovice and the front and the sounds of the war seem farther away than before. A number of women and some children have returned from Croatia.

Tomorrow, civilians will be allowed to return to Vidovice.

• • •

This evening, we are swallowed up in the tumult of a victory party thrown by Lessy, the commander of an anti-tank squad. Lessy is pronounced like Lassie, and he even has the look of a kind dog about him, with his long hair and moustache and long, thin face. His fraternal attitude towards his men accentuates this impression. They have just returned from the front, unwashed and smelling of the field. We sit shoulder to shoulder in the den of Lessy’s apartment which is finely furnished compared to others here. Platters of fresh pork rest everywhere and the hungry soldiers scoop from them with their hands.

Nine soldiers from Lessy’s unit have been wounded during the offensive. The mood, however, is not mournful, out of respect for what they have attempted and the part they have accomplished.

Lessy shares a bottle of Ballantines Scotch Whiskey that he has been hoarding. I don’t drink Scotch generally but I do tonight. As well as Sljivovica and beer. And coffee. There are several women here congratulating the soldiers, and whenever women are present in this country they insist on making coffee and they insist on you drinking it.

They tell stories of the past days’ fighting. A young soldier named Josip speaks of lying in a “cold wet muddy channel, pricked by rose bushes...little birds constantly moving in the grass nearby,” causing him to think the Chetniks were about to overrun him. Another addresses the problems with both sides wearing camouflaged uniforms. When they had gone forward the first day they wore yellow ribbons on their arms to distinguish themselves. Apparently, at least some of the Serbians had worn yellow also. A Croat soldier had entered Vidovice and was approached by a Serbian, who asked what was happening and if supper was ready yet. “Everything is fine. Supper is served that way,” the Croat answered, signaling the Serb past him and shooting him in the back.

They tell of Lessy wrenching a pistol from a Serbian officer’s hands after killing him, then tearing the stars from his shoulders and cutting off his ear. Lessy brings out these souvenirs and I hold them in my hand, the ear with dried blood and hair filaments on its jagged edge.

A soldier plays guitar in the corner of the den. Together the soldiers sing Bosnian folk tunes, shifting into “John Brown’s Body,” all of them singing the “Glory, glory, Hallelujah” part in English, with me joining in.

They want me to go with them to the front tomorrow, to stay and fight with them and write about it form the inside. I contemplate it seriously. Krunoslav is likewise inclined. For several days he has spoken of actually joining the fight that is much more his than mine. He is now in love with the tall Muslim woman in skin-tight red pants who has been pouring him coffee and rubbing him on the head. She could be his mother. He even resembles her a little. (They both have black hair and I’m a little drunk.)

• • •

My watch is lodged between my cheek and a crude throw pillow. It is 8:20 a.m. We have promised to meet Lessy at 9:00.

I wake Krunoslav with difficulty.

Neither of us feels like getting up. I lie on my back on the couch and he remains on the floor mattress. We discuss whether to meet them.

He wants to stay here and do something.

“I’m not sure I want to kill anybody,” he says.

“In Lessy’s unit you’d definitely have to kill.”

“Maybe I’ll join the Sanitet.”

I don’t understand.

“The MASH. I heard they needed people.”

“It would be insane for me to join any kind of unit without the language,” I tell him, thinking of a lot of other reasons.

Suddenly an explosion rocks our building. The sound of glass breaking across the street. Metal striking the outer wall behind my head. A man screaming. The strange smell. All rushing over me all at once. Mikell rushes from the next room. Krunoslav and I stand shaken, feeling over ourselves, looking around to make sure we are all right. The man continues to scream from below. Footsteps beating across the street. Another shell booms, this one several blocks away. Another as I lace my shoes.

The three of us hustle down the stairs, out the back door, around the corner toward the street. I look up at the window. Two powdery white scars are torn in the cinderblock below the sill. I realize that we’ve come damn close to being killed. But the real damage is across the street, up to the right about fifteen or twenty yards. The facade of a department store is blown into the street, the thick glass from its showroom foyer lies everywhere in large broken pieces. I step on a metal fragment, bend over and pick it up. It’s the length of a Bowie knife and a twisted inch thick. I half-expect it to still be warm but it isn’t. Through the hollowed-out twisted foyer I see men standing. On that side of the building a body-width pool of blood wets the sidewalk, narrowing, trailing, curving another ten yards to a plump man wearing stained white tennis shoes, lying on his side, one arm angled over his head, stretching forward, reaching. A man wearing a flat wool cap squats, a hand on him. Others stand twisting their heads around looking for help.

