UNDER MACHINE GUN FIRE
By Robert K. Brown with Vann Spencer
Most of the artillery explosions and white-hot arcs of large caliber tracer bullets were a few kilometers behind us on the Sarajevo skyline. We had been cramped in the truck bed for many hours,
stuck in the suburbs of the city. We were miserably bound in flak jackets, in a sandbagged truck bed and were numb to the much closer AK-47 fire. As long as no bullets pinged into the steel of our truck, no one in our party seemed too concerned about the random rounds. Basically, all 12 of us in the truck were tired and wet enough that we could give a damn about who got greased as long as it wasn’t us. Then suddenly, a Serbian 12.7mm heavy machine gun opened up on us, coming at us in what seemed likefootball-sized orange tracers.
The hot rounds came screaming toward our soft-skinned truck and softer-skinned bodies. Silently and instinctively, we scrambled to shove ourselves deeper into the truck bed to protect our heads and arms from the killer rounds. Moments before, I had been amusing myself by dictating a play by play of the action into a tape recorder. I have been told that I record everything and that my tapes could fill dump trucks. But now we had nothing to do but count the malevolent tracers swishing overhead as the huge machine gun roared in the background. My tape recorder was a welcome distraction.
“I figure that the gun position is about 500 meters out and the only
reason we aren’t exposed is because we are hidden by that ridge of dirt,” John Jordan, a big, blustery, hot-headed Marine vet said.
We had left our Springfield Armory Super Match MIA behind in Sara- jevo or we might have gone into the night looking for the Russian machine gun. Jordan let out one of his booming laughs of nervous relief that shat- tered our silence, “The SOB knows we are here but he can’t depress his gun quite get low enough to get us. His gun is mounted in a concrete bunker and unless he takes it off the mount and moves out of the bunker, he can’t get us.”
I glanced at the column of trucks in the rain. Who knows what the Serb was thinking as he glared at our white United Nations white truck. We seriously doubted that he knew that the dozen men in the truck were Americans and Canadians who had just smuggled in some critical items right under his very nose, or that John Jordan, who had killed some Serb snipers, was in our group. At that moment Jordan was no more popular with us than he was with the Serbs. He was the one who had gotten us into this mess that had reduced us to sitting ducks at the base of Mount Igman, some 10 klicks from Sarajevo.
Jordan, then 38, a giant of a man at 6’4” and 250 pounds, had served seven years in the U.S. Marines and looked the part. An Irish American boxer, who worked heavy construction in Rhode Island, he had packed up to lead a group of volunteer firefighters, under the name Global Operation Fire and Rescue Services (GOFRS), who wanted to save lives in the blown- up and bullet-riddled streets of Sarajevo.
Since the beginning of the war, he had received permission from the Bosnian mission to the United Nations to haul men and equipment into Sarajevo to help the Bosnian fire department. He helped save the lives of a number of civilians and U.N. workers. For a time he and his volunteer firefighters and paramedics enjoyed the protection and help of the United Nations but, according to Jordan, after U.N. forces failed one too many times to protect him and his people, he went rogue and began shooting back at the Serbs, killing six snipers, which made the muck-a-mucks at U.N. headquarters very unhappy indeed.
SOF TEAMS SMUGGLE IN AIR-PAKS
I had been supporting Jordan’s GOFRS for some time. When he found out that I was bringing a crew to Bosnia and Croatia, he asked me to help get some equipment to firefighters in Sarajevo. Scott Air, the company that manufactured the backpack breathing apparatus used by firefighters while they were inside burning buildings, agreed to donate 20 Air-Paks to the Sarajevo Fire Department, and Jordan was looking for a way to get them in. I agreed to pay the cost of freighting the Air-Paks on DHL and Jordan’s airfare into Zagreb, Croatia. Jordan was to bring along enough U.S. vol- unteer firemen, who paid their own way, to help hump the Air-Paks over the mountain and into Sarajevo.
We landed at the Zagreb airport and all went as planned until a nitwit Zagreb DHL manager named Milan Percic told Jordan that the $45,000 worth of Air-Paks in their custody would not be released.
“This is not America, this is our country. In Croatia you must follow our procedures. If you fill out papers and pay customs duties, maybe you can have your shipment in two or three weeks.”
Jordan produced his documentation proving that it was humanitarian aid merely being transported across Croatia to Bosnia and then on to Sara- jevo. However, Mr. Percic, full of himself and his authority and, according to Jordan, not willing to be intimidated by America or Americans, wouldn’t budge. In fact, he became even nastier, blocking the delivery.
Jordan and company didn’t have two or three days, let alone weeks. After taking Srebrnica and Zepa, the Serbs would probably increase pres- sure on Sarajevo, and we might not even be able to get the Air-Paks in. Jordan notified me of the hangups when I was waiting in Split, the desig- nated assembly point for the Bosnian war. One of my party, J. P. Mackley, who had excellent connections, flew up to Zagreb. After he and an old friend, who was highly placed in the Croatian equivalent of the CIA, shared coffee with Jordan, both DHL and Croatian customs got a call notifying them that it would be a good idea if they arranged for Jordan to take im- mediate delivery of the Air-Paks and screw Mr. Percic. The dimwit Percic was suddenly anxious to expedite the mission.
