Another front but a different war

Steve and I had some business to attend to at head quarters.
When we were finished, we went across to dicks bar for a drink. It was the usual rag tag of uniforms and units at the bar, but there was a distinct smell that reminded me of home it was the smell of diesel! Standing at the bar were two men in German tank suits. There were no tank units in Mala Bosna and to my knowledge; there weren’t any in Vinkovci. I really wanted to talk to those men we had a brief hand waving conversation and they seemed to be quite friendly they also agreed to take us over to their area of operations. We got into a Renault van and drove normally through the town, I was in the back with a small Hungarian called fare then just as we hit the road to Nustar the driver accelerated to maximum speed. Fare took out his pistol and started to shoot out of the back of the van towards the side of the road.
This seemed a little irresponsible to me at first, and then I noticed the large collection of bullet holes through the fibreglass sides of the van. We were as you may say ‘running the gauntlet’, the road was running parallel with the Serbian front and they had direct fire onto the road in a number of places, they were not keen to allow people entry into the village.
We shot into Nustar at full speed slowing as we past the first building. Nustar was a real war zone (it was later estimated to have 90% damage). The roads were covered with mud and bits of masonry. A few of the buildings were completely burnout. Furniture and broken ammunition boxes littered the paths, pigs rooted around in the rubble and the place seemed to have a burnt smell about it not one thing in the whole village had not been damaged in some way or another by shellfire. We drove to the far end of the village were we stopped and went to the cellar of the house on the left. A T55 was parked next to the house; across the street an M84 was parked near a dug in T55, in the garden in front of the garage a BVP was parked.
We went over to the T55 and they started it up for me. Now all the tanks that I had driven before were fitted with semiautomatic gearboxes (even the very old ones). So, my assumption was that the T55 probably has the same system. So I got in and I had quick look down at the panels and ‘found’ a gear stick! I started it forward, it was a real unresponsive bitch to drive needing high revs for very little return, not exactly the Alfa Romeo of the tank world. Well I decided to change the gear up a bit. It really didn’t want to go, there was a lot of grinding and crashing in the process but with a bit of effort it went in. It was not until I was getting out of the hatch that I noticed the extra pedal.
Unlike western tanks, which have only two pedals, Russian tanks use the old double clutch system and have three pedals. It wasn’t until later when I spoke to my translator about the incident, that he admitted that they had also noticed my reluctance to use the clutch pedal but didn’t want to comment.
This was the beginning of my stay in Nustar the village had a completely different feel to Mala Bosna,
The people were not cowered by events but more stubborn.
There was no action at all in Mala Bosna; where as the threat in Nustar was very real. This was the place I decided to stay.
I moved into the cellar where the other Croat’s from the tank group slept. The cellar was entered through an outside sloping steel door that covered the steps leading down to us. All the cellars that were being used were picked mainly because they had the important outside access. If the cellar doors were internal there was definitely a possibility that the remainder of the house would collapse during a bombardment and trap the occupants.
A wood-burning stove heated the cellar; the chimney had been put through a small ventilation window at the end of the cellar. The whole of one side of our cellar had been filled with sofa beds laid side by side and the soldiers would sleep in a communal pile. Someone had run an electric cable from the T55 into the cellar, to give us a 24-volt lamp for illumination. Someone had rigged the door with a crude form of alarm, activated on a pressure switch taken from a fridge so that every time the door was touched it would buzz giving us a little warning that someone was there. In a normal army such things would not be necessary but there were not many Croat’s left in the village so At night the village seemed to withdraw into its self, as all the different groups went into their cellars and bolted up for the night. During the night the Serbs would shell or rocket us a trip to the toilet could be fatal, but logic dictates with that amount of explosive being fired at you its very unlikely that the Serbs were amongst us, so it gave us a strange sense of security. We would emerge in the morning to inspect the damage of the nights shelling, sometimes the garden would be covered with debris from a near miss and other times it would be spotless after receiving a direct hit on the frozen earth.
The cellar was full of kittens, that were living under the bed in an attempt to stay out of harms way. They would sometimes come out, but seemed to spend most of their time under the bed.
I can lay claim to a life saving invention, that I introduced to the village.
most of the occupied cellars had doors outside the houses and steps leading down into the cellars, with no guards around outside it would be very easy for a small group of Serbs to create a lot of casualty's with a bag of hand grenades, so I introduced them to the double door.
It started with a very simple demo of me throwing a hand grenade into the cellar and then nailing a blanket across the lower entrance and doing it again, the grenade no longer went into the room but stopped at the entrance.
this would reduce casualty's and give anyone else a fighting chance in the event that this should happen.
the idea was quickly adopted in most of the neighboring cellars and in some cases whole doors and frames were removed from houses and refitted in the cellars as extra protection.
The house above was half damaged, it still had a roof in places and some of the remaining furniture was scattered around. We only went upstairs to use the toilet. To do this you would have to draw a bucket of water from the pump in the garden to flush it. It was strange to go up there at night and sit on a porcelain toilet in a proper room and stare up at the stars. It was also very cold and I started to dream of luxuries like toilet seats and central heating.
