Читать книгу Trusted Mole: A Soldier’s Journey into Bosnia’s Heart of Darkness - Martin Bell - Страница 11

8 January 1993 – British National Support Element Base, Tomislavgrad

The Americans were about to bomb the Iraqis again. On the hour, every hour, the television fixed high in a corner of the dusty warehouse spewed out the impassioned, near hysterical commentaries of the drama unfolding in the Middle East. Iraqi non-compliance with some UN Security Council Resolution seemed to be the issue; cruise missiles were poised to fly, midnight the deadline. In another place at another time we’d all have been glued to the box as we had been in 1991, eagerly anticipating the voyeuristic thrill of technowar. But not this time, not here and not tonight. The crisis in the Persian Gulf seemed so remote, so distant, so unreal. Shattered and numbed by the day’s events, nearly all the soldiers had shuffled off to their makeshift bunk beds, stacked four high around the warehouse.

Being less tired and having nothing more appealing than a sleeping bag on a cold concrete floor to look forward to, I’d delayed getting my head down. I was alone at a small wooden table, determined to finish recording the day’s hectic events in an airmail ‘bluey’ to a stewardess friend at British Airways. I glanced at my bedspace and marvelled that Seb had somehow managed to stuff his massive frame into his doss bag. Even more astonishingly, he’d managed to doze off despite the freezing concrete.

2225. The time flashed on the TV screen as the latest news from the Gulf came in from CNN. I turned back to the letter. Over the page and I’d be done, ‘… so, once the Boss realised what was going on, the three of us spent most of the day driving like madmen to get down here, but it was all over when we arr—.’

Ink splattered across the page. The pen sprang from my fingers as I leapt out of my skin knocking over the table. The newsreader had disappeared from the TV screen, obliterated. My ears were ringing, my mind stunned as a deep WOOOMF slammed into the warehouse, rattled the filthy windows and rolled over and around us. The air was filled with a fluttering, ripping sound and then another shockingly loud detonation somewhere beyond the wall. I was rooted to the spot. My legs started trembling. Adrenalin gushed through my veins.

‘Fuck! Shit! Oh, Christ, not again!’ Expletives echoed around the warehouse.

Pandemonium. All around me soldiers cursing, grunting, wild-eyed, tumbled from their bunks clutching helmets, flak jackets, stuffing feet into boots, laces flying, others scampering off with boots in hand, determinedly dragging their sleeping bags behind them into the darkness of the back of the warehouse.

Seb was on his feet in the same state of stunned confusion as I was. Within seconds the warehouse had emptied. The soldiers seemed to know precisely what to do. Why didn’t we? The greater terror of being left behind seemed to unfreeze me. A corporal raced past. I grabbed at him.

‘Hey! Where do we go? We’ve just arrived.’ Panic in my voice.

He wasn’t going to be stopped. ‘Just follow me, sir!’ he yelled over his shoulder as he disappeared into the gloom. We bolted after him. Ironic that he should be our saviour at that moment; officers were supposed to lead the men. Ridiculous really, but I didn’t care, just so long as he took us to wherever it was everyone else was going.

Cramming ourselves through a small door at the back of the hall, we emerged onto a raised walkway of a loading bay. Turning left we hurried after fleeting, bobbing dark shapes. I hadn’t a clue where we were going and blundered on regardless, driven by panic. We raced through a cavernous, dank boiler room. Another salvo of shells screamed in. Through a door at the far end we were hit by a wall of freezing air. It had been below minus twenty during the day. Now it was even colder.

We were now slipping and stumbling over uneven and frozen gravel. Ahead, stooped and crab-like, dragging doss bags, the black shapes of soldiers darted and weaved – like ghosts caught in the chilling glow of a half moon. Another whirring and ripping of disturbed air. We flung ourselves down grazing palms and knees, cheeks were driven into rough and frozen stones. I clung to the earth as an oily, slithery serpent in my stomach uncurled itself. The night was split for an instant, spiteful red and white followed by a deafening, high-pitched cracking, ringing shockingly loud. Then a deeper note, a rolling wave through the ground beneath, the air swept with an electric, burning hiss.

The desire to remain welded to the earth, panting and cowering, was overwhelming. Although the brain screamed ‘no!’, no sooner had the pulse washed over us than we were up, stumbling across the gravel. With horror I realised we were running towards the impacts. It made no sense. Surely we should be legging it in the opposite direction?

Far in the distance, beyond the broad, flat and featureless plain, now cloaked in darkness, behind a distant, rocky escarpment, two soundless halos of dull yellow flickered briefly. Moments passed and then two flat reports.

