Trusted Mole: A Soldier’s Journey into Bosnia’s Heart of Darkness

Zimbabwe proved to be just the tonic I needed. After three weeks soaking up the sun, visiting the camp up at Inyanga where we’d trained the Mozambicans, and catching up with old friends, I was ready to return to the gloom of a British winter. I arrived home on 8 December wondering what the future held. I didn’t have to wait long to find out. Amidst a pile of unopened letters was an official looking brown HMSO envelope marked On Her Majesty’s Service with Orderly Room – Depot Para stamped across the back. It felt flimsy and insubstantial – probably a Mess bill. A sixth sense told me it wasn’t. My heart pounded as I tore it open. It was a Memo from the Chief Clerk dated almost a week earlier:

Sir,

You should have been in Bosnia a week ago. Where have you been? We’ve been trying to get hold of you. Get in touch ASAP. Your joining instructions are with the Adjutant.

Chief.

Exactly as my aunt had predicted, breaking the news to my father was not easy.

‘You don’t know what you’re doing, what you’re letting yourself in for.’ There was a horrible pause. The phone felt like a brick in my hand. ‘Son, please, you’re making a terrible mistake … a huge mistake.’

My father died in March 1996. I think he died of a broken heart. I will always remember him: for his love and his support, for his unfailing encouragement and for his wisdom. I will remember him for his industry and his utter honesty, as a husband, as a father and as head of the household. But more than all those things I will remember him for those haunting and prophetic final words. I wish I had listened to him and heeded his advice. But I didn’t. I was youthful, impetuous, callow and cruel.

Around me in the Herc everyone seemed dead to the world. I stared at the white paint of the vehicles inches from my nose, hoping to sleep. My mind was racing and I was slightly depressed as England and its familiar comforts slipped away. The unknown lay ahead and that curious mix of regret and apprehension squeezed me.

The three weeks since arriving back from Zimbabwe had been frantic. I learnt that the first group of some thirteen volunteers had just finished a crash course in colloquial Serbo-Croat at Westminster University. I was to join them since the Commander British Forces, COMBRITFOR, Brigadier Andrew Cumming, based in Split, had no objections to my coming out. Our imminent departure had then been delayed when some kind soul in the MoD or at the UN office in Wilton had decided that the interpreters could spend Christmas at home, and that we’d all fly out to Split on one of the civil charter R&R flights leaving Gatwick on 29 December.

This breather had given me time to tackle the monstrously large kit list found in an annex to the Op HANWOOD deployment instruction. This was somewhat confusing since the Bosnia deployment had been given the operational name GRAPPLE. The kit list was exhaustive and might just as well have said everything but the kitchen sink; my house quickly began to look like a quartermaster’s stores. Piles of military junk sprang up in every room – socks, shirts, trousers, boots, shoes and trainers, towels and washing kit, webbing and mess tins, helmet and Combat Body Armour, polish and brushes and a plethora of bits and pieces gathered and hoarded over the years. I managed to stuff the whole lot into a bergen, a large sausage-shaped kit bag, a grip bag and a daysack. Each item weighed a ton. I should have heeded my instincts. I barely used a quarter of this baggage in all my time in Bosnia.

While I’d been struggling with the kit list the gang of interpreters had been undergoing some sort of brush up military training at the Guards Depot at Pirbright. Foot drill had not been on the agenda but pistol training, first aid, mine awareness and basic fitness had been. On 21 December we gathered at HQ United Kingdom Land Forces for a briefing. I’d met none of my new colleagues before and was curious to see just who these people were who’d been brave or foolish enough to expose themselves to the little-known Balkan language of Serbo-Croat.

They turned out to be quite a mixed bunch drawn from the Army and Navy. Their self-appointed guru was an elderly, plump and slightly fussy major from the Royal Army Pay Corps called Martin Strong. The other officers were mainly captains: Neil Greenwood, a keen medal collector from the Gunners: Nick Short, an infantryman from the Gloucesters, and a number of others, including Sue Davidson from the Woman’s Royal Army Corps. The Senior NCOs were even more curious: a Scottish Warrant Officer called ‘Jock’ McNair, and a thin, wiry Colour Sergeant with black, mischievous, ferrety eyes – Bob Edge, also a Gloucester. There were others of various ages, ranks and backgrounds. Seeming to have nothing in common save the course they’d just attended, they reminded me more than anything else of the cast of The Dirty Dozen.

