What Does This Button Do?

by Bruce Dickinson

  ‘We can get into Sarajevo – maybe,’ I said. ‘There’s a tunnel. If we go back, we’ll never get there. If we stay, we might get there. Worst case, we stay and drink cheap beer for a week and find somewhere local to do a gig.’

  Actually, worst case was being blown to smithereens by a Serb anti-aircraft shell or landmine or getting hit by a sniper’s bullet. I put it to the vote, with a promise that if one person dropped out none of us would go, and no one would think less of him as a result. I meant it.

  Everyone was up for it, including the guys who were just a tiny bit terrified. They admitted to the fear and voted to go anyway. I took the boarding passes and returned them to Colonel Green.

  ‘Sorry, we are staying. We’ll take our chances on getting through the tunnel.’

  He took back the passes and thought for a moment.

  ‘Stay right here,’ he ordered, and scurried away looking busier than usual. Twenty minutes elapsed before he returned.

  ‘Right,’ he started. There was a note in his voice that said he was in charge of something rather than tiptoeing around it. ‘You are no longer anything to do with the UN. You are therefore guests of the British Army. As such, we will store your kit in the armoury for now, and I suggest we take you to the officers’ mess for a pot of tea.’

  The drum kit and guitar amps stacked up against mortars, small arms and magazines would have made a great picture, but we forgot to take one.

  By midnight we had been up all day, and had tea and lectures about the war. An RAF intelligence officer stood in front of the big map board and explained exactly what was going on. The situation was not pretty. I still have the set of tactical maps they gave me as a souvenir.

  We were into our first can of beer when the door was flung open: ‘In the truck, lads. You’re going.’

  It was T-shirt weather during the day in Split but chilly by night, and it was below freezing where we were going. Come to think of it, where were we going? In what? And driven by whom?

  The Serious Road Trip was an NGO (non-governmental organisation) that operated relief convoys in areas the UN deemed too dangerous to contemplate. It famously drove a red London bus into no man’s land during the Balkans conflict and ran a clown school for the children of both sides.

  The Serious Road Trip was going to take us into the war zone, and we would drive overnight via Mostar and into the mountains, finally ascending the mighty Mount Igman. At the summit, the army would take over. Armoured personnel carriers would meet us at Bosnian Army Checkpoint Bravo One, and from there take us into Sarajevo itself. So much for the plan.

  Our vehicle was an open-backed truck – a four-by-four with a canvas hooped top. We loaded the gear in the back and noted the pile of sleeping bags on the planked and metal-framed floor. This would be us for the next 10 hours in near pitch-blackness. Two crates of beer were chucked in for good measure by the chirpy young South African volunteer. He was going with us, as he’d done the run before. The driver was a young architecture student from Edinburgh. We had no escort, protection, helmets or flak jackets, but we had a secret weapon. Who would possibly want to shoot at a vehicle painted like ours?

  The truck was bright yellow with rather capable renderings of Asterix the Gaul, Felix the Cat and the Road Runner painted prominently on the sides and rear tailgates. It was the camouflage of imbeciles, and who would want to shoot an imbecile?

  We scrambled in the back and made ourselves comfy. Comfort, of course, is relative, and is as much a state of mind as an objective reality. I wedged my backside up against a flight case in the truck, figuring that between the axles was probably less spine-shattering than directly over them. I remembered the bottle of Jameson in my rucksack. I pulled it out. I had been saving it for Major Martin. Not any fucking more, I thought, and I cracked it open, just as Roland Hyams started rolling his first joint with a small piece of cannabis resin.

  ‘Where the hell did you get that?’

  ‘I’ve had it in the corner of my mouth since England.’

  I had several uncharitable thoughts but just let out a very heavy sigh instead. He could easily end up dead, so having got this far he might as well puff away, because it would all be gone by morning. My days of spliffs were long gone, so I passed the whiskey round.