‘Incoming!’ screamed a breathless, hysterical voice somewhere ahead.

For seconds, hours, nothing … nothing … then a fluttering warning which sent us diving headlong into the gravel again. More cringing and tensing, detonations, ringing – closer this time. What the fuck are we doing running towards it?

We moved forward, staggering and diving in short bounds for what seemed like an eternity, keeping the edge of the warehouse to our left. In the darkness it was difficult to tell how far we’d gone – time and distance distorted by panic and fear. We rounded the far corner. Beyond a concrete V-shaped ditch was a row of maybe five or six armoured personnel carriers, APCs, neatly parked, squat and black.

I still had the corporal firmly in my sights. In a single bound he vaulted the ditch, raced up to the rear of the left-hand APC, yanked open the rear door and hurled himself inside. Others flung themselves in after him. Another flash on the horizon. Shit!

I was the last into the vehicle and feverishly pulled the door to before the shell landed. It wouldn’t shut. Too many people and too many sleeping bags. It was the bags or me.

‘We don’t need this sodding thing,’ I hissed in desperation, hurling one out into the night. I wrestled the door shut and hauled down on the locking lever just as the shell exploded somewhere to our front.

Inside the APC it was pitch black. Nobody said a word. Nothing could be heard save ragged, terror-edged panting as each man fought to recover his breath. Someone in the front flicked on a torch with a red filter. What little light managed to seep into the back cast eerie patches of dull red across strained, pallid faces. There were far too many of us crammed into the vehicle – knees and elbows everywhere. On my left was a slight youth clad in a boiler suit, who didn’t look like a soldier at all. Opposite me I recognised one of the batch of colloquial interpreters, a staff sergeant in the REME,^* evidently posted up to Tomislavgrad, TSG, and now stuck in this APC. He looked terrified. It was his sleeping bag I’d slung out. Two down from me and next to the youth was Seb, still panting furiously. There were others too. Seb’s driver, Marine Dawson, had somehow ended up in the commander’s seat, and somewhere up there was the Sapper corporal, whom we’d blindly followed. There must have been about eight or nine of us stuffed into the small APC.

Our private thoughts were interrupted by a wild banging on the door and muffled shouting. Reluctantly, I eased up the lever and opened the door an inch.

‘Fuck’s sake! Lemme in. Lemme in!’ A helmeted shadow was trying to rip open the door. I held on grimly, not wishing to expose us any more to the outside world.

‘Sorry mate. No room in here … try the one next door …’ I barked through the gap. The shadow swore savagely and disappeared into the night. I slammed the door shut just as another shell screamed in, shattering the night.

‘Oi! You! Get the fucking periscope up!’ It was the corporal, up front somewhere. What was he on about now? Deathly silence. Nothing happened.

‘You in the commander’s seat! Get the periscope up and let’s get a fix on those flashes … work out where the bastards are firing at us from …’ Has be gone mad?

The unfortunate Dawson, who clearly had never been in an APC in his life, frantically started to tug at the various levers and knobs around him. He had no idea what he was supposed to be doing. I’d have been just as clueless. Another shell screamed in.

‘Fuck’s sake, fuck’s sake … get out, get fucking out!’ The corporal had finally lost his rag. A scuffle broke out up front as the shell exploded. In the darkness all you could hear above the high-pitched ringing in your ears were thuds, grunts and the occasional blow as Dawson and the corporal struggled with each other. Somebody whimpered, the APC rocked softly on its suspension, a few more grunts and blows and the unfortunate Marine was ejected from his seat.

Settled in the seat the corporal expertly flipped up the periscope and glued his forehead to the eyepiece. ‘Compass … somebody gimme a compass!’ he yelled without removing his eyes from the optic. His voice rose a note, ‘Shit! ’nother two flashes on the horizon … two rounds incoming!!’

I stared down at the luminous second hand of my watch … five seconds … it swept past ten seconds. Someone started to whimper, another’s breathing rose in volume, great gasping pants … thirteen seconds … my watch started to tremble. I was mesmerised by it … fourteen … fifteen – the air was ripped; two double concussions which rolled into each other. A collective sigh of relief swept through the APC.

‘Where’s that fucking compass?’ The corporal was at it again. Either he was barking mad or had simply been born without fear. He was still determined to get a fix on the guns. I dug out a Silva compass from my smock pocket and passed it up the APC.

‘Time of flight’s about fifteen seconds,’ I shouted up at him.