The briefing was a fairly traumatic affair delivered by a worn-out looking watchkeeper, Major Windsor, who’d just finished the night shift. With the aid of a huge map of the Balkans and Bosnia-Hercegovina, across which snaked an impossibly contorted front line drawn in red, he attempted to explain what was going on out there: Serbs here, Croats there, Muslims here, Bosnian Croats there, Bosnian Serbs here and here, Krajina Serbs, Croat Serbs, Croat Croats, Serb Serbs, HVO, HV, JNA, JA, ABiH, BSA, UNHCR, ICRC, BRITBAT, BRITFOR, COMBRITFOR, BHC, UNSC, NGOs, ICFY, ECMM, Route Circle, Route Diamond, Route Square, TSG, GV, blah, blah, blah, blah. It was all gobbledegook, meaningless confusion that went straight over our heads. I don’t think they really understood it either.

Christmas at home had been strained. My father had worked himself up into a real lather over the whole thing. ‘You don’t know what you’ve let yourself in for. You don’t know what they’re like, those people down there, the mentality. They’re not like us here in the Diaspora. All the decent people were either killed off or fled into exile … Tito might have gone but they’re still old Communists. They’re born and bred that way and they’re rotten – Yugovici, all of them. And you can’t trust them. They’re cheats and liars and they’ll use you if they can. I haven’t suffered here in the West for fifty years, struggled to bring you up and educate you, just to watch you disappear off to the Balkans and be killed …’

On and on it went. He was distressed, inconsolable. It was dreadful and I felt guilty that I was causing him such pain by opening up old wartime wounds and bitter memories. Suddenly, I was no longer sure I was doing the right thing. My plans started to look less like a great adventure designed to keep at bay the dreaded desk job and were beginning to take on a much more sinister hue. The thought that I might be killed, particularly in a UN mission, hadn’t even entered my head.

‘And that blue beret won’t protect you and they won’t be fooled by that Laurel name they’ve given you. They’ll see through that immediately.’ I had to agree with him on that one. The Laurel thing was particularly absurd and unfunny.

My mother was far more pragmatic about it all. ‘Here you go, son, a little Christmas present for you to take out to Bosnia.’

I took the small, soft package from her. It felt like a handkerchief. Mothers! I wasn’t too far off the mark. It was an old Second World War silk escape map, the kind issued to aircrew and SOE agents. Although slightly frayed, yellowed around the edges and musty through decades of storage, it was still soft and had lost none of its rich colour. Printed in exquisite detail on both sides, it depicted the Balkans and middle Europe – Sheets F and G. The legend read ‘Frontiers as at September 1943 … owing to frontiers being constantly changed in Eastern Europe, those marked on the map must be accepted with reserve.’ The scale was lmm:lkm. It was all there: Vitez where the Cheshires were, Gornji Vakuf, which was also featuring in the news, and Split on the Dalmatian coast, where we’d be going in four days’ time. I’d never seen the map before.

‘Where did this come from?’

‘Oh, we were each issued with one,’ my mother replied cryptically.

‘What! In the desert?’ I was mystified. I knew she’d been in North Africa, but what on earth was she doing with an escape map of the Balkans? The only ones issued with those had been the Cairo-based SOE agents. ‘You weren’t in SOE were you?’

‘Well, not exactly. For a while I worked for Colonel James Klugmann, the head of SOE Cairo … that Communist traitor!’ she’d almost spat out his name, ‘… but no I wasn’t SOE. But I was sent to Yugoslavia with Dr McPhail’s Save the Children.’

Her story was all completely new to me. I’d vaguely been aware that she’d finished her war somewhere in Italy, but not that she’d been part of the first ever UN mission to the Balkans in 1945. The candles flickered on the table as she spoke. Recruited into Dr McPhail’s unit in 1944 she’d acted as an interpreter in a large Croat refugee camp in the Sinai desert. In late 1944 the unit had moved to Italy and in March 1945 my mother and her three-tonne ambulance had landed in Dubrovnik. She’d spent the rest of that year driving around Bosnia, Hercegovina and Montenegro looking after orphaned children.

‘… anyway, we were each issued with one of these maps and I think you should have it out there.’

I looked carefully at the silk and found Dubrovnik some way to the south of Split; to think that this had been in her pocket in that place nearly half a century ago! My father had never mentioned his war and my mother rarely hers. Now it was as if my imminent departure for the Balkans had spurred them both into revealing things that had for decades been locked away.

