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 Mi-AA and an AR-i5, 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 mak
e 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. i700 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 and 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.
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