“This guy,” commented Jordan, “acts like somebody really rang his bell.” No doubt.
The Air-Paks were released, but then there was the problem of how to transport them, along with eight firemen, to the bus station in down- town Zagreb. Then we still had to figure out how to get the Air-Paks from
Split to the jump-off point on the forward slope of Mount Igman above Sarajevo.
Bob Barrett, a firefighter with the Essex, England, Fire Department, ran an international aid organization called Fireman’s Relief Aid in his off hours. He was reckless. In late 1992, although every place in Bosnia was dangerous and difficult to get to, his organization got the aid into places where others feared to go. By 1994, many organizations were filling ware- houses in the tamer areas of Bosnia, but not many were going into Sarajevo. The city, left with perhaps 150,000 inhabitants, was wholly dependent on airlifted aid, and nothing came in over the road or through the Serb sieged airport. Barrett personally repeatedly drove tons of supplies down Mount Igman and into Sarajevo. On one trip down the mountain, a 20mm round passed between Barrett and his assistant driver and destroyed the engine block of his truck.
WE SCORE A LELAND TRUCK
As soon as Barrett met up with us, he was able to borrow a beast of an ex- British Army Leland-manufactured 21⁄2-ton truck from one of the NGOs hauling shampoo and soap up to the refugee centers in Tuzla. It was painted white just like those of the British Army, and equipped with left-side steer- ing for use outside the United Kingdom. It had a hole in the roof for access to a long-absent machine-gun mount and for good measure there was a large British Union Jack decal pasted on the middle of the dashboard. The tires were still bullet free.
That evening we packed the bare essentials we would need in the un- lucky event that we got caught on the mountain or got delayed in Sara- jevo. The meager supplies included two canteens, poncho and poncho liner, spare socks and skivvies, flashlight, lots of batteries, plenty of rope to lash on the items we might have to hump, and a variety of aged U.S. government rations we called “Ham and Motherfuckers,” all stuffed into a medium Alice rucksack.
Around 0900 hours the next morning, 13 men dressed in blue GOFRS uniforms loaded the Scott Air-Paks, one medium Alice rucksack per man, plus web gear and four large plastic boxes of $10,000-worth of medicine on board the big white Leyland. Phil Gonzales, a Special Forces medic who specialized in field anesthesiology, and I had worked together off and on
since I had him at my Special Forces team camp A-334 at Tong Le Chon in 1969. We had joined up later in Asia, as well as in Central and South America. And now we were in the hellhole of Bosnia.
“I can put you out in a shell hole,” said Doc, “fast enough for the sur- geon to filet you and then bring you out of it fast enough to catch the medevac. I have enough medicine to completely treat 40 gunshot wounds and enough IV solutions to keep you alive until I can get to you.” He handed out plastic bottles of Saline or Ringers solution to most of us along with the appropriate IV lines and needles. “In case you need to start an IV on yourselves or someone else, in case the whole truckload of us get a direct hit,” Gonzales said.
We passed into Bosnia. The Croatian border police waved the big Ley- land through. The identically dressed Bosnian-Croatian border police, who pretended to be unrelated, waved the big Leyland through on the other side. Although that part of Bosnia was controlled by the Croatian govern- ment in Zagreb, for reasons known only to them they pretend to be con- trolled by the Bosnian Muslim government in Sarajevo.
The Croatians controlled the prosperous region of Herzegovina that appeared to be mostly untouched by war at that point, since most of the damage had been repaired. New gas stations, convenience stores and hotels, probably funded by war profiteering or official corruption, had sprung up. The dividing line between Croatian Bosnia and Muslim Bosnia (and in fact between Western Civilization and Eastern) was the Neretva River pass- ing through the center of the city of Mostar. West Mostar, the Croatian part, was intact, but the Muslim-inhabited eastern side was firebombed after the Serbs first rained artillery on it, and later the Croatians bombarded East Mostar for about nine months, forcing the Muslims underground.
THE WAR STARTS FOR US
The war started for us as soon as we crossed the American Bailey Bridge over the river. The people we encountered were gaunt and gray, and the Austro-Hungarian architecture had been riddled with artillery holes. The Muslims had blown up every bridge north toward Sarajevo over the Neretva River to try to keep the Serbs and Croatians from crossing to attack East Mostar. The road detoured over makeshift bridges and at one point we waited for traffic to clear on a single-lane bridge protected by a lone Malaysian U.N. soldier. A civilian car slowed down to a crawl and the driver, face scowled with hatred, spat at us and flipped us the bird, thinking we were with the United Nations. The U.N. Dutch Army contingent had walked away from their “safe havens,” abandoning thousands of the driver’s countrymen, women and children to be slaughtered in ditches along the roads leading from Zepa and Srebrnica. A number of the young women were reported to have committed suicide rather than be captured. More than 8,000 Bosnians were murdered by Serb Army troops under the com- mand of General Ratko Mladic.
At Jablenica, a ragged Muslim in civilian clothes armed with an RPD squad automatic weapon, jumped into a banged-up Fiat police car and fol- lowed us through the city. At first we were on alert, but let down our guard a little when we figured he was just protecting himself, wanting to make sure that the U.N. people were not murdered in his jurisdiction.
