I Am Soldier of Fortune

by Brown, Robert, Spencer, Vann

  MacKenzie and I, bored to tears, hung around the Holiday Inn waiting for our local fixer to arrange a visit to some of the defensive positions in Sarajevo. That night in the Holiday Inn bar we were picking the minds of other journalists. I was interviewing a French report about the Foreign Le gion. Mac was a few yards away with several alleged reporters. He suddenly broke away, approached my table and with a disgusted look on his face growled,

  “You are not going to believe this.” “What now?” I replied.

  “See that good looking blonde at the table I just left? She must be all of 20. She is dumber than a fence post. When discussing the ruthlessness of the Serb Snipers, she became agitated and said, “Well, why don’t they just throw land mines at the snipers. The editor at Elle should be strung up for the yardarm for sending her.”

  One positive thing came out of Mac’s round table. A free lance jour nalist who had been in Sarajevo for a couple of months volunteered he could get us to the frontlines. It wasn’t ‘til we hired him did we find out he had a case of tourrette syndrome. We had almost given up because only a suicidal maniac would try to dodge the unending incoming fire, despite the supposed ceasefire in effect, just to escort a couple of journalists trying to get a story.

  SNIPER’S ALLEY

  That is when I first met Mark Milstein, a fanatic of a journalist who had figured out the ropes of how to get the necessary papers after several months in Sarajevo. He was relieved that professional soldier MacKenzie would join him interviewing a unit tasked with suppressing snipers in a Serbian-held suburb on a hillside overlooking part of Sarajevo. Since I was able to get an appointment with the French Foreign Legion unit securing the Sara jevo airport, MacKenzie and Milstein headed out for the front lines.

  The following is MacKenzie’s report: “We didn’t have to go far to find the front; it was about a block away from the Holiday Inn. We first crept around the sides of the hotel, trying to make ourselves invisible to gunmen on the hillside above. On reaching the edge of the dreaded Sniper’s Alley (the dread was real enough—a civilian had been shot in front of our hotel the previous afternoon), we firmly grasped our camera bags, tightened up our rear apertures and sprinted across a hundred meters of empty boulevard and center divider. It was almost an anti-climax when we got to the cover of some shell-pocked buildings on the other side of the street without draw ing a single round of small-arms fire.

  “As Milstein had been there before, he led the way around parking lots and pedestrian concourses to the local command post. There we presented his paperwork and spoke to a succession of increasingly senior Bosnian Army soldiers until finally the area commander, Ante, appeared. We must have impressed him, or maybe it was a slow day, because he decided to show us around himself.

  “Ante’s unit was responsible for 800 meters of front along the 10-meter-wide Miljacka River, which runs through the middle of Sarajevo. Ruined factories, burned out skyscrapers and scarred apartment buildings (still occupied!) provided his men with excellent cover and observation of similar Serbian positions, which in some places were only 20 meters away across the river. As my friend and I followed Ante through the rubble, we asked him about his troops. He prudently wouldn’t tell us their strength, except to say that he could get as many men as he had arms to issue.

  “Some of his troops were members of the Bosnian Army and some were from a police counter-terrorist unit formed to provide security for the 1984 Winter Olympics. Some had served in the Yugoslav Army and some had no previous military experience. However, all were fiercely de termined to defend their city from the “Serbian invaders.” The few cam ouflage-clad female combatants in the group, some of whom were reported to be counter-snipers, were in obvious agreement. A platoon leader told me that of his 3 7 men, seven were Orthodox Serbs, five were Catholic Croats and 25 were Muslim Bosnians. He said they were fighting together because they had always lived together and wanted to do so in the future, without interference from politicians in Belgrade, Zagreb, the United Na tions or their own city hall. That attitude, widespread among all ethnic groups living in Sarajevo, denied the Serbs the easy victory they hoped for when they started fighting there in April 1992.”

  MAUSERS AND .50 CALS

  The unit was armed with a variety of weapons, which provided them with good counter-sniping capability and included scoped German K98k Mauser rifles and Yugoslav copies; Russian Dragunovs and Yugo M76 snip ing rifles; and the M72AB 1 N-PN Yugo FAZ weapons-family light ma chine gun variant with a folding metal stock, which was also fitted with bases for telescopic sights. At one position I noticed a small, neat pyramid of .50-caliber shells which, when I asked, were said to have come from a .50-caliber bolt-action rifle.

  The unit’s several machine guns had also been used with some success by responding to muzzle flashes at night with short bursts. Rounding out the unit’s weaponry were Yugoslav AKs, a scattering of hand grenades, some anti-tank rockets and, as always in Bosnia, a variety of civilian shotguns and hunting rifles.

  Whatever the weapon in use, after months of practice the Bosnian counter-snipers knew their jobs. Their hides were always well back from windows or shell holes and they had easy routes to dozens of alternates.

  Since Serbian counterfire often took the form of a tank round, “shoot and scoot” was one of their most closely followed operating principles. With every two or three shooters was an observer equipped with binoculars or 40x42 spotting scopes, who also carried maps and sketches of scores of known Serbian positions and bunkers.

  As I climbed many, many stories up the parliament building, I had a firsthand look at the Bosnians’ biggest problem in trying to suppress enemy snipers. On the hillside opposite were literally thousands of empty windows and thousands more trees, bushes, and piles of debris, each one a potential firing position. One of the worst areas was an overgrown cemetery, about 300 meters away, where each crypt and tombstone could hide a rifleman. Clearly, the Serbs were proficient in their tactics and use of ground.

  These phantom shooters seldom were highly skilled military techni cians with specialized equipment, selectively taking out justifiable military targets at ranges of up to 1,000 meters. More often than not, it was a Chet-nik taking potshots at baby carriages from 200 meters with an AK. It was simply the callous, terrorist assassination of innocents. Most journalists and U.N. observers agreed that the sniping of civilians was premeditated— the objective being to force civilians to leave the city.

  Ironically, some of the Serbian sharpshooters had served in the same police counter-terrorist unit as their Bosnian counterparts and they were all known by name to each other. Perhaps the most discussed was a former shooting instructor who had trained some of the same people trying to shoot him. An Olympic-medalist marksman, he was reputed to be very capricious in his choice of targets. The first week only women, the next week only journalists, the following week firemen, etc. His former students were very much in dread of his cross hairs, as he reportedly never, ever missed. If he dropped the hammer on you, you got more than your ticket punched. Why this former policeman, once dedicated to law enforcement and who specialized in anti-terrorism, had now become virtually a terrorist himself, was the subject of a good deal of conjecture. As with many things during the war in Bosnia, there were no obvious answers.

  Unable to take Sarajevo by storm, the Serbs resorted to murder-by-rifle-fire and indiscriminate shelling to force the surrender of the city. Since the battle had started the previous year, some 10,000 people had been killed and 60,000 wounded, the vast majority civilians. Serb troops cut off the electricity and water and were trying to prevent food from getting in, hop ing to break the resistance of the inhabitants. The populace was now being forced to boil sewage for drinking water. The Serbs made a mockery of U.N. forces, closing the airport and stopping convoys whenever they felt like it. All this happened while American and European political leaders bickered over whose fault and whose responsibility the war was, and issued statements condemning the actions of just about
everyone. It was enough to make a grown man weep with frustration—or maybe take a rifle and go shoot a Chetnik.

  31

  HARD ROAD TO SARAJEVO

  UNDER MACHINE GUN FIRE

  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 like football-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 £’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 G.O.F.R.S. 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 2½-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 anesth
esiology, 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.