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Be humble for you are made of dung. Be noble, for you are made of stars.
SERBIAN SAYING
We knew that the men who launched death from the top of the mountains overlooking the city normally slept off their hangovers in the mornings. For this reason we set off early, confident that we could get in and out of Mostar before the heavy weapons resumed their relentless task of tearing the homes, churches, mosques, vehicles and people of the city apart. Squeezed into the passenger seats beside me, for this last leg of our four-day drive from Scotland, were Father Eddie, a short, plump, middle-aged priest, and Julie, a tall, beautiful young nurse. Over the last few days the three of us had become good friends. Two nights ago, parked beside a filling station in Slovenia, we had talked long into the night. Father Eddie surprised and disturbed us a little by explaining that before leaving Scotland he’d had a feeling he might never return home and so had given away most of his worldly possessions to his parishioners. Later, Julie told us how, a few months earlier, she had awoken in the middle of the night feeling strongly that God was asking her to give up her job to help the people in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Her story moved me because of her deep faith and because it had some similarities to my own. I felt a little ashamed that when she had first phoned me to ask for a lift to Bosnia-Herzegovina I had not been at all enthusiastic about the idea. By now I was very glad she had managed to change my mind.
As we drove through a harsh Bosnian landscape of jagged rocks and thorn bushes, we prayed a rosary together and then chatted a bit nervously as I concentrated on the twisting narrow road. Soon we began to pass the remains of people’s homes. Some were reduced to piles of rubble, while those still standing had become burnt-out bullet-marked carcasses. We drove on in silence. The road began to snake downhill and Mostar appeared below us, sprawling along the Neretva, the famous river which has often been described as a dividing line between the cultures of East and West and which today was the frontline between Serbian forces and the Croat and Muslim territory through which we were driving. The minarets of mosques were visible down in the old Ottoman quarter, and for a moment I thought of my first visit to this town many years before when we had browsed little street stalls beside the river and watched young men prove their bravery by leaping from the famous Stari Most Bridge into the rushing green torrents below. On the descent into the city we were stopped at a checkpoint manned by HVO (Bosnian Croat Army) soldiers. A thin man with a machine gun on his shoulder and cigarette in his mouth walked to my open window and stared at us sullenly, his brandy breath drifting into our cab. Unsmiling, he held out his hand, and we gave him our passports and the customs papers for the medical equipment in the back of the truck. The delivery of this equipment was the reason for our journey and now, about a kilometre away, on the slopes of the city below us, we could see Mostar’s general hospital, our final destination. It was easily recognizable and we stared at the modern, shiny high-rise building, which towered above the surrounding houses. Even at that distance we could see that a shell had ripped a massive ragged hole in its side. The soldier waved us on and we drove carefully through streets of twisted metal, shards of glass, piles of rubble, burnt-out cars, chewed-up tarmac and hate-filled graffiti. We entered the hospital grounds. Outside the hospital several refrigerated trucks were parked with their engines running; makeshift morgues for a city that had long run out of space for its dead. Under the front-door canopy, three hospital staff in white overalls recognized our arrival and waved. My anxiety eased and a feeling of elation took hold of me. I was beginning to congratulate myself silently on a job well done, and found myself wondering if Julie was impressed, when I suddenly realized, a little too late, that the welcoming party’s waves were turning to urgent stop signals and their smiles to cringes. My heart hammered hard as I jammed on the brakes and heard a crunching noise above my head. In front of us, our welcome committee now doubled up in laughter and it was then I realized what had happened. Their hospital had just taken another direct hit; this time by a small, battered truck from Scotland, whose amateur driver had misjudged the height of the canopy overhanging the entrance and instead of parking under it had driven straight into it! A quick inspection revealed that I had torn a hole out of the top corner of the truck’s box, while the damage done to the hospital’s canopy was hardly significant compared to the punishment the rest of the building had been taking. The greatest, most lasting damage done was to my own ego.
We unloaded the equipment quickly and drank a hasty cup of coffee with two young male doctors. They suggested we get out of town before the shelling started and that we follow them to a safer venue for a chat. Near Medjugorje, where we were to stay the night, they stopped outside a roadside hotel that had been raked by gunfire and damaged by shells.
Over a coffee the doctors explained to us that, because of the extensive damage caused to their hospital by the shell strike, only the ground floor was now in operation. The building was becoming impossibly overcrowded and they were lacking even the most basic of medical supplies. They were particularly delighted with the external fixators we had brought them as they were treating so many patients with smashed limbs, and they urged us to deliver them more supplies. We explained to them that Julie had travelled with me because she was a nurse and was willing to give up her job in Scotland to work as a volunteer here. They replied that they had enough nurses but not enough medical equipment. They suggested that perhaps Julie join me in my efforts to collect surplus medical equipment in Scotland because by now they had realized that as well as not being able to drive a truck particularly well, I also didn’t know the first thing about medical supplies, so someone who did would have to get involved if I was to be of much further help to them. I was surprised by how delighted I felt at the prospect of Julie working with me, but just mumbled that we could mull it over. Julie said something similar and I decided I had better not get my hopes up. From medical matters the conversation drifted inevitably to the war situation. The doctors described how the ‘Chetniks’ on the mountains were now targeting not only the hospital, but ambulances too. Several had been destroyed while trying to carry patients to the hospital. By now they had swapped their Turkish coffees for Slivovitz (a local plum brandy) and they began to express how they felt about the war. They were filled with hatred towards their enemies the ‘Chetniks’ and it became a disturbing conversation. The two doctors, who had been talking to us for hours about what they needed to heal badly injured people, began to describe the terrible things they would do to any Chetnik soldier they could get their hands on. Clutching lists of urgently needed medical items, we took our leave, promising we would return with more supplies as soon as possible.
This was the fifth trip I had made to Bosnia-Herzegovina in quick succession, and on each previous one I had been accompanied by a different family member or friend. Each had been a precipitous learning curve for a twenty-five-year-old fish farmer who had not ever aspired to be a long-distance truck driver. I discovered a whole world with its own culture, inhabited by long-distance drivers, one which was not always welcoming or easy to understand. Language itself was a problem. There were new technical terms to learn such as the ‘tachograph’ (the device which records the driver’s hours and speed at the wheel) or ‘spedition’ (the agents who prepare necessary customs papers at border crossings). This was made all the harder by our lack of European languages and our Scottish accents. On one of my early trips my co-driver was Robert Cassidy, a good friend from Glasgow, whose accent therefore was stronger than my own one from Argyll. We were driving a 7.5 tonne truck full of donated Scottish potatoes to Zagreb. It was midwinter and bitterly cold. We slept in the back of the truck at night between the pallets of potatoes, and we woke one morning near the Austrian–Slovenian border to find that our large bottles of drinking water had frozen solid, while a sign at the petrol station told us it was six degrees below freezing. One of the new technical terms we were about to learn on this trip was ‘plomb’. This refers to the small seal made of lead, which the customs officials place on the back of a truck when you enter their country, so that when