Life on the front part one

We went back to our house after the meal. We had been assigned guard duties and we would be taking over other people’s weapons at the bunker when we went on duty. The situation was not satisfactory but it was a start. As we bedded down for the night the Serb’s start hitting us with 82mm. Mortars. One of them exploded very close to the house smashing all the glass in the front door, the woman down stairs started to scream and one of the pigs in the back garden started squealing. It was a terrible noise. More unnerving to us than the shells that were coming in.
During the night randy came over and woke me up to go on duty. I put on my boots and my parka, I expected it to be cold outside and I wasn’t disappointed. It didn’t feel right being unarmed and walking up the road towards the bunker. Though they may be a fair distance away I felt very vulnerable, when I got to the bunker I took over a Croatians klashnikov. The interior of the bunker was dark and cold, but at least it was safe. The floor of the bunker was covered with gravel and shell cases, I spent a lot of time at the observation slits. I could see the machine gunner at Mirkovci as he fired off his weapon the tracers would arc slowly across the night. At first I thought they were pretty, then I thought about the four standard bullets that I couldn’t see between the ones that I could. The gunner was good, I watched him work. After he had fired off a burst he would try and fire off single shots to get past the first tracer. We always saw the tracer coming and were more attuned to watching for them than listening for the shots being fired. I spent an uneventful two hours there getting used to the sights and sounds of the front.
The next morning we inspected the damage caused by the mortars in the night. The front garden had taken a direct hit. What had been left of the family’s car had been aerated for the third time and the blast had smashed the glass in the front door, the owner took all this in his stride and surprisingly he didn’t complain.
We went over the road to see the others and were told that we would be issued our own personal weapons; we filed behind the house to a neighbouring cellar they told us that our weapons would be issued to us. I paused for a moment as a klashnikov was passed up to me; I asked myself did I really want to get involved in all of this? Mark pushed past me and took the offered weapon, if he was in then I was in; I took the next one. I lucked out on that. Because I found myself the proud owner of a Romanian klashnikov complete with forward pistol grip. I was not impressed with it.
I wasn’t there to play Chicago gangster, and the grip was upsetting me when I went to change magazines. The first thing I did when I got back to the house was tried to cut the stupid thing off. I needed a saw to do this and asked the old man if he had one, this resulted in a lot of hand waving and him running of to tell tales to the commander. While he was off causing trouble I sat on the front steps and started to hack the front pistol grip off with a knife. Eventually Satan arrived to find out what all the fuss was about, it seems that our host had relayed a message that my intention had been to cut the barrel off my rifle! Satan looked at what I was doing and borrowed a hacksaw off the old man so that I could do the job properly. Once the pistol grip was removed the weapon was perfect for me.
The weapon may be bottom of the market, but it is incredibly light, almost half the weight of a Yugoslav klashnikov. However it does not have a sight to fire rifle grenades and it over heats on sustained automatic fire. This was not a problem, as I didn’t want to use it as a L.S.W. Despite its bad reputation I found it to be a very good little weapon.
I made another startling discovery. Standard Romanian ammunition has a mild steel core, to the layman this means that the bullet cannot deform when it hits something hard, but retains its shape. This is not a good thing in some ways, but it means if someone is wearing a bullet-proof vest my bullets will not mushroom on the vest but penetrate! A very useful thing when half the Serbs were using flack jackets.
Trying to get fed was a major problem. The food was sent from the central kitchen in Vinkovci to the front in large thermoses. What you got for lunch you got later for dinner. The problem seemed to be the erratic timings of the food delivery or the Serbs mortaring us so we couldn’t get out and eat it.
One man in the village had taken it upon himself to use his underground garage as the cookhouse. He would receive rations for our part of the village and feed us when we turned up. The food slops were given to our old host who would cook them up and feed them to his pigs. The garage wasn’t a bad place, the whole area under his house had been dug out to make a garage and work shop. It was very well done and the workshop area had been converted into the eating area. We would go in there and take a seat at one of the trestle tables and the owner would come over from his resting place at the back of the workshop by his stove. Even though the place was open to us, it was obvious that this was his little private sanctuary away from his family and the groups of soldiers who came to eat there. He would come forward and put bowl of stew in front of you then retreat to the back of the workshop and his newspaper. Sometimes there would be bowls of gerkins on the table or perhaps pieces of cold pork, and slices of bread to give some substance to the meal.