‘Good. Fifteen seconds, yeah?’ He seemed pleased. What difference did it make? Flashes, bearings, time of flight? The facts couldn’t be altered. We were stuck in this APC. Shells were landing somewhere to our front. A direct hit would destroy the vehicle. A very near miss would destroy it as well, and, with it, us. But I had a sneaking admiration for that unknown corporal. He was one of Kipling’s men, keeping his head and his cool while all around him were losing theirs. At least he was doing something, keeping his mind busy, warding off the intrusion of fear and panic – pure professionalism. I felt useless, unable to contribute in any way, jammed as I was in the rear and prey to my fears and imagination.

What were we doing sitting in an aluminium bucket between the building and the incoming rounds? Surely we’d be safer in the lee of the building, behind it? Another dreadful thought came to mind: the CVR(T) series of vehicles, of which this Spartan was one, were the last of the British Army’s combat vehicles which still ran on petrol. All the others – tanks, armoured infantry fighting vehicles, lorries, Land Rover and plant – ran on diesel. We were sitting on top of hundreds of litres of petrol ‘protected’ only by an aluminium skin. We’d sought refuge inside a petrol bomb. My mind imagined a near miss – red hot steel fragments slicing through aluminium, piercing the fuel tank, which we were sitting on, and wooooossssh ... frying tonight! Fuck this! This was not the place to take cover.

‘Hey! Why don’t we just drive out of here, round the back of the building where it’s safer?’ I shouted at the corporal and anyone else who might care to listen.

‘No driver in the front,’ he shouted back, seemingly unconcerned. I don’t suppose the fuel thing had occurred to him.

‘We had this for four hours this afternoon … just sat here, froze and waited … shit myself,’ mumbled the staff sergeant opposite and then he added savagely, ‘I’ve fucking had enough of this shite!’

‘Another flash!’ screamed the corporal. Bugger him! Why did he have to be so efficient? I didn’t want to know that another shell was arcing towards us. This is the one that’s going to fry us!… three seconds … the panting started … five seconds … where were Corporal Fox and Brigadier Cumming? Where had they taken cover? … seven seconds ... How had we got ourselves into this? How eager and consumed with childish enthusiasm we’d been, desperate not to miss out! How we’d raced down to TSG – and for what? … nine seconds. ... Idiots! The lot of us.

We’d been in Vitez that morning. In fact we’d just left the Cheshire Regiment’s camp at Stara Bila when it happened. We’d driven there from Brigadier Cumming’s tactical headquarters in the hotel in Fojnica. He’d been incensed by an article in the Daily Mail, written by Anna Pukas, which had glorified the British contribution to the UN and had damned, by omission, everyone else’s. We’d dropped by the Public Information house in Vitez late the previous night after a gruelling eleven-hour trip up into the Tesanj salient. Cumming had returned to the Land Rover Discovery clutching a fax of the article. He’d been livid but it had been too late to do anything about it at that hour so we’d returned to Fojnica. The following day we shot back to Vitez where Cumming had words with the Cheshires’ Commanding Officer, Lieutenant Colonel Bob Stewart, who had been quoted in the article.

We were heading back to Fojnica and had been on the road some ten minutes. The Brigadier was silent. Corporal Fox was concentrating on keeping the vehicle on the icy road and the accompanying UKLO team – an RAF flight lieutenant called Seb, his driver, Marine Dawson, and their wretched satellite dish in the back of their RB44 truck – in his rear-view mirror. Next to his pistol on the dash the handset of our HF radio spluttered and hissed into life. It was always making strange noises and ‘dropping’ so I never paid much attention to it. Corporal Fox grabbed it and stuck it to his ear.

‘Sir, I’m not sure, but it sounds like something’s going on in TSG … signal’s breaking up and I can’t work out their call sign … sounds like they’re being shelled or are under attack.’ Corporal Simon Fox was a pretty cool character, never flustered, always the laconic Lancastrian. I couldn’t make much sense with the radio either. Static and atmospherics were bad. All we could hear was a booming noise in the background. We decided to head back to Vitez.

The Operations Room at Vitez was packed. We entered to a deathly, expectant hush as everyone strained to hear the transmissions from TSG.

‘… that’s forty-seven and they’re still landing … forty-nine, fifty … still incoming …’ There was no mistaking it: TSG was definitely being shelled and some brave soul was still manning a radio, probably cowering under a desk, and was giving a live commentary as each shell landed.

‘How long’s this been going on for?’ snapped Cumming, now hugely concerned that his logistics and engineer bases were being attacked.

‘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.