I Am Soldier of Fortune

by Brown, Robert, Spencer, Vann

  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 talker of our group, Fenshaw, fully capable of carrying on both sides of a conversation, dropped his voice a few decibels, but continued to ram ble on.

  SHUT UP OR DIE

  “Shut Up!!” Doc Gonzales ordered him. When he did not, Mackley un sheathed a Fairbairn-Sykes 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 Bosnians 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 liv
ely 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 death 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 semi-automatic sniper rifle. Seven boat-tailed 7.9-mm 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 probably 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 ENE
MY?

  “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.