Getting there could be a bastard though, between the garage and the area were we were billeted was an empty plot of land. It was were our trenches met the road and the owner of the house next to it had some nasty dogs.
Each time we tried to cross the gap the dogs would start barking at us. There instinct to protect their territory was telling the Serbs that we were crossing the empty plot. The Serbs would blindly send a few bullets in our direction in the hope of getting one of us. As you can imagine this was beginning to piss us off. Various authorities had asked the man to shut his dogs up, we really didn’t want to have to shoot the mans pets but it was getting to the stage that someone was going to get killed, in fact rover had caused a few near misses already.
Mark and I were crossing one night and our practice was for one of us to move whilst the other took a position ready to give covering fire. Mark was going to be first to go; we could see the dog getting ready to make a fuss.
Mark grabbed a roof slate and sprinted across the gap rifle in one hand, slate in the other. I was busy watching the front so I can’t tell you how he did it, I can only tell you the result. I heard the start of a bark it only got as far as the W in woof. I looked over to see mark in position and sprinted over myself. The dog was nowhere to be seen and all was quiet. Mark had thrown the slate in mid run and hit the dog right in the mouth, an amazing shot for a stationary man extraordinary for some one who was running in a crouch.
We never had problems with the dog again, we saw it and it saw us. The only difference now was it would turn tail, and leg it into the house.
On other occasions the Serbs would get it into their heads to mortar us at dinner times. On these occasions the locals seemed to know what would be coming and disappeared for the duration of the attack. Perhaps they had something like the weather forecast available to them, only dealing with possible bombardments?
Any way, I made my way over to the garage one night and I was starving. A few large mortar rounds were hitting in the village, but none were close enough to our area to be worrying.
I went down the slope to the garage door. It was locked but I was prepared to wait, I was more or less under ground so any shrapnel flying by wasn’t going to bother me. Suddenly the barrage redirected its self on to the road behind me, the shelling was constant and they were trying to hit the front row of houses. The little concrete sided wedge that I was standing in was now a very dangerous place to be. The rounds were hitting the road but the shrapnel was spraying everywhere. All it needed was one piece to ricochet down there with me and I would be cut to ribbons as it bounced between the walls. The garage door was locked and the only place I could think to go was in the drainage channel laid between the ramp and the doors to stop the garage flooding when it rained.
The channel was covered with timbre, it was old and rotten and was easy to pry out with my hands. Once I had made a gap big enough to get through I slipped down into the hole and stood in the channel which only came up to my waist. The bottom of the channel was covered in thick sticky mud. A mortar exploded very close by and I ducked down in the channel, it was then that I realised what I was actually standing in. the channel was full of old sewage from people who had thought it was a great place to relive themselves, it was horrible. I don’t care what people say about it, if I were going to be killed I would like to have a certain dignity about it. The idea of dying in a channel full of shit is not the kind of thing I consider dignified, your family will never find out about it but your mates who pull you out afterwards will always remember it. I pulled myself out of the channel and lay on the ground next to it until the shelling stopped.
Our relationship with our host was always very strained. He would refuse to get out of his cellar to open up the mess hall when we were being shelled. He also refused to allow any protection to be added to his house. No windows could be boarded up in fact I think he was trying to see how long we could survive up there.
randy decided that it would be a good idea to create our own opps room, and from somewhere they produced a white board on a stand and set up in the room opposite our sleeping quaters, this lasted all of 3 hours on our return to the house we found the room locked and the white board gone. the home owner had decided that we were not going to have use of the front room.
Randy and robert were also insensed at the lack of cooperation they were getting and decided to move back to the mortar patoon behind us, where their skills could actualy be used.
Well we had had enough of our "hosts" as well and as soon as Randy and Robert left we went to move over the road with the rest of the unit.
Extra beds had been put in the cellar to accommodate us even then there would not be enough room for all of us. I found a good cupboard under the stairs on the ground floor, which would be ideal for me. Chimneys and stairwells normally survive when buildings collapse. So though the cellar offered some protection I thought the stair cupboard was better.