As we neared Sarejavo, we saw a few houses that showed hits from heavy machine guns and from a main tank gun. Every town and village had skinny men of all ages outfitted in well-worn camouflage scattered about, appearing to be going somewhere.
Barrett’s organization maintained a transfer point at Tarcin on the re- verse slope of Mount Igman, some 30 kilometers from Sarajevo. A team of Sarajevo firemen was supposed to be waiting at Tarcin to help carry the medicine and Air-Paks over the mountain. Both for reasons of operational security and flexibility, Jordan had given the Sarajevo fire chief a fairly broad window, between 1300 and 1800, when he and his men were sup- posed to show up each day for three consecutive days. It was day two and they had failed to show up on either day. We no longer had the third day to play with.
It was Thursday. Mackley had been warned that the Croatians in- tended to kick off a major offensive the next Monday. We believed the low- grade intel, because if the offensive did happen, the Serbs would be certain to make things tougher on Sarajevo, which might include increasing their barrage on the city and laying in some concentrated artillery on Mount Igman. We could be trapped in Sarajevo for a few weeks or perhaps even a few months, not good for Mamma Brown’s boy.
We were deciding whether to scrap the mission and go home, or try to get in and get out of Sarajevo by Monday. Jordan decided that attempting the harrowing mission on foot was a no-go and that we should drive the big white Leyland down the mountain and take our chances with every- thing that could go wrong, including being hit by the infamous Serb 20mm that had nearly killed Barrett.
We tightened the velcro closures on our flak vests and strapped on hel- mets if we had them, just in case. Doc Gonzales double-checked the para- medics and gave us our marching orders: “Remember, the main objective is to stop the bleeding and start the IV to replace the lost blood until and if such time that you can get to a hospital.”
The guys at the next few checkpoints controlling access to the Mount Igman road held us up for a few minutes, pretending to make an official document check, figuring that our hapless bunch of gringos was on a death march straight into the arms of the gringo-hating, gun-toting Serbs.
We traveled over the typical torn-up old Yugoslav road, which was too narrow to let large vehicles cross more than in single file, forcing us to stop off and on to let a French VAB armored vehicle or a Bosnian truck going in the other direction to pass. At one point, we surprised three French Foreign Legionnaires on sentry duty at the start of a rough path cut in the bank of the main road. Our French speakers dismounted and asked them if we were going the right way. The Frenchmen shifted back and forth and one of them reached for the hand grenade he carried in his load bearing harness.
“Serbs pretending to be legionnaires had killed two French officers only a few days before, prompting the French to send a Mirage-dropped smart bomb to Serb HQ in Pale,” Mackley warned. He looked over the side of the truck for an escape route. The Frenchman with the hand gre- nade turned his back on us so we couldn’t see what he was doing, but in- stead of pulling the pin and throwing the grenade, he simply hung it on the harness of one of his comrades.
Shortly after dark, we hit the top of Mount Igman and started down the other side. Barrett was speeding up, switching his lights off and on, mostly off. He only lit them up for seconds, so Serb gunners would have difficulty spotting us. We began to get a few glimpses of the lights in the Serbian positions. We came to a sudden halt and detected some excitable chattering going on in the dark.
“Be quiet!” Jordan warned. “No English!” as he pulled out his big K- Bar knife and slipped over the side of the truck into the night. The compulsive blabbermouth of our group, Fenshaw, fully capable of carrying on both sides of a conversation, dropped his voice a few decibels, but contin- ued to ramble on.
SHUT UP OR DIE
“Shut Up!!” Doc Gonzales ordered him. When he did not, Mackley un- sheathed a Sykes Fairbairn dagger and prepared to shut both of them up permanently. Tension filled the truck. Jordan came back and broke the ten- sion with a breathless warning.
“I thought we’d taken a wrong turn and it was the Serbs up there,” he said with great relief. “If something happens and we have to run for it, run uphill. They will be shooting downhill as that is the direction they expect you to run.” The holdup was caused because two trucks had just been shot up ahead of us with a 20mm gun about an hour earlier on a stretch of the road called Breakdown Ridge. Six people had died and the wrecks were still burning.
“The French claimed to have knocked that gun position out as part of their mandate to protect convoys, but that same gun had been responsible for knocking as many as 20 trucks off the mountain in the past two months. No one even bothered to take the bodies out. The first French or British U.N. vehicle that was large enough for the task simply pushed the shot-up vehicles over the edge of the road. If the road was blocked, they said, more people would die if they could not pass that stretch at maximum speed,” Jordan said.
Jordan tried to convince the commander of the French VAB armored vehicle that he should allow our white truck to get in between his two white U.N. armored vehicles to travel the most dangerous stretch down the mountain. He told us where to go in the French equivalent of “tough shit, there isn’t enough armor here even for me if the Serbs start firing.”
Bob Barrett, a taxpaying subject of Her Majesty, had earlier made the same request to a pair of British armored vehicles going down the moun- tain and was told to bugger off. As soon as the next French VAB came past us on the way down, Barrett yelled back to us, “We are on the way!!”