“Lie still,” the squatting man tells him. He does not lie still. He rocks the trunk of his body, sliding his feet back and forth on the sidewalk, holding his arm angling, reaching. I can hear him draw short stabbing breaths. He wants to move. Blood runs from his chest, no longer really a chest, his heart pumping out onto the concrete. His hand—broken glass clings to his hand—reaches, reaching toward a bicycle propped against a tree, a green plastic garbage can, another man standing, something else. He is humming a little now. The squatting man talks to him as others gather, saying things I cannot understand. I feel like a small child lost in a crowd.

A soldier arrives in a van. The van is amateurishly painted in camouflage, small brush strokes all over it, even the windows, with a Zlatarog beer can crushed into the gasoline receptacle. They start to load the wounded man carefully. But he has already died.

• • •

We go back to the apartment. Artillery thuds in the distance. We have missed our rendezvous with Lessy.

We fumble for words. There are none. Just that we are out of cigarettes, all of us.

Mikell says that a kiosk has been opened on the eastern side of the village but that we shouldn’t go over there with the shells falling. Krunoslav and I decide to go anyway. It seems unbearable to just sit in the apartment.

On the way I tell Kruno that we could already be in Vidovice if we’d met them this morning. I feel bad about telling them we were going and not meeting them.

“It was a practical decision,” he says.

“I’m not sure that it was a decision.”

“What do you propose now?”

“We should get into Vidovice,” I tell him.

“I’d like to talk to the Sanitet.”

“You know where it is?"

“In Mahala, near Jurich’s command.”

“All right. We'll go there and see what happens. Try to see Jurich again. Then we’ll go into Vidovice.”

• • •

Seven old men, carrying shotguns and hunting rifles, are loading into the back of a truck. Old Matanovic is among them. He says he will look forward to seeing us in Vidovice. We three continue on our way to the Sanitet. Mikell flags a ride and we are driven to Mahala, dropped off outside Jurich’s headquarters. Jurich is not there, a balding soldier tells me, very proud of his English. He is wearing a Mauser pistol that he is also proud of. He guides us to the Sanitet. He talks a lot of English that I can’t comprehend. He’s either mentally unbalanced or he’s been drinking something wicked this morning. I cannot tell.

At the Sanitet, Krunoslav speaks rapidly with the doctor, introduces Mikell and me. He looks at me curiously and I show him my UN press card. He regards me with distaste. He’s a young man, mid-twenties, no older. He looks very tired. They sit down to talk, the doctor in a comfortable chair at the end of a coffee table, Krunoslav on a small couch. I move to the front, where Mikell is conversing with an older woman who sits smoking behind a desk.

There is one surgical table, empty, covered with a white sheet behind a half-drawn curtain. Two young girls sit behind the curtain, beneath shelves littered with gauze and cotton balls and steel containers full of shiny instruments and cardboard boxes with red crosses on them. The girls sit there like they have been told to make themselves scarce. I ask them if they speak English, if they are doctors. They respond shyly, smiling and looking at each other.

The older woman in the front tells me they have had many wounded that have been evacuated to the hospitals in Vinkovcy and Cerna.

One of the girls is blonde, so pretty I can’t quit trying to talk to her. She only smiles and looks at her friend.

The doctor has Krunoslav writing something.

“He asks who you write for,” Krunoslav tells me without looking up.

“You know what to tell him. Tell him I’m free-lance. I write for a number of different magazines.”

The doctor doesn’t seem satisfied.

“He asks if we’ve reported to the press center here.”

“There is no press center here.”

“Yes, he says there is. He will call them and they will come here and take us there.”

The doctor is already cranking the handle on a decrepit field telephone.

“What exactly did he say, Kruno?” I whisper. “You know there is no press center here.”

“He said what I told you. He asked earlier if we’d been cleared by the command and how long we’d been here. I told him we’d been with Juro Jurich.”

The doctor speaks into the receiver, using the words Americski novinar. He puts the receiver down and says they will be here to pick us up and take us to the press center.

“Where is the press center?” I ask.

“It’s not far,” Krunoslav translates.

“Then we could walk.”

“It isn’t necessary. They are already on their way.”

I suggest we wait for them outside. The doctor follows and waits with us.

I tell Mikell he can go back to the apartment, that we might be awhile. He says no, that he’ll come with us.

Maybe there is a press center, I’m thinking when the unmarked olive drab station wagon pulls up. A short, trim muscular soldier with bowl-cut blonde hair gets out, formally asks for our credentials. He’s wearing a pistol that looks like an American .45. He looks at the credentials. He gives them back and motions for us to get in the car.

“Do you speak English?” I ask.

“Very little,” he answers, facing stiffly ahead. He drives fast.