In the cellar there was a small cupboard where an electric water pump was housed, the purpose of the pump had been to draw water out of the well in the back garden and pump it into the upstairs water tank. With no electricity the system didn’t work and as the top floor had been hit a number of times by the Serbs, the owner of the house had prudently disconnected the cable in case we got power back and the pump started flooding the house from broken pipes.
In this cupboard the free be nasty’s were held, these were the weapons that nobody wanted to use but you could help yourself if you fancied anything. There were boxes of the first ever hand grenades made in Yugoslavia during the second world war, these grenades were so old they didn’t even have the familiar pin pull and fly off handle that people associate with grenades. Instead they had a common bolt stuck in one end of what looked like a home cast grenade. To use it you would have to tighten the bolt slightly with your fingers and then hit the grenade on a hard surface to light the fuse. Nobody wanted to try their luck with the grenades.
One of the other things they had were the famous anti tank grenades. Shaped like an old German stick grenade with a shaped charge head. They were designed to be thrown onto a tank as it passed and use brute force to blow its way through the armour, again considering the force required to breach a tanks armour this was not a thing we wanted to use.
The last objects in the cupboard of horrors were trip fired antipersonnel mines, they were Chinese or Russian and incredibly old. The mine was assembled from three parts, a wooden stake with a screw thread mounted in it was screwed into a dye cast body that is designed to fragmentize in a 360o angle. The final part of the assembly was the fuse/striker assembly. Most of these were very corroded! And that is how they got to live in the nasty cupboard.
Once we were settled in we got into the routine of stand too and guard duties. We had immense problems with the local commander’s handwriting he would write up the guard list in the manner that he thought our names were pronounced. So we would look at the list in the morning and think that we were not on duty only to be told a little later that we were.
The bunker that we used was built at the end of a dead end street. It wasn’t the best place to build a bunker; it didn’t have any great fields of fire in fact the only thing good about it that I could see was that the street didn’t show up on any of our maps. So hopefully it wouldn’t show up on any of the Serbs maps either.
The bunker was made out of railway sleepers piled on one another, with earth compacted around the walls. As with most of the positions that the Croats had built it was too high up for my liking. They seemed to be building high hunting posts rather than working defensive works. Perhaps what they didn’t realise was that this particular quarry was capable of shooting back.
On right hand side of the bunker stood one of the old Yugoslav sentry boxes, it wasn’t used it was just too heavy to shift and had been left there. Behind that, was the first house in a row of houses. The front of it had been damaged by artillery fire and you would have to be mad to try to go in there. The front steps of the second floor were easily visible from the Serbian positions, so nobody was willing to try to get up there.
Our O.P was in the house next to it. From the balcony we could look across the maze fields at the tank parked on the hill to our left. It was so annoying that we could see these targets but had nothing that could hit them! The roof of the building was just a skeleton of beams with a few slates thrown in for effect. The Croatian concrete box construction of their houses meant that most roofs were for cosmetic purposes only. Though I don’t think it was intentionally built that way the concrete “lids” on most of the buildings protected them from the odd artillery shell. From this roof we could see down into to Mirkovci. The terrain between us had a step in it that meant they could only see the roofs of our village and we could not see their village, however from the roof of the O.P we could see most of what they were up to. I could see track marks were they had brought up a tank and hidden it in a dip between us; also the outskirts of the village had been marked with range pegs so that the Serb riflemen would know how to adjust their sights if we attacked them.
Occasionally we could see smoke come up from the village as the Serb’s burnt a Croatians house. We could only hope that none of the Croat’s had chosen to stay behind when the others had fled. At night we could see the refinery at Mekanovci that was still burning, some times the Serbs would manage to put the fire out, but a mortar would get it going again. After all it gave them something to do apart from shoot at us!
Robert mark and I needed a shower and we were told that if we went to Vinkovci Head quarters we could get a shower there. The head quarters were in an old mental hospital in the town, the upper floors were abandoned because of the shelling but the cellars were massive and used as sleeping quarters for a lot of troops. The ground floor was used for the radio room and the scout reccon group slept in a separate room.
We asked were the showers were and were sent up to the first floor. There at the end of the corridor we found a little room of to our left that was the showers. Most of the floor had superficial damage from the bombardments all the windows were blown in and the plaster had come off the ceiling in a number of places.