THE VALLEY OF HELL
Jordan stood up in the bed of the truck so he could see where the tracers were coming from if they opened up on us. Obviously nervous about hav- ing us so close on his tail, the French armored vehicle driver tried to outrun us. But Barrett was the better driver and kept the big white truck close enough to the back of the VAB for us to note that the Protection Force part of the black-lettered U.N. license plate was painted white. To our right and down the hill we spotted the two trucks that had been shoved over the side of Breakdown Ridge.
It was pitch black and after midnight when we finally found our way to a firehouse in the Sarajevo suburbs. We obtained clearance to carry our medicines and Air-Paks through a tunnel that the Bosnians had dug under the tarmac of the Sarajevo International Airport. The French, who con- trolled the airport, were in bed with the Serbs and refused to let the Bosni- ans go over the airport tarmac and into Sarajevo so they had to go under it. The Bosnians took in food, weapons, fuel and ammo not allowed in by the French through what had become a very lively tunnel.
As Jordan phoned for permission for us to pass through the tunnel, he was told that he needed to head to Sarajevo immediately. A police car waited to take him to the tunnel entrance. We bedded down for the night. Former legionnaire Paul Fanshaw found a place to sleep inside piles of truck tires erected as an artillery barrier in front of the firehouse doors. Mackley and I unrolled our ponchos outside in the rain, refusing to get caught inside a building if the Serbs put in some artillery.
Early on Friday morning, Jordan phoned from Sarajevo: “We have been denied permission to use the tunnel. It is in such bad shape that it took me five hours to navigate the 1,000-meter, 3-foot, 7-inch-high route. It would be almost impassable for 13 people carrying heavy loads to navigate.”
We decided to go for broke. Barrett charged ahead, planning to present us at the airstrip checkpoint. We swerved through the suburbs of Sarajevo during broad daylight as we approached the road across the airstrip. Houses were largely abandoned and most were badly shot up from the constant incoming artillery and mortar fire. The entry to the tunnel, the only supply route, was devastated with signs of recent Serb shelling and was still in flames.
A French soldier waved us through the first checkpoint and we pulled onto the tarmac where we were protected by a high earthen berm. How- ever, as soon as we cleared it, we would be out in the open and vulnerable to anything the Serbs wanted to throw at us for about 200 meters. We all hugged the bottom of the truck for the fast dash, past the wreckage of a shot-up jet transport plane and into the open. The wind whistled over the truck. We easily passed the second French checkpoint on the outside of the strip and breezed through the Bosnian checkpoint as we entered a city of wasted buildings jumbled by a three-year volley of large caliber, high- velocity projectiles. We passed some civilians walking down the famous Sniper Alley, then pulled into the headquarters of the Sarajevo Fire De- partment where we offloaded the medicine and the 20 Scott Air-Paks. John Jordan was there to meet us, covered in mud from his trip through the tunnel and carrying his MIA.
By some miracle, we had passed through the valley of hell unscathed! The SOF GOFERS team was the first to break the Serb blockade of Sara- jevo in six months and the Sarajevo firemen were thrilled that we had pulled off bringing in the breathing equipment that would allow them to save a good number of lives.
Barrett decided to take the truck back across to the other side to get the food and clothes destined for the firemen and their hungry families. He loaded everything he could into the Leyland and decided that since it had been so easy on the first crossing, he would tow across a non-functional large, red fire truck that was nonetheless badly needed in Sarajevo. Todd Bayless, a Canadian firefighter, was steering the big, red fire truck as Peter Dietz, another Canadian firefighter, rode in the Leyland with Barrett driv- ing. They must have been quite a sight to the bystanders as they drove with breakneck speed into the killing zone of the airport tarmac. Certainly, no one tried to stop them and there was probably more than one bet about whether they would make it.
A SNIPER AMBUSH
Almost as soon as they left the protection of the berms and drove into the killing zone, a Serb sniper opened up on them from nearby with a Yugoslav SVD semiautomatic sniper rifle. Seven boat-tailed 7.9-mm Russian bullets had penetrated the soft-skinned trucks.
Four bullets hit the white truck and three were found in the red one. Shortly before driving past the protective berm, Peter Dietz, just for the hell of it, held an extra protective vest with a steel trauma plate up alongside his face. It was a good thing that he did and it was a good thing that he didn’t move much after he held it up. One of the bullets struck the edge of the armor plate on the front of the British-made flak vest. Had he coughed at the wrong moment or had Dietz scratched his scrotum, the sniper’s bul- lets would have missed the edge of the plate and passed easily through the Kevlar fabric. The result would have been Peter’s head looking something like a watermelon that had been dropped on the sidewalk. Both Dietz and Barrett were wounded by fragments of the bullet, which had broken up on the edge of the steel trauma plate.
The bullets all entered the cab from slightly above. One of the others passed through the thin metal of the Leyland’s cab. One of those bullets shattered as it passed through the cab and one of the fragments entered Bob Barrett’s leg. The third and fourth bullets passed through the bed of the truck, one of them entering about center, and the other hitting an accessory box in the rear and going on to neatly sever the wires from the rear taillight.
Todd Bayless was totally helpless. He saw it coming at him, but he couldn’t speed up or slow down or even swerve as he watched the sniper’s bullets hit the white truck towing him. He heard window glass shattering all around him, but when he looked up he was uninjured. Clearly the sniper had been waiting for them, having been tipped off by French Army sentries. They were regular French Army, not legionnaires.
