was doing something positive. It was a great tonic and, I’m convinced, stopped me from losing it. As I scrawled my mind retreated a step or two back from the edge of panic. There was one card missing.
‘He hasn’t got one. The boilerman’s a local.’ The staff sergeant nodded towards the youth next to me.
‘Kako se zoves? What’s your name?’ The boy was trembling. He half whispered something, Darko, Dario, Mario or something. I couldn’t quite get it so simply wrote down boilerman – local.
The shelling continued sporadically, the gaps between the salvos increasing. Five minutes passed. Nothing. Another couple of minutes. Still nothing. For the first time I noticed it was freezing in the vehicle. Suddenly the door lever sprang upwards. A helmeted soldier poked his head in.
‘Who’s in this one?’
‘Here you go. It’s all there, if you can read it.’ He grabbed the slip and tore off into the night.
We sat there in silence waiting for the corporal’s words to throw us into terror. They never came. Eventually, the door was opened. It was the runner again.
‘All clear,’ he announced cheerfully. ‘It’s all clear. You can come out now.’
I was stunned. All clear? Just like that! ‘I suppose someone’s rung up the Serbs and asked them if they’ve finished for the night!’ I quipped, more out of relief than sarcasm. But he’d already disappeared.
Stiffly we eased ourselves out of the Spartan. I expected devastation. There was nothing. The sky was cloudless and the moon had risen higher, casting its chilling rays, illuminating soldiers who were clambering out of other vehicles and walking slowly back to the warehouse clutching their sleeping bags.
‘Well, I don’t know about you, but if they do it again I’m not taking cover in that fucking thing – it’s full of petrol.’ I was shocked at what we’d done. The staff sergeant mumbled his agreement. There was more to it than just the petrol and the exposed position of the vehicle. The worst of it had been the claustrophobic and narcotic effect of being in close proximity to other people’s terror. We’d all set each other off.
Next to the boiler room door stood a large square chimney running up the outside of the building but offset from the wall by about two and a half feet. Where it disappeared into the ground, between wall and chimney, was a concrete-lined well about four feet deep. Perfect for two people. That’s where we’d be going next time.
Together we found a couple of hefty slabs of concrete, a manhole cover and some sandbags, enough to create some form of overhead cover against splinters. Twenty minutes of grunting and heaving warmed us up considerably. I was pleased. The chances of a shell actually landing on us were slim. Satisfied that we knew where we’d be going next time, we retraced our steps into the warehouse and parted company.
In the warehouse I spotted Brigadier Cumming, Colonel Field and his RSM, Graeme Furguson. They were chatting and laughing, an encouraging sign. Someone had produced an urn of sweet tea. There was plenty of nervous chatter and laughter, a strange but perfectly normal reaction to stress. I asked the Brigadier where he’d got to.
‘Oh, I had a marvellous time. I was in the command APC. They even made me a cup of tea!’ He seemed quite relaxed about things. I recalled the 432s clustered somewhere round the back of the building. At least he would have been spared the running commentary and the clock-watching.
The CO and RSM were doing their leadership bit, moving among the soldiers and chatting. It all helped. It was time to try and get some kip so I wandered back to my sleeping bag only to be confronted by a disturbing sight.
Standing in the half-shadow, just beyond our bergens and sleeping bags, were three soldiers. With them was a young Sapper lieutenant supported by two others. He seemed to be trying to get away from them. But, they weren’t so much trying to restrain him as calm him. One was holding his left arm and patting his shoulder while the other was attempting to soothe him. He seemed oblivious to them both. His eyes, unfocused, wild and staring, said it all. His lips trembled slightly. Occasionally he’d gulp hard and nod his head, but his eyes just kept staring. He’d had it. Genuinely shell-shocked.
‘He all right?’ I asked, approaching.
The one on the left shot me a glance. ‘He had a bad time of it this afternoon. This last lot …’ He didn’t bother finishing the sentence.
‘He’ll be fine,’ chimed in the second, which really meant ‘leave us alone’. I was only too glad to. It was unnerving seeing someone’s soul stripped bare, so starkly reminding me of my own terror.
I thought the Serbs were bound to shell us again so I didn’t bother taking anything off. Somehow I managed to cram myself into the sleeping bag still wearing the flak jacket, but I couldn’t zip the bag up over the bulk. It was a wretched night and I suppose I was still edgy. I dozed fitfully on the cold concrete while freezing air seeped into the bag. They had the last laugh: there was no more shelling that night.
Breakfast was a subdued affair. I found a place opposite Seb at one of the wooden trestle tables in the makeshift canteen in one of the halls. He was talking about the shelling, banging on as if none of us had been there. I suppose it was just a delayed reaction or just his way of getting it out of his system but it was irritating and he was making me distinctly nervous. I didn’t need an action replay over breakfast.
‘Seb, it’s over, it’s passed. Just drop it.’ It was precisely the wrong thing to say. He rounded on me angrily.
‘Yeah, that’s right, rufty tufty Para. Easy for you to play it cool, especially if you’ve been through it loads of times. For some of us it was our first time.’
I was stunned by his presumption. Suddenly, I didn’t feel like breakfast, got up and walked off. In the following six months Seb and I could barely stand to be in the same room as each other. The atmosphere would always be tense and uncomfortable. Was it because he thought I’d seen him lose it that night? Who knows. It’s strange and sad what these things do to people.
Before we left Brigadier Cumming inspected the night’s damage. In the compound where we’d taken cover in the Spartans stood a row of four-tonne trucks some thirty metres forward of the APCs. Nearly all were shrapnel-damaged and sagging forlornly on punctured tyres. The walls of the warehouse were deeply scarred. To one side of the warehouse two Land Rovers had been completely destroyed. A shell had landed fifteen metres on the other side of the compound fence and shrapnel had ripped through their soft aluminium sides, turning them into sieves. It was a sobering sight.
Not one shell had landed within the compound. Further analysis revealed that the shells had landed some 100 metres forward of the camp with the nearest landing about seventy metres away. How could the Serbs have managed to converge all their guns on one spot and yet drop all the rounds short? Maybe it had been deliberate, a warning – stop allowing the Croats to fire their guns from behind UN buildings. Another suggestion was that they’d intended to hit the warehouse but had been working from old and inaccurate maps. I doubted it; they’d recorded that particular DF during the day and would have known to ‘add one hundred’.
In all some thirty-three 152mm shells had been fired that night. Astonishingly, no one had been hit. Two things had saved us. The first was the row of four-tonne trucks which had absorbed some of the shrapnel, the second that the Serbs had been using old stocks of shells which had burst into large lumps of jagged metal. Although these looked menacing, they travelled less far and quickly lost their energy. Modern artillery rounds fragment into splinters one third of the size and travel three times further. We’d been lucky. The TSG incident so disturbed the politicians back home that a Naval Task Force, including a regiment of 105mm light guns, was quickly dispatched to the Adriatic.
We departed TSG at 0900 hours. Brigadier Cumming was keen to get back to Tac in Fojnica as quickly as possible. Another crisis was brewing. While we’d been racing down to TSG, a French APC transporting the Bosnian Deputy Prime Minister, Hakija Turajlic, to the airport in Sarajevo had been stopped by Chetniks, Serb irregulars. After a stand-off, they’d gained