The shower room was disgusting somebody had dumped a mattress covered in shit on the floor. Not a pretty sight. We striped off and took it in turns to shower, surprisingly in all the disorder of the place it did still have hot water, even if an arctic wind was blowing in through the broken windows. We towelled off and put our dirty uniforms back on. As we got ready to leave the store man came up from the cellar.
He was carrying a little bowl a piece of bread and a sausage. He pulled a key from his pocket and opened a steel door at the end of the corridor next to us. Inside there was a figure huddled in the corner. It was a young man slightly older than my self, handcuffed and dressed in civilian clothes was. The room wasn’t really a room it was a cupboard; there was a mattress on the floor and a bucket next to it. The man stood up and came to the door; the store man unlocked his handcuffs and stood back as the man ate his meal. Robert was thrilled at seeing his first ever real live prisoner of war. I doubted as to weather he was a combatant or not he just looked like a very miserable peasant but the store man insisted that he was one of the famous fifth columnists that the government insisted was everywhere. I think he was to stupid or to trusting to run away when the other Serbs evacuated. In a civil war no matter how you try, you can’t be neutral. We left him to his meal and his dark little cupboard prison back to the front where we hoped to fight real soldiers.
We normally got the late night or early morning shifts. It wasn’t the duty that bothered us so much as whom we would be on duty with. Some of the locals were very dangerous they varied from chain smokers, raving drunkards, to the ones that can’t do anything without a torch. Worse case scenario is you get some one who has all three of these qualities on duty with you. You may not think that this is serious, but when you have to stand duty with a man who is advertising your position by turning your bunker into a lighthouse in the middle of the night. You start to not want to be near him. Or in some cases you come to a tactic agreement that he can go back to a garage behind us for a fag whilst you guard the bunker.
On one of those nights I made an interesting discovery. I was in the garage a little way along the street under the O.P. I was having my last fag before going on duty when I found an American petrol cooker on the table in front of me. It was dark but I could feel its outline. The body was short and plump the stem leading up to the head had some kind of regulator on it, and the pot supports at the top were surprisingly short. This was obviously a Yugoslav field cooker but it was very badly designed. For instance the spike on the bottom was a really stupid idea, I mean most field cookers have folding legs not a spike. In fact I thought the thing was such an odd shape I wanted a better look at it. I held the cooker in one hand and light my lighter with the other. Where as before I had been in pitch darkness I could now see what I had been doing. In my left hand I was holding a landmine! I was not at all happy about that. I ask you who in their right mind leaves land mines on people’s tables? They should all be taken out and buried somewhere safe.

We can also see the church tower that is probably being used as an O.P against us. At the Head Quarters I saw a map showing the Croatian nuclear bomb, which was a railway carriage filled with explosives. The map shows the blast going in the direction of the Serb positions.
　
　
　
On some occasions, we were able to go into Novo Sello.
This gave us a chance to have a wash with hot water and a little time on our own, It was better than the headquater building. a chance to wash shave in reasonable warmth and a semi civalised atmosphere.
The house was begining to fill with piles of clothes and staple food items, they were of no use to us but had been used to pack out and hide shipments of weapons, the journalist had told me that automatic weapons wern't realy a problem and in reasonable supply but single shot long range weapons were what they needed the most. it seemed they had a contact outside the country who would offer an exchange of walther 7.62 hunting rifles with telescopic sites for automatic weapons, so the rifles were packed in bales of blankets and food aid and smugled in, how long this trade went on for I have no idea but the piles of unwanted aid were proof to its existance.
One night I went there to cool off, the house was all shuttered up and deserted, I checked to make sure the house was clear.
The peace in its self was alien and unnerving. I striped off all my dirty clothes to have a bath and threw them in a corner. After living and sleeping in the same clothes for 7 days a week you don’t really know how much you smell. Its only after you have had a good wash and go to put those clothes back on that you realise how dirty they were. As I got used to the idea of being clean and ‘civilised’, again I started to relax.
The next thing I knew the ground was shaking as a terrible chain of explosions went of around the house defening me; the walls were actually shaking with the blasts they were so close.
I was not impressed with this in the slightest, and then someone started banging on the back door shouting, “English come out!” with a very heavy accent.
Well it seemed to me that in my brief absence from the front things had really taken a turn for the worse and our position had been over run. They weren’t going to get me that easy.