When the truck pulled into the Sarajevo Fire Department yard, the U.N. white paint of the Leyland was flecked silver around ragged holes made by sniper bullets. The side windows in the red pumper truck were completely shot out and one well-aimed round had gone through the windshield, barely missing Todd Bayless’ head. He would have been toast had he not ducked.
“Lucky, lucky, lucky,” observed Doc as he examined the trucks and their occupants, all in miraculously acceptable condition. In three years of driving in and out of the city, Bob Barrett was targeted by direct fire “10 or 11 times depending on how you count them.” In Bosnia, indirect fire such as mortars, rockets and artillery did not count unless you got hit or it came close; it was usually a random act and if you caught one, it was just bad luck. Direct fire becomes a highly personal matter when someone tries to inflict harm on your very own warm body.
“I don’t know much about guns, and I don’t like them but I certainly take an interest in them when they are pointed in my direction,” Barrett said as he pointed to each bullet hole and noted the approximate order they came in. The main cluster of shots hit the cab of the white truck. Then the sniper moved back toward the red fire truck and placed another cluster in the cab all around Bayless. It was just a miracle that the sniper didn’t actually hit anybody since the trucks had to drive through the killing zone at 10mph.
Bayless had an explanation: “We were a ridiculous sight. When that sniper saw that red fire truck packed with boxes of old clothes being towed across the airport by that big white truck he probably thought that only idiots would try that kind of crap and he laughed his ass off and missed.”
“It was obvious,” said Barrett, “they were waiting for us. One of their spotters probably got on the radio to Serb HQ at Lukavica Barracks and they sent the sniper out.”
The Serbs knew well of John Jordan and the volunteer firefighters. “I used to be on decent terms with them,” he told us. “Hey, we are firemen trying to help anyone who needs it. We used to cross Serb lines and put out their fires too, but it started to go sour one day when a couple of U.N. Civil Police were trapped in a car wreck. I couldn’t get a truck in close enough because Serb snipers were very active, and I couldn’t get any help from the U.N. It was amazing, one of their own trapped in a vehicle with an engine in his lap and a sniper is trying to finish him off.
“We watched one of them die and the other one would have too if we didn’t neutralize the sniper. I had seen the muzzle flash and Bosnians who were there also identified the window; they’d been shot at quite a bit from there. So I started laying some rounds in slow-fire with the MIA from about 400 yards out. Anyway, the sniper was drunk or something, he was hanging out the window and I got him. Two days later we were fighting a fire on the hill above the stadium and the Serbs put mortars on us and their snipers shot up the fire truck. I returned the sniper fire. It became a major firefight. Relations weren’t good, and two days later U.S. jets led the NATO air strikes against Serb positions. American relations with the Serbs were not good from there on,” Jordan continued,
UN: THE ENEMY?
“We’ve neutralized a lot of Serb snipers since then and they would defi- nitely like to have our ass. And you know what the U.N. did for us for
saving their guy when they couldn’t? They screamed like hell and said we had no right to defend ourselves while we are fighting their fires and saving their people, and they sent armed U.N. troops over to take back the equip- ment they lent us. If I told someone in a bar back home about that, they wouldn’t believe it. They would say nothing could be that screwed up. But the U.N. is really that screwed up!” Jordan said.
Every Serb in the world knew of our trip into Sarajevo because the pre- vious day an interview that had been filmed the week before with me doing a standup had been prematurely aired by Fox News network in Los Angeles and other markets. Perhaps the largest Serb community outside of Belgrade lived in Los Angeles, and probably an L.A. Serb had been on the phone asking his relatives if the American firemen had yet smuggled the Air-Paks into Sarajevo. I had laid out the plan for Fox News on the understanding that they wouldn’t use it until the job was over and everyone had returned to the United States. Breaking their word not to broadcast until it was all over had seriously jeopardized our mission. We did not know this at the time and didn’t become aware of it until much later. However, we figured something was up.
What we did know was that if the Serbs were waiting for us at the killing zone on our way out, they probably would be better prepared. If there were 13 of us tightly packed in the bed of the soft-skinned truck, the probability was high that someone would be perforated. The worst part was that the randomness of bullets flying through the air guaranteed that all of us had a pretty even chance of catching the bad news.
There were only three ways out of Sarajevo: drive out the way we came in across the killing zone on the airport tarmac; leave the truck behind and try to get permission from the Bosnian government to go through the crowded tunnel under the tarmac; or try walking out at night through the sniper firing lanes and booby traps that lay among the grave markers at the Jewish Cemetery on the hillside.
We had to get out, now. Jordan had gotten word through the Bosnian government that the impending Croatian offensive would kick off in the next 48 to 72 hours; it would be likely that the Serbs would respond by laying plenty of artillery on Sarajevo to keep the Bosnians occupied. If things heated up just a little bit more, we could be stuck in Sarajevo for quite some time and that would be ugly.
As Jordan and I began working on the route and method of our exfil, Doc Gonzales went out to distribute the medicines we’d smuggled in to Sarajevo’s hospitals and clinics. The neighborhood clinics that first received trauma cases were largely without the medicines and implements they needed to treat gunshot wounds. Gonzales found the single greatest threat to public health in Sarajevo was Serb snipers when he checked the logs of the incoming cases. Cases that would have made the news nationally if they had happened in Seattle or Richmond seemed pretty ordinary in Sara- jevo.
