‘Peter, why don’t you mention it to Brigadier Cumming. He’s at Kiseljak now. I can’t ask … besides he’ll say “no” anyway.’ I also knew that I was shortly to be posted up to the Cheshires in Vitez. Bob Stewart had been asking for me for several weeks now. He needed both Nick and me, one of us up in Tuzla to cover the Op CABINET crossings, the other in Vitez to cover the Op SLAVIN crossings. As it was Nick was having to dash between the two. Stewart had a point, and within days, in fact on the back of the Minister for the Armed Forces and the Adjutant General’s visit, due to happen on 8 February, I’d go up country for the last time and be left in Vitez. It didn’t appeal much. But the idea of working in Sarajevo did.
We sailed through all the Sierras. Even S-l was no problem. The bearded monster recognised Peter, broke into a huge, toothy smile and forced a glass of Slivovica onto us. The penny dropped – the key to all this is the personal contact.
Predictably, Brigadier Cumming said no. He could read us like a book – two naughty schoolboys, plotting. ‘No, he’s needed in Central Bosnia … and he’s still my asset.’
At half-six Peter departed as the Sierras closed down for the night at seven. There was still no sign of the APC shuttle or of the Civil Adviser and Simon. Unbeknown to us Sarajevo was being subjected to an intense and sustained barrage. Both men were trapped in the PTT building and were consequently being subjected to an all-night barrage of red wine from Peter. Somehow he’d made it back through the shelling. That’s what he was like.
‘Driver’s let us down! Stanley! You’re driving, let’s get back to Fojnica.’ Cumming wasn’t bothered. He would have been had he known I’d never driven a Discovery before and certainly not on iced-up roads in the dark.
It had started snowing again. We stopped for an hour or so at the BBC house in Kiseljak where Martin Bell, ‘the Man in the White Suit’, entertained us. We fell into deep conversation. I wanted to know more about the place.
We arrived back in Fojnica before midnight. I’d driven in silence and listened as the Brigadier told me how the conference had gone. It had been something of a jamboree during which it had been discovered that the British were the only contingent in theatre with the command and control assets – radios – necessary to effect a UN withdrawal. As we drove somehow I knew we wouldn’t be leaving. I pictured Greta in her flat, in the dark, in the freezing cold, with no future and only despair for companionship. We wouldn’t be going. We couldn’t abandon them – the Little People.
October 1997 – Ian, UK
‘So, that’s it, Ian. You stand on the cusp of two cultures. You cross that bridge to the Little People and you’re hooked. Like Caesar and the Rubicon, there’s no going back. Once you’ve done it, you’ve done it …’
Ian’s listening carefully. I’m calmer this time round. He says I look calmer. Perhaps it’s the pills. Sixteen days have dulled the edge off the ‘shock of capture’. I’m starting to get this stuff out, bashing Niki and him with it. In a way it has started to help and very slowly I’m beginning to climb that rope which Ian has dropped to the bottom of the pit I’m in.
It didn’t all happen at once. I wrote to General Jackson in London to tell him that the package had been delivered successfully, that Aida’s parents were all right and that she was not to worry. I didn’t tell him about Greta. Aida would only have flapped. I’d taken Greta at face value and trusted her. Fortunately, I wasn’t wrong. I didn’t hear anything from the Jacksons for another few weeks. In fact I pretty much forgot about the whole thing. Events in Bosnia just moved on as they do.
I’m laughing now. An absurd image has entered my mind. The British really are the most peculiar people. They might find themselves in the most God-awful situation, but they’ll always make the best of it; they’ll ignore what’s going on around them and cling to their culture and their ways.
I’m thinking about Burns Night, 25 January, in Split. The entire canteen has been converted into a dinner night. Brigadier Cumming and his replacement, Brigadier Robin Searby, and one or two other visitors from JHQ, are sitting on a high table on the stage. Searby is over here on his recce. He’s a brigade commander in Germany and he and his HQ are to take over from Cumming in May. He’s another cavalry officer, 9/12 Lancers. I’m looking at him and feeling a bit scared. He looks as dangerous as a shark and he’s as mad as hell because his luggage has been lost. We’re all sitting there eating haggis, swigging whisky and listening to the bagpipes. Young officers and sergeants stand up and recite Robert Burns. Weird, because you’re also aware that fifty miles away people are slitting each other’s throats and burning and raping each other out of their homes.
The next day we take Searby and the others up country – TSG, Triangle, we even get through GV, and on to Vitez. I wasn’t in the Discovery but in the backing Land Rover TDi and I’m giving a running commentary to this lieutenant colonel from Wilton who runs the G3 Ops desk in JHQ, Jamie Daniel. He became Rose’s MA in 1994. We reach Vitez, get a brief from Bob Stewart and that evening we leave Daniell and the others in Vitez. I’m back in the Discovery along with Cumming and Searby and we’re driving along the Busovaca valley to BHC. It’s dark outside and we’re negotiating one checkpoint after another. All along the valley, high up on both sides, houses are blazing away, chucking sparks and smoke into the night sky. It’s straight out of Dante’s Inferno. We drive to Kiseljak almost in silence.
In the foyer of BHC people are scurrying around in a panic. Apparently, the ‘Mujahideen’ are on their way to do the place. The Muslim-owned pizza restaurant has already been blown up. Searby’s standing there puffing on a cheroot and he turns to me and growls out of the corner of his mouth, ‘Is it always like this?’ I assume he’s referring to this picture of multinational madness. A helmeted and flak-jacketed Danish guard races past us with two weapons – a G3 rifle slung over his shoulder and an MG42 machine gun, its ammunition belt trailing along the floor. ‘Yes, it is, sir. This HQ is an utter nuthouse.’ ‘I don’t mean this …’ he snaps back, ‘… I mean that – the valley, the burning houses. Is it always like this?’
It’s weird. We’ve just driven down a valley of burning houses. To me it’s no more than that, a valley of burning houses. But to him, to a fresh pair of eyes, it’s horror. We’d got used to it; we’d already become slightly desensitised to it. It hadn’t occurred to me until Searby had said that. I’d only been there a month.
That was pretty much the last event with Brigadier Cumming. I stayed in Vitez. I didn’t really work for Bob Stewart, not directly and then rarely as an interpreter. He had his own and some of them were quite outstanding.
The whole business about interpreters is interesting. When the Cheshires arrived in mid-October 1992 they selected a schoolhouse at Stara Bila just outside Vitez as their main operating base. No one knew then that the road running through the Lasva valley would become the Muslim-Croat fault line, and this schoolhouse was right on it. You wouldn’t know the place was a school. The blockhouse or schoolhouse was furthest from the road. It was a two-storey concrete affair, long and squat with its flat roof now bristling with antennae. Between the schoolhouse and the road was a playing field, which had been converted into Portakabin accommodation and a Warrior/vehicle park. Originally it had been tents but the Royal Engineers had put down hardcore and built a mini Portakabin City, with a fine canteen. A one-way
circuit for the vehicles surrounded all this like a moat. Along the left side of the circuit were civilian houses, some occupied by the locals, others hired by the UN. The UKLOs had one, the doctors and medics another, the lieutenants yet another and the one nearest the road and the mess was the captains’ house. It was all pretty chaotic. Electricity was supplied