The water that we drank was collected from the H.Q. building at the end of the village; the water supply in the village was undrinkable. The house had a second cellar that held the old boiler for the house it also had large 20 litre bottles of “rakija” in it. This was the home made spirit that the locals were so keen on. In my opinion it was foul and dangerous, I would only drink it to be hospitable and even then one glass was enough. The Hungarian was in heaven here; he would go to the other cellar and filter the rakija through a piece of cloth to get the brick dust and straw out of it. Then rebottle it into a smaller container for a quick drink when he needed it (which was most of the time). The sheds around the house contained firewood, maze, onions and garlic. The last two were to be our staple diet. The pigs that ran round the village were fair game as a diet supplement. The first people who got there often ate the food that came over to us from Vinkovci. So we would butcher the pigs and eat roast pork bread and onions most days if not then it was back to tined sardines in oil which there were a plentiful supply of.
On my first night there Luka took me round with him as he reset the radios to the new frequencies. Why he wanted to teach me so much so quickly I did not know, but I did my best to take it all in.
We went into the tank group’s main house and he spoke to the commander, one of the lads asked me if I wanted to do guard duty that night. I didn’t want to upset them and asked them when they needed me, 2 till 4 in the morning! The graveyard shift, actually that’s not at all funny, as there was a graveyard slightly to the rear of the trench. I went back to the cellar with Luka had a wash and found myself somewhere to sleep on the long bench. At about 1.30 the guard woke me and dumped a walky talkie radio on me. Strange! He disappeared to his bed I wasn’t happy about that, I don’t mind doing guard duties but I was not happy about doing his half-hour as well. The guard post was a trench dug outside our main building; it had flooded with water in the past but the water had all frozen solid. With the way the Serbs liked to shell Nustar at unsociable hours I thought that it would be a very good idea to get down in the trench and look at how things went around me. The radio would occasionally squawk some message or other, I knew that we were condor and anybody calling that name wanted us. Its just that I didn’t speak Croatian and I was sure that the woman at the on the end of the radio didn’t speak English either. This whole thing was beginning to look like a joke.
One of the first jobs that I was given was to kill a pig that they had cornered in an out building. The floor was bare concrete as were the walls. Fare gave me his pistol and let me in through the stable door to meet my victim. By pig standards it was a medium size pig, and wasn’t to fussed to have me in there with her. But then again she didn’t know what I was going to do to her.
I went over and had a look at her, what I wanted to do was get a clean shot through her head that would kill her instantly and not ricochet of the floor into me! The idea of being hit with a second hand bullet after it been through a pig is not a nice one the secondary infection alone would probably be enough to kill you. So I lined the pistol up and shot the pig above the eye where I thought the brain should be. The pig jerked its head up and the bullet exited out of its jaw, it didn’t like that and started to run round the room. The crowd outside encouraged me to fire again, I was not at all happy with the way things were developing.
The pig by all rights should have died on the first shot, it hadn’t and it wasn’t very happy. For that matter neither was I. Once the pig had calmed down I tried again the result was even more horrific. The bullet entered above the eye and exited through the cheek on the other side. This was no longer funny it was becoming a struggle of life and death between us, very soon the pig was going to realise that it weighed more than me and it could easily attack me. Desperation then took over I was loosing a lot of face over this bullet-proof pig.
I took a knife from Fare and went into hand to hand combat with the pig. I managed to straddle it as it tried to run past. I brought the knife up under it throat and sliced in one quick movement. The stroke would have easily killed a human but the large quantity of fat around the pig’s throat took most of the damage. Things were now going from bad to worse. I was stuck in a small enclosure with an enraged pig that was running around the room squealing, shaking it’s head from side to side and flicking blood all over me and up the walls. It was my idea of the perfect nightmare. I had till then held no malice towards the pig but this was now getting to be too distressing for me. I took Fare’s pistol and cornered the pig pushed the pistol against its forehead and fired a shot directly through its head down its body. The pig dropped on the floor dead I hoped, and I left the room feeling very shaky, it shouldn't take that much to kill an animal.
When they butchered the pig I stayed on to watch I wanted to know why the pig hadn’t died at the first shot. I found that pigs have very small brains at the back of their skulls, almost worn as a hat it is so far back. Do not apply human biology to animals.
It was probably on day two that Luka left the village he was going back to Zagreb to continue his education and another Croat Goran was going to take over as my translator/ baby sitter.
In the western world Goran would have had a Harley Davidson and a job in a garage, however in Yugo he worked in a sweet factory and had a little van.
I have to say on our first meeting I didnt like him, Fare, Golub and I stood outside the cellar in the mud that passed for a garden when Goran first arrived, a starving Alsatian we had called Pero hung round us, Like most of the Dogs in the village I assume he had once lived at the house and had been abandoned by his owners and just stayed hoping for their return.
Goran came over from the tank HQ and stood talking to Golub they looked at the dog and Goran kicked a punctured football towards the maze field at the end of the garden, The dog ran down to retrieve the ball and they both raised their weapons and shot it.