A seven-year-old girl was shot down while playing in her backyard, as was an old woman who was too slow crossing a street. Others, clearly not male military types, were shot down in cold blood. Snipers on the Serb side of Sarajevo were not necessarily Serbs. According to the Bosnian mil- itary, there were also a few Russians, a few Americans and even a Japanese national who carried journalist’s credentials. They used Yugoslav-made SVD knockoffs and 98 Mausers, but the most common sniper weapon was a belt-fed RPD in 7.62x39mm, mounting a 4X scope. The common technique was to locate a target at any range and fire bursts, adjusting fire up or down as it went.
“On balance,” said Gonzales, “shooting little girls in their own back- yard is a pretty chicken shit way to operate. Somebody would be doing planet earth a favor if they took out some of those guys.”
Unfortunately, the counter-sniping was limited on the Bosnian gov- ernment side. According to Jordan, the expertise, let alone equipment, just wasn’t there. In fairness to the Bosnian Army, even the highly touted counter-sniper radar deployed more than a year previously by French U.N. forces had done little to check the sniper problem.
Shortly before curfew, I decided that we would go to the Holiday Inn for a beer so all 13 of us, including half the off-duty firemen, loaded into a VW bus, a truck and several cars. Mackley and I were unlucky enough to get into the lead VW driven by Jordan. Mackley asked one of the G.O.F.R. Firemen, sitting in the middle, holding both Jordan’s Springfield M1-AA and an AR-15, if he wanted to sit on the outside. “Nah, we aren’t going to stop to shoot it out. If we take any fire it will be near the Holiday Inn.”
The streets of the government-held sections of Sarajevo were not lit,
and clouds blocked the sky, making it black on the bleak streets of Sarajevo. Jordan had his nose to the windshield and the accelerator to the floor run- ning 60 miles an hour with no lights. With little gasoline in the city there wasn’t much traffic, but several times we swerved to narrowly avoid head- on collisions with other speeding and lightless vehicles. The nearest miss, however, was with a dumpster Jordan didn’t see in the darkened street. Every so often Jordan turned on the lights just to adjust his course. Navi- gating the darkened streets of Sarajevo gave a new meaning to the term “dead reckoning.”
A BLACK AND WHITE HITCHCOCK MOVIE
Stepping from the dark of a blacked-out city into the lobby of the Holiday Inn was like stepping onto the set of a black-and-white Hitchcock movie. One of the first things people noticed was that the place looked pretty run down. There weren’t many lights, and the dimly lit marble floors and high ceilings felt like Egyptian tombs.
Most of the occupants of the Holiday Inn were on expense accounts paid by television networks, humanitarian organizations and the United Nations. For enough money the best to be had in Sarajevo was found in the basement-level bar and dining room. TV crews, plus a few U.N. types and a jungle-camouflaged British Army captain, having gourmet meals by candlelight, occupied the booths along the wall. The same piano player who for three years had been playing Balkanized versions of “New York, New York” and “Sunday Kind of Love,” was hard at work, his black suit only slightly fraying at the cuffs.
Everyone appeared remarkably well fed, compared to folks outside who suffered visibly from malnutrition. There was an abundance of black-mar- ket food in Sarajevo, but the prices were in German marks and too high for ordinary people. We watched a fat Italian TV reporter cut into a steak that likely cost $100. “What a remarkable sight,” Doc Gonzales noted, “considering that the meat ration in Sarajevo had been one can per person per month.”
After about 30 Bosnian and American firemen sat down, I said to the waiter, “Please give us several rounds of beer and soft drinks for everyone.” At that moment, I did not care that the cost was $5 each. Fortunately, a wire-service reporter on an expense account ended up paying the $485 tab.
SOF photographer Mark Milstein and Mackley went up to the sixth floor to have a look at the war. We guessed that some people would no doubt live through the night because of the bad weather. Then suddenly, an armored Land Rover of the type favored by journalists from the televi- sion networks started out of the front driveway and was immediately en- gaged. Trying it once again, the Land Rover fell in behind a French light armored car and ventured out. The result was the same, but the firing seemed more intense, as if it were coming from both the Serb and the Bosnian sides.
The U.N.’s prestige had sunk to a new low when it gave the Serbs back the artillery surrounding Sarajevo in June and then abandoned to the Serbs the safe areas of Zepa and Srebrenica in July. It was the Srebrenica example that worried Sarajevans the most. According to the survivors’ accounts and information collected by intelligence services, there were mass murders and rapes after the fall of Srebrenica. A number of refugees were coaxed out of the woods and murdered by Serbs wearing U.N. helmets.
Early on Sunday we pondered the information crucial to our exfil.
“The tunnel is absolutely out,” I said. Although the Bosnians certainly appreciated the Scott Air-Paks and all of the great work done by Jordan and his firemen, they could not allow us to clog the tunnel. They were just being practical about preserving their only lifeline into the city to build up supplies, which could now be moved down Mount Igman but might be cut off if fighting intensified due to Serb anger over an unrelated Croa- tian offensive.”