I would rather go on my terms than theirs, I saw no point going like a lamb to the slaughter and people who meddle in other people’s wars can expect no mercy if they are caught.
So I loaded my A.K 47 crept down the hall and unlocked the front door as quietly as I could.
I then moved down the corridor as far back from the door as I could get. I was next to the bathroom in the darkness out of the wash of the hall light where I hoped I wouldn’t be seen. The tactic was that they would loose their night vision in the hall when they came in. whilst I could shoot at them from the safety of my position around the corner shrouded in the cover of darkness.
Then I got ready and sighted up on the door. I called out to them to come in. I was in the perfect position to take them out, but I held my fire, as I was still not 100% sure as to whom they were. I watched them come in and crouched down further in my position. The lead man was slightly hunched and the rear man called out again to me in bad English. When the lead figure drew close to me his face was in shadow and I was still not to sure who he was, he was bundled up in a Croatian issue combat jacket with a black woolly cap on his head.
As he turned to face me I saw that it was mark, his face froze in shock when he saw the gun pointing directly at his head.
I lowered my weapon and smiled, I was very relieved to see a friendly face after the uncertainty of the past ten minuets. The shock on his face was apparent, He asked me if the rifle was loaded (silly question) I took of the magazine and ejected the round from the chamber to make the weapon safe and showed the round to him.
To be honest if he had of called out in the first place we wouldn’t have had this slight misunderstanding, but he allowed dad to call out to me, after the shock of the explosions I was badly shaken and my only instinct had been for survival.
It seems that things had heated up on the front as a result of some nice artillerymen firing a Multiple rocket launcher from behind the house. It would have been nice if they had of told someone what they were about to do, but that would have spoiled the fun!
The three of us headed back to the front hunched against the cold and impending bullets unlike the locals we spaced our line each man covering his own arc, it was a good system one drumed into our heads by our instructors in the real army, and one that would save our lives on numerous occasions.
A new guy came up to us from Novo Sello. He was a New Zealander. His attitude had a lot to be desired, he was a typical bullyboy, and like all bullyboys he was week. He talked a good talk about barroom brawls and drunken heroics, but did he know what this was all about? He didn’t last long with us he grated on the nerves of the other unit members and finally flaked on us.
We had been to the coffee bar under the hospital and were coming back into Mala Bosna, the Serbs had put a couple of bursts across the road to tell us that they new that we were coming, so we went down into the ditch.
As we got close to the railway line we had to slow down and eventually wait, as we crossed the line one by one. The distance was not that great but as it was the beaten ground of a machinegun it was a terrifying run. Each time you crossed it you didn’t know if a spray of bullets would be heading up the line to meet you and shred you before you got to the otherside.
Steve Mark and Mike were the first in the line then martin and I was taking up the rear. The others crossed over at irregular intervals as we waited our turn. We could not watch them go because we were stuck in the beaten zone, as the others moved off we moved up to our start positions at the end of the ditch, Martin was beginning to freak out. I was scared, to me it was a normal thing to be scared if you are not then there is something wrong with you, and believe me when people stop being scared in war they normally get careless and die.
Martin however was beyond scared he was petrified. I was stuck in a bad position, he was blocking my way forward and I really didn’t want to be there any longer than necessary. Martin had now frozen up and it was up to me to persuade him to move forward. I am no good at talking to irrational people, though perhaps in this case we could say his fears were totally rational. I take after my father with his no nonsense attitude. I was scared as well but I had to try persuading him to go forward without relaying to him my fear as well. My first idea was to threaten to shoot him if he didn’t move, but this would prove counter productive later. My second idea was to fix my bayonet and give him a little prod with it, but this could also produce problems. So I had to try the old tried and tested method called lying. I coaxed him on by explaining that if he moved fast enough he wouldn’t get hit (false), and the best time to cross was after the gunner had fired off a burst (true) and after all it was only a ten meter dash! Eventually martin built up enough courage to make the dash. He ran across the track and not a shot was fired. I followed over as quickly as I could, I was terrified my heart was in my throat and I was out of breath after a little sprint like that. As I sheltered behind the building on the other side I found myself saying to myself “you are to old for this” I was only twenty one! Martins fear had totally infected me I would never ever go anywhere with him again.