The Ukrainian Ops Officer’s English was limited. David Crummish nodded politely, understanding nothing. I couldn’t be bothered to listen to his gibberish. It reminded me of Kuwait. All I wanted to do was to find Peter Jones. I’d popped into UNHCR and politely asked where he could be found. I’d met a wall of hostile faces – they didn’t like soldiers in their enclave – and had been informed that he was out in a place called Dobrinja, that he’d be back in an hour or so. Eventually the Ukrainian’s English ran out. We were left none the wiser, but in true English fashion thanked him profusely for a most informative overview of the situation in Sarajevo.
Rumour had it that the Praetorian Guard had a coffee shop somewhere in the bowels of the citadel. We set off in opposite directions and I found myself on a lower level, in a narrow corridor, my path blocked by a huge Legionnaire with a lantern jaw and shaven head.
‘Excuse … me …’ I spoke no French so took it slowly, ‘… is … there … anywhere … where … a … man … can … get … a … coffee? … Café?’
‘You a Brit?’ he replied in an accent straight from the mid-West cornbelt. Dumbstruck, I nodded slowly. ‘Sure, buddy. One floor down, same corridor, turn right at the end …’ And then he was gone. Later I got to know him well – Tom Iron, ex-US Ranger, now Corporal-Chef, 2eme REP.
The four of us regrouped and descended into the depths in search of the elusive coffee shop. Not there. Oops, that’s a hospital. ‘So sorry’; two Legionnaires glared at us malevolently from their card game. We were in yet another corridor, still hunting, opening doors and apologising profusely.
Suddenly, the cloistered quiet of the corridor was shattered by a wild, animal scream and a babble of desperate voices, which surged around the corner and stopped us in our tracks. Moments later a gaggle of perhaps fifteen or twenty people, some uniformed, choked the passage ahead and advanced towards us. Unsure what to do, we flattened ourselves against the walls. A young girl of perhaps fifteen or sixteen was shrieking her head off. She was howling – a horrifying animal scream of madness. She wasn’t so much being helped and supported as actually being carried. Arms and legs firmly gripped, she was carried aloft, struggling and fighting like a beserker while the crowd babbled in concerned and anguished ‘polyglot’. The mob, flailing limbs and all, swept past us and turned the corner towards the hospital. The girl’s screams echoed back down the corridor. We stood there, rooted to the spot, horrified, speechless. Something in those unhinged, feral screams had touched us all. I looked across at David and the Civil Adviser. Their eyes were staring and the blood had drained from their faces. I can hear those screams today and I can still see those ashen, horrified faces. We looked at each other for what seemed an eternity. No one moved. No one even murmured. Corporal Fox was the first to react and save us. I felt him jab me in the ribs and I could see his face in front of me. His eyes were twinkling slightly and I could see his lips, half-smiling, move in laconic slow motion.
‘You know what, sir? I know exactly what she is going through.’
‘How’s that then, Corporal Fox?’ I heard myself say.
He chuckled then laughed slowly. ‘I hate going to the dentist as well.’
The spell was broken. The screams receded. We laughed nervously and self-consciously, aware that we had been, momentarily, somewhere dark and awful. We abandoned our search for coffee and, in silence, went back up to the foyer. We didn’t know it at the time but the girl, a local, had been walking past the PTT building with her father. A mortar round had landed very close to them. It had decapitated him but had left her unscathed, splattered and standing in a warm pool of his brains, gore and blood – screaming her head off in terror … … Welcome to Sarajevo.
Cumming’s instructions had been quite specific. ‘Give the package to Peter. Tell him to deliver it only if and when he can. He shouldn’t go out of his way or risk himself.’ When I eventually located Peter he looked at the map on the package and told me the address was in the middle of town. Since I spoke the language, he said, I could deliver it myself.
We clambered into his battered old Range Rover, which had belonged to the British Ambassador in Athens. It had found its way, courtesy of Ms Glynne Evans of the FCO’s UN Department, into Sarajevo for BRITDET’s use. Until its appearance Peter and the others had only had the protection afforded by a soft-skinned Land Rover. Their job required them to cross front lines every day.
Peter Jones is an exceptional man. He is also extremely lucky to be alive. I first met him in July 1987 when we were both ‘sickies’ at RAF Headley Court, an RAF/Army Rehabilitation unit in Surrey. I was there rebuilding arm and shoulder muscles after a routine shoulder operation. Peter was learning to walk again having lost six inches from both legs after he’d fallen several hundred feet off a Scottish mountain. It had nearly killed him but he was making a full recovery. I only ever heard him complain once. Sucking on a Marlboro he whinged, with a smile, that the accident had cost him a small fortune in new uniforms! It came as no surprise to me that the ex-six foot two officer had been selected to lead a tiny detachment of three other soldiers in Sarajevo. I know of no one who could have done the job better.
In November 1992 UNHCR Sarajevo had asked the British to lend them some logistics advice. At the time Peter was the Ops Officer of the National Support Element at TSG. He was tasked to select and take into Sarajevo a team of three other logistics experts to help and advise UNHCR on the finer points of setting up a logistics operation for the delivery of humanitarian aid. He chose WO2 Don Hodgeson, SSgt Allan Knight and LCpl Caroline Cove. Together they drove into Sarajevo in a soft-skinned Land Rover towing a trailer. They were due to remain for two weeks but stayed for 110 days. For UNHCR they found three warehouses in the city and established an efficient system of secondary and tertiary distribution of aid. The aid was in-loaded from the warehouse at the airport to the city warehouses from where, in consultation with a four-man Bosnian commission, it was further distributed to eighty-four ‘communes’ (defined as a street, apartment block or area) on a fortnightly basis. In addition they strove to keep Kosevo hospital supplied with fuel oil. This brief description of their efforts does absolutely no justice to their success. On arrival they met with hostility from the local Sarajevan UNHCR staff. When they left there was scarcely a dry eye in the house.
The conditions they endured daily were far more extreme than any endured by British troops in Bosnia. BRITDET Sarajevo was the jewel in the crown. It was a flagship operation which was monitored closely by the FCO and which, rightly, accorded Peter ‘favoured son’ status in Split.
As we drove east along the main drag towards downtown Sarajevo the geography of the city both in terms of terrain and buildings changed markedly. The valley became narrower and the buildings older. For the most part, Sarajevo is a prime example of the dreariest Communist high rise architecture and reminded me vividly of the buildings I had seen in Minsk and Moscow, where the Army had sent me to learn Russian in the 1980s. There was scarcely a single building that remained unscathed. On the left – a grotesque concrete battleship, the TV building. Further on, the Holiday Inn hotel, a foul-looking six-storey square of yellow. Three-quarters of it was still functioning for the press, to whom rooms were charged at pre-war prices. Behind it were the twin UNIS tower blocks of glass, miniature versions of New York’s World Trade Centre. Both were virtually gutted with not a single pane of glass left unbroken. On the right – a huge oblong skyscraper, which had served as B-H’s parliament. Now completely gutted, it was home to snipers and sharpshooters. In some instances buildings had ceased to exist at all. Peter tried to explain the layout of the front lines but it was too confusing to absorb. I remember being surprised when he said that the Serbs not only held the hills around but also parts of the city where the line came down almost to the River Miljacka, which paralleled the main drag east-west through this long and thin valley city. Where the front line cut into the city, as it did opposite the Holiday Inn, the threat from snipers was greatest. Here ISO containers had been stacked upon each other as a barrier to view if not to bullets.
From the gutted parliament onwards the architecture became nineteenth-century