“The only viable possibility was driving across the tarmac of Sarajevo’s Butmir airport and back up Mount Igman, and that route was also over- loaded with what-ifs. The first was, what if the French simply refused to let us pass? We all knew that the French were only allowed by the Serbs to control the airport if they cooperated. In fact there was a French military liaison officer sitting in Lukavica Barracks who reported nearly everything he heard on the radio to his French-speaking Serbian counterpart. All that had to happen would be the Serbs telling the French to hold up that truck long enough to call in coordinates and dump a few four-deuce mortar rounds on it, ” Mackley said.
Mackley had been one of the conspirators when some official and un- official Americans tried to smuggle donated telephone equipment into
Sarajevo to connect its lines to the world. The French repeatedly stopped them by informing the Serbs. The equipment eventually got through mainly due to the direct involvement of U.S. Ambassador Vic Jackovic. The French simply could not be trusted because they had their own agenda, which didn’t have much to do with doing the right thing.
“Assuming the French did let us through their checkpoint, they might keep us long enough for that sniper with the SVD to get set up, or maybe the guy was already sitting out there waiting for us,” I mused.
On Saturday afternoon, television interviews regarding the operation were given to both CNN and BBC reporters and they were likely to run the interviews on Sunday evening, which meant we had better be across the tarmac before that. We had smuggled a helluva lot of difficult-to-smug- gle items, including the 20 Scott Air-Paks, $10,000 worth of medicines and a red fire truck into Sarajevo right in front of the Serbs’ noses. Jordan and me on television, rubbing said noses in it would make for bad public relations with the Serbs, who might well dedicate some resources to try to kill us for it.
“We have no choice but to use the same route back. Even if we make it across the tarmac and onto the other side, four semi-trucks were de- stroyed by Serb artillery at the Hrasnica Bridge a couple hours after we passed through. We had made it through, but that was then. Beyond, there was Mount Igman and high exposure to the Serb 20mm aimed along Breakdown Ridge,” I recorded Mackley and Jordan’s concerns.
“There is no way in hell that anyone is that damned lucky,” interjected Doc Gonzales, who immediately went to work sorting out the implements and supplies he would need to clamp off bleeders and start IVs into those of us who would need it. The benefits of driving the white truck were clearly outweighed by the disadvantages. Being mistaken for the United Nations might give us some official advantage with French privates, but it might also cause us some grief with the Bosnians, and being shot by your friends kills you just as dead. Also, the high-visibility white was no deter- rent to the Serbs.
CORNERED
“When we go through, somebody is going to take a shot at us,” said Jordan as we interlocked sandbags along the front and sides of the truck bed.
“They see a dozen guys in blue uniforms hunkered down in the bed of this truck and they will shoot. The question is how accurate and how sustained that fire will be. As we move along we will be looking for places to hide if the engine is shot out.”
Mackley had insisted on the sandbags, but they were very heavy and too many would slow down the old Leyland, so we had to put them on the side where we were most likely to get hit, which for most of the route would be the driver’s side. We interlocked the sandbags as best we could along the front corner of the truck bed and along the side to the rear. If the Serb sitting on that 20mm so much as twitched his finger, those 20mm rounds would sail through the tailgate, the sandbags, everyone in the back and into the cab before they broke the engine and exited out the radiator.
We barreled down Sniper Alley, where there was nothing but shot-out buildings and burned-out shells of buildings, no other traffic on the street. We lay low and could not tell whether anyone was out walking or not. It was 1649 hours and we were stopped at a checkpoint. We didn’t know whether it was Bosnian or French.
“It is French. A couple of young men just leaned over the truck bed and asked for our passports, which gives the Serbs . . . how did you put it Mackley?” I asked him.
“It gives them time to know exactly where to shoot,” Mackley said. I spoke into my tape recorder again as the two French privates went away with our passports. 1700 hours and we were cutting it close because in an- other hour CNN would come onto every Serb television set in Sarajevo.
We had been sitting at the French checkpoint for 20 minutes—plenty of time for the French to notify the Serbs at Lukavica Barracks—when Jor- dan came back and stuck his head over the side to let us know what was going on.
“Do you think the Frogs would shoot an American,” asked Jordan, “for lifting the gate? Yeah, maybe so. I asked if they would let us into the bunker if the shit started coming in and they said ‘yes.’ Yeah, damn right they would.”
“There are only two of them,” Mackley noted. “The first mortar round comes in, we’ll just run over their asses and go on in their bunker.”
“By the way,” said Jordan, “these guys say they are familiar with the sniper who shot up the trucks yesterday. They say he is here all the time
nd that he is at 100 meters out.” The minutes dragged on and it began to drizzle. A large-caliber machine gun opened up in the distance. Just then Jordan reappeared. “We got another problem. The Frogs were about to let us through and this Land Rover pulled up. Don’t stick your heads up to look, we don’t want them to know how many of us are here, it might make the situation worse.”
Jordan continued to give a play-by-play to those of us lying flat in the truck bed. “OK, in the Land Rover we have a Bosnian brigadier and his wife and kid, a Bosnian colonel and a British major or captain. They are arguing now. The brigadier is telling the Frog that this is his country and he can go wherever he wants and they have no right to stop him. Guys, we may have to ram the gate and get the hell out of here. If the Serbs know this guy is here they are liable to send some bad guys in after him.”