  The night passed slowly, sleep was fitful and the cold seeped deeply into our limbs. The world was disappearing behind us through the canvas flap, suffused with a faint red glow from our tail lights, which painted shadows in the thick fog that had now enveloped us. We slowed to a crawl, then stopped. I poked my head out of the back: petrol station. Did people actually stop for petrol in a war? I suppose they did. I decided to sit up front in the cab. We would soon be approaching the base of Mount Igman, the 7,000-foot beast that marked the front line into Sarajevo.

  Now we drove into utter blackness; before there had been occasional dim streaks of white light by the roadside. In the distance I could make out the gigantic rock that was Igman. It was easier to see because there was a war going on at the top of it.

  Star shells and parachute flares hung in the sky, a firework display presaging death and destruction for those unfortunate souls atop the mountain, which was, of course, where we were headed. As I pondered this, we stopped fairly abruptly, as one does when a man steps out into the road and points an AK-47 at you. There are more friendly ways to hitch a lift, but I suppose in a war zone thumbs have been superseded by bullets and gun barrels.

  Our hitcher turned out to be a Bosnian soldier who was fed up with walking and needed a lift to the base of the mountain. He chatted away in Bosnian, and we were almost conversing in sign language when we bade him goodbye. He melted into the darkness and, at around 5.30 a.m., we started the long crawl up the precipitous track to the summit.

  ‘Have you done this before?’ I asked our driver.

  ‘Nope. First time.’

  I didn’t want to distract him. The gravel-and-dirt track twisted viciously and the headlights peered into the darkness beyond the edge. It was almost a sheer drop in places.

  ‘Some of the lads do this without lights,’ he offered, matter-of-factly.

  I said nothing. He switched off the headlights.

  ‘Tell you what,’ I said, ‘how about we switch them back on again?’

  What a tale those headlights told. In the pre-dawn gloom, we drove through the remnants of the Bosnian army going home. The headlights tracked along the rows of pine trees, and I remember thinking how beautiful this place would have been, and maybe would be again, if ever there was peace. Every few hundred yards was a war drama: two white ambulances with red crosses, windows wound down, bullet holes in the doors, blood streaming down the sides; a dump truck full of combatants carrying plastic bags and wearing half their uniforms wearily returning to what was left of their city.

  We were on top of the mountain. The fire fight was over and, like everything in this crazy war, who knew what had happened and who had won? Answer to both questions: nobody.

  Finally, we stopped in the snow-covered forest. The track curved away to the left, down a steep incline towards Sarajevo and the front line. Ahead lay a small caravan on wooden piles, smoke coming from a wood-burning stove. A single strand of telephone wire hung across the road and connected the shed to somewhere. We had arrived at Bosnian Army Checkpoint Bravo One.

  In front of the caravan was a washing line. The woollens and sheets were frozen stiff. I got down from the truck. I couldn’t see any armoured personnel carriers. They were, of course, supposed to be there.

  I knocked on the caravan door. Two soldiers, one male, one female, were warming themselves by the stove. I passed them a PR photo of the band and tried to explain our predicament. A shot of whiskey helped – we were all smiles later – but I was none the wiser as to our next plan.

  Down below in the valley, Sarajevo was totally obscured by thick, white cloud. Like an inland sea it rolled between the valley sides. The entire vista was Serb-controlled, except for the spot on which I stood.
Anti-aircraft guns modified to shoot horizontally ringed the basin, so they could shoot into the city or, for that matter, at the summit where I was standing.

  There was no serious attempt to dry the washing hanging on the line. It was a sniper screen. Sarajevo was full of shitty clothes flapping in the breeze to obscure day-to-day activities, lest a Serb sniper should take a dislike to your children.

  The sound of a revving engine broke the silence. Around the corner bounced and clattered a battered VW Golf. It pulled up and the occupants got out, high-fived each other and then drove off.

  Shortly afterwards, the bread van arrived in similar fashion, delivering one loaf for the people in the caravan. The driver spoke a little German, and with a bit of the sign language that had served us well, he proudly displayed the bullet hole in his front windscreen, exactly where his head should have been.

  ‘He try to fuck me! Nicht tod!’ exhorted the baker. The butcher and the candlestick maker were nowhere to be seen, but the warming rays of the sun did illuminate our local sniper, flitting in and out of the trees with a bedroll attached to his back and what looked like a hunting rifle with a telescopic sight.