It wasnt quick as the bullets hit the dog it twisted and whined a complete incomprehension as to the pain and the limb failure as in those few seconds its organs were shattered by bullets ripping through its body. I had liked that dog, I walked down to see it, unlike them I had to know that it was dead. I could not leave it at the edge of a mine field slowly dieing. Pero was dead his eyes were still bright and his chest wasnt moving, I picked him up and carried him back to the house.
Stopping at Golub and Goran, I looked at them and said "one day I will kick the ball for you"
I then went and tryed to dig a hole. The ground was frozen like rock the top was soft from the sun but underneath the frost held on I could only dig down a foot and so the dead pit was made, my own little rubbish bin for the animals littered around our house and position.
Nustar and my appetite never really saw eye to eye, outside the cellar half buried in the mud and frozen solid was the remains of a goat each morning I would pass it, The roads were littered with dead pigs, and the mine field at the last checkpoint was a slaughter house for a small herd of cows who had been hit by artillery, their body's had gone black and gaunt through decomposition and frost. a little further up the road the remains of two tanks blocked the road, burnt out and probably still crewed.
Nustar was a place of death.
The plan of action as explained to me was that in the event of a serious assault the tanks were to be pulled back to vinkovci, they did not have enough crew for the tanks so I would be driving a T55 with no turret crew between two live tanks in a withdrawal up the mad mile. A totally insane idea and not one I subscribed too but that was the plan.
The situation was this, Nustar is situated in a valley near two bridges over a river the serbs held the high ground, the tank group was at the far end of the town furthest from Vincovci with our own infantry groups around us. Our main past time was to stay underground and have shells land on us.
I doubt any of you have experienced a rocket barrage, totally unlike mortars or standard artillery it is hell.
One night we were in the cellar when they hit us, I heard the shrill roar of the first rocket motor then a constant stream of explosions, the earth shook dust came from the ceiling and inside my chest was bursting out, I wanted to scream rip my uniform off throw down my gun, run up the steps and out the door into a sane different world. but I could not I would die, the Croat's in the cellar looked at me as I sat on the end of my bed with my rifle between my knees and a blank expression on my face. Fear is infectious, they looked to me because I was the professional, if I cracked they would all go.
I had seen multiple rocket launching systems during the gulf. a rumble then a wonderful pyramid of lights in the sky followed by a thunder storm on the horizon, It looked fantastic now it was me on the receiving end and it was hell.
I dont know how long the barrage lasted but the last couple off rockets were the worse, not for the damage they caused but because one did not explode, I heard the motor but there was no bang. So what happens now we wait, and we waited till the morning, It could have been a delay but it did not explode or it could be lodged in a building or any where just waiting to fall, be dislodged and then explode when you least expect it.
when we went outside the barrage had cleaned the area, the scope cover from the tank outside was missing, the rubble had gone from the garden, the last of the roof slates had gone and the dead pit was empty, now someone else's problem, Pero the other dogs, cats and chickens I had dumped in the hole with the intention to burn had gone.
Goran decided that he would like to test me and the best place to do that would be no mans land, he suggested that we go for a little trip to see the neighbors.
Our first trip out was obviously his first too as the route was not one I would have chosen but as he lead I would follow, we went up the road through the herd of dead cows and tip toed through the antenna mines.
again to the reader I will explain these mines, normal mines require a direct pressure on them caused by footfall or vehicle weight. different mines have different pressures to set them off, and further to that different characteristic's, some mines will blow your foot and lower leg off blowing contaminated earth and shrapnel up into your groin area leading to possible castration due to secondary infection, others do not explode on pressure, but on pressure release firing the mine out the ground to about a meter where it then explodes outwards spraying shrapnel over everyone in close proximity. anti tank mines are normally an upward shaped charge with an anti tamper device, and infantry man may stand on it without it exploding, but should he attempt to move it a line and peg underneath it detonate the mine vaporising the person playing with it. Antenna mines though are just evil, it is a standard anti tank mine but with a 1 meter antenna set in the middle, the thought behind the mine is simple should anything pass over the mine the antenna will move detonating the mine.
They stood proud on the road surface amongst the body's and when you passed them you felt yourself drawn towards them as you picked your way through them. As we moved I scanned the road ahead and the bushes to the side of the road, this really was not my preferred route.
As we cleared the mines, Two men came round the corner in front of us this was a major problem, I crouched and sighted on them. They stoped and sighted on me, but no one was shooting yet, the ball was firmly in Gorans court he could speak to these guys, I couldnt all I was doing was waving them towards us but keeping a gun on them because the whole situation was a little un healthy for every one.
They lowered their weapon and moved towards us. I lowered mine slightly to reduce the threat to them but left my finger on the trigger. I was on single shot but reconed that I could probably better take them on that, than fire bursts that would probably go over them.
The unarmed man came forward to Goran and things seemed ok, the other man then joined them. They were a forward sniper team (spotter and rifle man) who were coming back into our positions. we had told the infantry sentry down the road that we were going out but he failed to tell us that there was already a team in nomans land, hence the near fatal confrontation.
( It was to happen a lot that Guards failed to report other patrols to us, and worse was to not tell their relifes that we were out there and be greated by hails of gun fire from our own side when trying to get to saftey)