Mackley interrupted, “Jordan, where are the passports? Get the damn passports right now and we’ll crash the gate.”
“Oh shit,” Jordan said. “The brigadier is reaching for his holster. Shit. They may shoot it out right here.”
“Get the passports!” I yelled to Jordan as he dropped off the side of the truck. We had been sitting for nearly an hour by then and that was almost enough time to get 20 snipers in position. Sarajevo was starting to look like not such a bad place to be stuck after all. Then the pipe gate was lifted and Barrett drove forward. Everyone was suddenly silent and the ten- sion was heavy in anticipation when the truck engine was suddenly turned off. Jordan’s head popped over the side of the truck again.
“We’re through the gate now so to Hell with ‘em, but we don’t have the passports back yet and I’m getting sick of this shit. They let the Bosnian go through, but they are holding us back because they say one of their ar- mored personnel carriers got in an accident or something up ahead. They still have our passports.”
For the first time, Jordan’s voice sounded a little concerned, which didn’t do much for the confidence of the rest of us. “I’m trying to be nice with these guys. I’m not being an asshole, but I gotta get out of here. My mortgage company doesn’t give a shit that French troops won’t let me out of Sarajevo. We delivered humanitarian aid and it is time to leave now. By now the Serbs have had a chance to rag their French friends about yesterday and, who knows, maybe they have gotten the word to start some shit.
Maybe that is what they are waiting for. Whatever happens they have no right to hold me hostage in Sarajevo. They can hold the truck but they can’t hold me and I will start walking across this tarmac very soon and take my chances with the Serbs.”
Hoofing it across the tarmac was not good—there were too many of us and we would be strung out in a nice pattern for machine gunners or mortar crews. We would be better off either taking our passports away from this guy or forgetting about them and driving on ahead. Another long minute or two passed and Mackley and I had just about decided to take our passports off this French private’s dead body when he handed them to Jordan, who threw himself into the back of the truck and suddenly we were speeding off across the tarmac and into harm’s way.
Doc Gonzales, who was wearing a flak vest, lay across Mackley’s body to give him a little protection since my vest was protecting the driver. We expected to hear the report of a sniper’s rifle and his rounds cracking into the truck, but the only noises were from the truck’s engine and gears. It was still daylight when we arrived at the last Bosnian checkpoint before the Mount Igman road. The guards refused to let us pass and several other trucks were pulled off to the side of the road.
IT’S A SETUP
Barrett told us, “What the Bosnians are telling us is that we were being set up for the Serbs back at the French checkpoint. A French VAB had fallen off the road and tumbled down the mountain. Three French troops had been killed and they were holding up traffic while the French tried to do a recovery.”
“Get the hell out of here,” the Bosnian trooper at the guard post yelled when we pulled the big, white truck to the side. “The convoy won’t get underway over Igman until around 2300. You are going to draw fire. You are a prime target that jeopardizes all of us, so get lost.”
As we started down the road, an AK-47 opened up on us from close range. We all went down as the rounds buzzed over us. Barrett put the pedal to the metal.
“It’s the Bosnians shooting at us this time,” Jordan yelled. “It’s just a warning. They don’t want us parked near their houses drawing Serb mortar fire.
We went back to the Hrasnica firehouse and waited for nightfall. As we waited, Mark Milstein wandered off in a cammo poncho. He was stand- ing in front of the grocery store, his arms full of chocolate and sodas. A lot of starving people were watching from the surrounding apartment build- ings when someone shot at him. The round landed between his feet, and the chocolate and soda went flying. Milstein’s foot had just begun working well again after the last time he was wounded. He was in a bad humor when he came back to the fire house but Mackley had a great long laugh and told him he damn well deserved it. (Mackley and Milstein almost got into a knife fight in the hotel dining room in Pristina, Kosovo a few years later. I had to intervene to preclude soiling the ratty carpet with blood and one of them ending up in a rat infested KLA prison.)
About 2200 we returned to the checkpoint at the base of the Igman road. It was raining and black and we were grateful. After a few hours most of us settled down and snoozed fitfully as the skyline periodically lit up with explosions.
It was about 0400 the next morning when Barrett started the engine and we began moving up the mountain. We were about the seventh truck back as we wound around to the start of the road and put our big white tail toward the Serb with the 20mm gun. I got bored and started to doze off. Mackley rudely woke me up after a few minutes and pointed down the mountain. It was almost daylight and we could see. The weather had held for us; it was still raining and the cloud cover was low. The Serb gun- ners couldn’t see us anymore. We were home free .
Further down the road we were held up in Mostar while a motorcade went by. It was the Bosnian president being followed by the Iranian am- bassador. The Iranians were supplying him arms and all we had brought were $45,000-worth of Scott Air-Paks and $10,000 worth of medicine. About the only real help that Sarajevo was getting from the Americans thus far was coming from SOF, Doc Gonzales, John Jordan and the volunteer firemen. Eight years later Mackley visited the Sarajevo Fire House and found the Scott Air-Pacs. They were all the worse from repeated use and the firemen still remembered John Jordan, that giant of a man with brass balls whom we could never forget……………
I swore I would never go back to that Godforsaken land. Until Clinton bombed it in 1999, that is.