  It was the only weapon I’d seen since the AK-47 at the base of the mountain. It turned out that there weren’t enough guns to go round, so people waited till somebody died or was wounded, and then their weapon was passed on. Actually, not strictly true: our team in the caravan had one axe, used for chopping wood, and the man had a highly polished hand grenade in his belt.

  The sun came up at 8.30. The fog had turned to mist, and Sarajevo started to become visible, like a long rasher of bacon, in the valley below. We had been there for two hours. We were also going to be in plain view of whoever was pointing guns at the track that descended into the city.

  That was the good news. The bad news was that our armoured vehicles had been stopped at the base of the hill. The local Bosnian commander had found an NBC camera team in one and threw his toys out of the cot. We would have to drive down the hill ourselves, in full sight of the Serb guns. Surely no one would kill an imbecile? This imbecile begged to differ.

  We started round the corner and down the single-track path. As I looked down to my right, I could see the twisted remains of the other vehicles that had been blown off the road. A prickly feeling began at the back of my neck.

  In a most bizarre circumstance, we stopped. Coming the other way, up the track, was a Coca-Cola delivery lorry.

  There is a Gary Larson cartoon of two deer conversing in a forest. One has a target on his chest. The caption reads: ‘Bummer of a birthmark, Hal.’ As I stood in the open while our truck backed up into a passing space, I felt exactly like the cartoon critter.

  The Coca-Cola lorry passed and we made our way to the bottom of the hill, where white-painted armoured personnel vehicles waited to finally greet us. I met the very enthusiastic Major Martin, and we bade goodbye to our yellow cartoon four-by-four. The gig was the same night, so sleep, food, a press conference and a soundcheck were the order of the day. But first the drive into the shattered city.

  The airport perimeter road was the front line. Both sides lay entrenched, yards from each other, as the UN vehicles passed between them in the grey mist. I was given a blue UN helmet and told to keep my head down.

  After a few minutes I poked my head out just enough to see the devastation. As we passed rows of semi-demolished houses, children scuttled between them like rats. The war had reduced families to a feral existence, and the city, including the military, was down to three days’ supply of food and fuel, and even that was at a minimum level of consumption.

  The city that hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics had been smashed beyond recognition. Fronts of buildings were a façade, as the back was blown away, or simply the entire structure was pockmarked with cavities and pebble-dashed with bullets and cannon shells.

  In streets strewn with rubble, cars stood like colanders, hundreds of bullet holes ventilating them. I could not for the life of me think what it was about a humble Renault that had provoked what must have been about 200 bullet holes. It was so extraordinary that I took a picture of it.

  A river divides the higher and lower sides of Sarajevo as it progresses down the valley. The Serbs controlled the high ground, and the snipers fired into civilians on their way to work.

  ‘Sniper alley’ was the name given to the highway that ran from the airport in a straight line to the city. Every time you drove up and down this road you rolled the dice. We rolled it several times, the locals rolled it twice a day or more.

  We arrived at the UN Headquarters, the former Olympic Village. The road crew got billeted in the bit with concrete sandbags instead of windows. The band got the penthouse suite, of course, which had iron bunk beds with old mattresses and the ubiquitous sniper tape covering the windows. Breakfast was a cheese roll and a beer, plus I donated what was left of the whiskey to Major Martin. He popped it in his desk drawer before proudly pointing to a dinner-plate sized cavity on the wall behind his desk, just above his head.

  ‘Fifty-calibre shell,’ he grinned. ‘Bastards haven’t got me yet.’

  Don’t waste time before drinking that whiskey, I thought.

  The spirit of the Blitz was alive and well in Sarajevo. The night was already falling when we woke up, with the cold starting to gnaw at our bones. We headed for the press conference. The Brits had managed to put together something resembling canapés – Ritz crackers with ketchup – and I sat with the local bands who would support us. There was no electricity, and the generators to power the gig would only be switched on moments before in order to save fuel.

  The guitarist next to me spoke some English.

  ‘How do you rehearse with no power?’ I asked.