 

The yard is filled with soldiers. We are at what looks like an old school compound, surrounded by a fence. We are stopped at the gate by two soldiers wearing helmets who look in the car and let us pass. There is a cordon of sandbags behind the fence, a couple of heavy machine-guns mounted on tripods.

He parks the car, lets us walk in front. Inside the door three men are waiting for us in front of a trophy case, one holding an AK-47. They snap out something to Kruno. “Get out your credentials,” he tells me. They put our credentials on a table with chairs surrounding it.

They search us, me first. When the searcher feels the knife in my pocket he freezes, grabs at the knife, pulls me over to the table and points at my pockets, then at the table. I put everything I am carrying on the table in front of him, the knife, my passport and wallet, our camera, a handful of bullets, some loose dinar notes, scraps of paper. I keep my cigarettes and notepad in my inside jacket pocket. He looks at the bullets, searches me again while staring straight into my eyes. He finds the notepad, lays it on the table. The blond who drove us here stands watching. I notice his hand is resting on the grip of his pistol.

Kruno is next. The searcher flinches, shouts, “Pishtolj!” and another grabs Kruno, spins him around while the searcher wrenches Kruno’s hard, thick address book from his jacket.

They talk to Mikell while they search him—he laughs and responds incredulously. They speak roughly and jerk him around.

We are told to wait while the blond and the searcher disappear down the long hall, carrying our papers and the camera.

“What’s happening, Kruno?”

“I don’t know. They said nothing to tell me. They just thought I had a pistol,” he replies, holding a cigarette, offering one to Mikell, then me. The soldier with the AK lights our smokes awkwardly, cradling the rifle.

Mikell stands quietly, angrily, holding his bandaged fist, cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth.

I hear boot steps on the tiled floor of the hallway. A third, barrel-chested man has returned with them. He stops in front of me, wearing a short-brimmed cap that’s too small for his head. He shouts a question, glaring.

I hold up my empty hands, “I only speak English,” I say at the same time the others are apparently telling him the same thing.

He stalks toward Mikell, shouting, stabbing him in the chest with a stubby fat forefinger. Mikell has to step backwards to keep his balance. Mikell talks back to him, I understand the name Juro Jurich, and Kruno joins in, “da, da, Juro Jurich. Juro Jurich.”

He stays on Mikell, still stabbing him in the chest, yelling, his face blood red. Then he turns to Krunoslav and all I can make out are the words “Juro Jurich” and Kruno gesturing toward me.

He walks toward me, pauses, his face very close to mine. He is sweating and I can smell his stale breath when he says something and storms off.

The soldiers merge us into a line and start us down the opposite end of the hallway. Two more soldiers carrying long, thin strips of lumber pass us, looking.

“What’s going on, Kruno?”

“We’re going to prison,” is all he says.

“You’re kidding.”

“We’re going to fucking prison,” he says.

They unlock a door in the side of the hall and shove us inside and I hear the key turning in the door, the bolt sliding home.

We are in a large classroom, with chairs and tables strewn about. On the floor around the baseboard of the wall men in uniform lounge on pallets. A few men stand along the rear window-filled wall. They are all looking at us.

“We’re in prison,” is all Kruno seems to be able to say.

“Well, what did they tell you out there?”

“They told me nothing. They kept asking who we are working for and why we are here. When I told them you are a journalist they kept asking. They think we are spies or something.”

"C'mon man."

“They did.”

“They say anything at all about what they’re going to do? How long they will keep us?”

“Hell no. They are deciding whether to shoot us.” 

“Shit.”

“Shit yes.”

“What did you tell them about Jurich?”

“The truth. That he took us to the front. I guess he’ll catch hell.”

“I guess he can handle it.”

Mikell stands over by the windows, talking to one of the other prisoners.

A bearded man sitting propped against the wall near the door is wearing a neck brace and sits like he cannot move.

Krunoslav talks to Mikell, comes back to where I’m sitting on the edge of one of the tables, trying to light a cigarette with a match, my hand twitching.

“The fat man is Pero Konj. He’s the military police chief of the region. He’s wanted by the Serbs for war crimes. I’ve read about him in Zagreb.”

“Are these prisoners Serbians?”

“No. They are Croatians. The man Mikell speaks with is here for killing his wife. Most of the others for getting drunk. The Serbians are in another room at the end of the hall. Where those men with sticks were coming from.”

“At least we’re not in there.”

“It doesn’t matter. Look at that man in the neck brace.”

“I know. I’ve seen him,” I say, imagining all sorts of reasons why someone would need a neck brace here.

I look out the windows. Many of the panes are missing. It would be very easy to crawl out and get machine-gunned.