Another peculiar thing happened that evening. Mark Etherington, an old friend from the Regiment, rang up to wish us all a happy Christmas. He’d been out of the Army for over a year and had last been seen heading out of Wandsworth in south-west London bound for Cape Town on a motorbike. On the phone his voice sounded faint, distant, distorted by terrible static and a hollow, irregular thumping sound. I had to shout down the phone.

‘Mark! Where are you?’ No doubt he was stuck somewhere in darkest Africa.

‘Bihac … I’m in Bihac …’ He too was yelling.

‘What? Sorry? Where did you say?’

‘Bihac … in Bosnia … thought I’d ring and wish you all a happy Christmas.’

‘Mark! What’re you doing there … and what’s that banging noise?’ The thumping in the background was incessant.

‘Shelling! It’s shelling.’

‘What!’ Had he gone mad?

‘Shelling. I’m in a basement with my Muslim interpreter and the Serbs are shelling us!’ The random thumping took shape in my mind. Mark was never prone to exaggerations.

‘What’re you doing there? Thought you were in Africa?’

‘… ran out of money … dumped the bike in Nairobi … got a job now

as a European Community monitor …’ the line was getting worse, ‘gotta go … on my mobile … not good reception in this cellar …’ And then he was gone, cut off in an instant.

I searched for Bihac on the silk map and found it, a dot in the top left-hand corner of Bosnia. As I stared at the silk, I was chilled by the incongruity of it all: me enjoying Christmas in the warmth and security of a house in the West Country, listening to the sound of battle hundreds and hundreds of miles away, where a friend was cowering in a cellar.

I’ve always hated goodbyes. The following day we repeated a ritual that had been going on for the past twelve years. I’d kiss my parents goodbye and stuff my head into the helmet saying ‘don’t bother coming out’ – but they always would. They’d traipse out after me; my father would grab my arm and say ‘be careful on that thing’ and my mother would say ‘I wish you’d get rid of it’. They hated the bike. Then I’d roar off down the road and they’d stand there waving until I was out of sight. It never changed.

But this time it was different. We were on the road. My father grabbed me. ‘Be careful out there.’

‘Yes, son, be careful and God bless.’ My mother was never one for grand emotions.

I fired the engine and clicked the bike into gear glancing across the road as I did so. They looked small and vulnerable in the December chill. My mother was waving, smiling encouragement, as mothers always do, masking her true feelings. My father was just standing there staring. What was in those eyes? I couldn’t quite place it. Regret? Compassion? Pity? It was something deep and sorrowful and it cut me to the quick. His lips were quivering. Quickly I glanced over my left shoulder, rolled the throttle and roared off down the road. In the mirror I could see them standing there, waving madly – two small old people standing in the road. They waved until I rounded the corner and could see them no longer. That image burns in my mind today. I have often wondered what happened next as they turned and went indoors. Did he put his arm around her? What did they say to each other? What did they think? What were their private and miserable thoughts?

For some reason sleep continued to elude me, which is peculiar as it’s quite normal for a Herc load of ninety paratroopers to nod off immediately after the aircraft has taken off. SOP. My stomach was still knotted with apprehension. How was I going to get out of the airport at the other end? Had the ‘movers’ there been briefed? A week ago it had seemed funny. Now, stuck in limbo at thirty thousand feet, it was anything but.

After being thoroughly savaged by Major Windsor’s barrage of Op GRAPPLE abbreviations, route names and a plethora of confusing place names, we’d staggered out of the Wilton briefing room and made our way up several flights of stairs to see another major called Francis Brancato. He ran the UN office at Wilton. I’d met him once before when he’d come out to visit us in Kuwait. In his office he’d taken me to one side and announced that I’d be flying out as Captain Laurel.

‘Pardon me?’ What was he on about?

‘Captain Laurel. That’s who you’re going out as and that’s who you’ll be,’ he repeated matter of factly.

‘Laurel! Why?’ I was bemused.

‘Do you know the other two who’re out there now?’ He was deadly serious, ‘… both Serbs … like you …’ he rattled off their names. One was a lieutenant in the Light Infantry, the other a corporal in the Royal Anglian Regiment.

‘Nope. Never heard of them … didn’t know there were any others in the Army.’

Now I was genuinely surprised.