  He cut me a glance as if to say, ‘What sort of a ridiculous question is that?’

  ‘We rehearse,’ he began proudly, ‘with our spirit.’

  Put firmly in my place, I nodded. ‘I believe you do,’ I muttered.

  The Bosnian Cultural Centre has probably been remodelled as you read this, but when I visited in 2015 it was identical to the place we played in 1994. The corner of the building back then had been rather impressively melted by an anti-aircraft rocket, but most of it was below ground.

  Word had got out about the concert, and because the Serbs were in the habit of mortaring public gatherings, schools had been closed and kids made their way home furtively, lest they became a target. Queuing round the block in Sarajevo was not just tiresome – it was life-threatening.

  There were rumours that wealthy ‘nationalists’ paid money to go on assassination vacations in the war zone. The head of the UN fire service claimed that he had a Serb hitman gunning for him back home in Connecticut. Like most things in this zone of lunacy, it was best taken with a pinch of salt. Our jolly fireman was the local CIA rep.

  The perversion of normal behaviour and the corruption of innocence was brought home to me when we visited an orphanage, which, sadly, was a work in progress, as fathers were being killed on an ongoing basis.

  At first we saw the infants, tightly swaddled like small mummies in an impossibly hot room. One male nurse in a lab coat was metaphorically spinning plates, trying to keep them quiet; their expressions were like masks, devoid of emotion, bereft of human touch. I made the fatal error of picking one up and feeling the warm pulse of humanity in my arms. First its dark eyes fixed on my face, then the hands started to open: a gurgle, a smile and a finger seized with the force that only a newborn can muster. The tears that flowed were of confusion, joy, anger and sorrow. What kind of a world was this innocent going to inherit? Chaos ensued rapidly. One gurgling infant led to the others awakening from their suspended animation, like a room of clocks all striking midnight at different times.

  Panic-stricken, our plate-spinning, lab-coated jailer rushed from cot to cot, desperately trying to put his charges back into the dead zone. Now the whole ward was anarchy: babies standing up, laughing, giggling, quite literally throwing things out
of their cot. I had never thought of myself as a baby anarchist before, but I had a massive grin on the side of my face as we left the room. As Doc McCoy said in Star Trek, ‘It’s life, Jim . . .’

  The bigger kids played outside, in the exposed cellars and broken staircases. The lack of adults meant that the ‘big boys’ looked after the tribe in what looked uncomfortably like it might have been a scene from Lord of the Flies by William Golding.

  We had a pair of drumsticks, an acoustic guitar and yours truly, so we started busking with Alex Elena, our Italian drummer, tapping away at the soot-blackened wall. It was a slightly awkward moment, as we realised that many of these children had never seen a guitar, let alone touched one. They were spellbound.

  ‘Hey,’ Alex shouted, ‘everyone clap, c’mon.’ And he started enthusiastically putting his hands together.

  In a moment still burned in my brain, one of the older children leapt up and clapped his hands – ‘rat-tat-tat’ – at the nearest group of kids. They fell down dead. The clapping was the sound of death – of machine guns and snipers. And so the next group fell down too, until all the small children lay with their limbs flailed out, frozen at the point of death. We stopped playing, dumbstruck. The kids got up and fell about laughing. It brought home to me how such a small thing as clapping can be twisted and subverted by the grim realities of a war zone.

  Down at the show, I was amazed to see a modern PA system had been set up. Our sound engineer, Jed, from Ireland, was scratching his head in wonderment: ‘Where the fuck they got this from, I don’t know, but it’s good kit. It all works.’

  I soon found out. The hall was rammed, and the heat from the bodies was cooking the air. This wasn’t a war zone: this was freedom; this was rock ’n’ roll – time to remember joy. The soundcheck was fine, and with 10 minutes till stage time I was summoned by Major Martin.

  ‘We have a problem,’ he stated.

  I met the problem upstairs. It was the group of bandits who had purloined/provided/hijacked the PA. They wanted money or they would take it away. There were six of them, all Bosnians, an interpreter and Major Martin, whose hand was starting to twitch around the butt of his sidearm.