I rest back on the edge of the table, unable to sit down in one of the chairs. My life doesn’t flash before me and I don’t particularly feel afraid, though my hands are shaking and I am thinking about death. It is a numbness and I think about all the things that could happen and a lot of things that could never happen and a lot of things that I want to happen. I wish my watch wasn’t lying on the couch back at the apartment, for I do not know if we’ve been here twenty minutes or two hours.

“The doctor. That fucker. I could kill him,” Kruno says.

“I knew when he said that about calling the press center we were in trouble. But what could we do? How can someone who says he’s a journalist say he doesn’t want to go to the press center?”

“What press center? Since I’m already a spy I’ll just have to kill him. If I ever see him again.”

“What did he tell you about joining the Sanitet?” I almost laugh when I ask him.

“He said I was no use to him without medical training. He didn’t trust anything I said from the beginning.”

“Tell Mikell I’m damned sorry. I can’t believe the way that fat bastard treated him.”

“Mikell is pissed at them, not you.”

“Yeah, but it’s our fault he’s in trouble.”

Mikell refuses to be angry with me. He is awestruck at the way he’s being treated.

A guard opens the door. He walks inside. He looks around, says nothing, leaves.

• • •

I’m not sure at all how long we’ve been here. It must have been just after noon when they picked us up. The sun is starting to set now. Shells fall regularly outside and we joke about being killed by a shell while we’re in prison.

Three of them come to get us and they say nothing as they lead us out. My thoughts are so profound I cannot remember them. We are led into another room, similar to the one we just left minus the prisoners. The man who’d been the searcher before sits behind a desk at the front, writing. I stand in front of the desk, trying to see what he is writing. He looks up at me and tells me, with a look, to back off.

In English, he asks me for my name and address. And who I work for. I tell him free-lance which he doesn’t like but he writes it anyway. He asks me my father’s name and address. What the hell does he want with that? I tell him, looking at what he is writing again and he doesn’t stop me.

He repeats this procedure with Kruno and Mikell.

We are taken to a table at the back of the room and given blank pieces of paper and pencils. We are told to write down a brief summary of everything we have done since we entered Bosnia. I ask Kruno a question and they tell us not to speak with each other.

I write as little as possible. When I am finished it is so tersely worded that I’m afraid it sounds sarcastic. To hell with them. They wanted brief, they got it.

After collecting the papers the searcher looks them over and starts to question Krunoslav extensively. Again, I don’t understand anything except novinar and Juro Jurich. The searcher skips Mikell, coming directly to me. He ask me one question, three times. “Did you take photographs of the front?” Three times I say no, without having any idea what Kruno has told him.

He leave us with two soldiers. I whisper to Kruno and he tells me not to worry, he also said no when asked about taking photographs of the front.

A few minutes later the man returns, collects us and leads us down the hallways to the table in front of the trophy case Our papers and incidentals are lying on the table. The camera is there. I don’t check on the film. I’m sure it has been destroyed.

The searcher speaks to Kruno, leading us out the door. Time has sped up, everything is moving fast. We are in a car, Kruno and Mikell in back. I sit in the front seat, looking at the driver, who keeps his eyes straight ahead. There is a pistol the size of a .357 Magnum shoved between his bucket seat and the middle console. It might be easy to grab that pistol, I’m thinking.

“Where are we going?”

“He’s taking us to the apartment.”

“That’s it? We’re free just like that?”

“No,” Kruno laughs. “He’s taking you and me to Mikell’s apartment to get our things. Then he’s escorting us to the ferry. The man at the prison said for us to get the hell out of the country. And if we’re caught here again it will be much worse.”

“At least they’re letting us get our things.”

Mikell relunctantly gives the man directions to the apartment.

The guard gets out of the car with us and follows us inside, carrying the pistol in his hand.

I try to rush into the back room, without being obvious, to make sure the rest of our film is hidden. He follows me. He watches closely but doesn’t search anything.

Mikell rides with us to the River bank. It is dark. There is a crowd gathered, waiting for the little fishing boat to return from the other side. Before the guard leads us down the muddy bank Mikell writes his address for us. We embrace, say goodbye.

A man returning from the Croatian side greets us. I barely recognize him in his clean civilian clothes. He’s one of the soldiers we met in the trench with Jurich. He’s sees the guard with the pistol and understands, hurrying along.

The guard forces the others in line to let us board first. We climb onto the boat. The boat dips in the water. The guard stands at the water’s edge as the boat shoves off. Bright lights illuminate the Croatian side of the River. Artillery thunders behind us. I look back. I can see the silhouettes of people on the high bank, a few arms waving. And I can see the guard, who stands watching us until we are halfway across the River.