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

has blown up one of the bridges on Route Pacman just north of Mostar. Pacman is the major aid route north and now no aid is running. No one’s sure how the bridge has been destroyed so we jump into the Discovery and zip down the Dalmatian coast. Absolutely spectacular – the Dinaric Alps just drop vertically into the Adriatic and this road is simply a scar on the rock, sometimes hundreds of feet above the sea. Offshore are these enormous long, flat, grey islands lying there like hump-backed whales. They’ve got names like Hvar and Brac … there are more further north, hundreds of islands. Forget Mozambique, this is the most stunning coastline in the world. At Ploce, which is a big marshy port, we cross the Neretva river and swing north following the river valley. At Metkovic we cross into Hercegovina and stick on our body armour and helmets; it’s SOP for all troops in B-H to wear the stuff.’

      ‘And the bridge?’

      ‘It was buggered. We get to it eventually after passing Mostar, which was pretty trashed itself. It’s not hard to see why; the Serbs are sitting on a massive escarpment to the south and dominating the town and the road. They can drop a shell or mortar round just about anywhere they want. The road we’re on is pitted with craters. But they don’t dominate the bridge because that’s in a tight gorge with sheer rocky sides rising hundreds of feet. We reach the bridge which is a concrete affair, one span of which the Jugoslav National Army had dropped as they had retreated over it, so the bit that’s been blown up is the wooden repair to the span which the Royal Engineers have constructed. We get chatting to the HVO soldiers there. One, a battalion commander, blames it on the Muslims on the other side, which baffles me because they’re supposed to be allies. One of the soldiers then tells me that the Chetniks (an extreme wing of Serb irregulars) came down the gorge wall at night and did it. That’s scarcely believable because it’s sheer and covered in ice and is hundreds of feet high. So how did they get back up?

      ‘We don’t hang around for long. Colonel John Field, the Engineer Regiment CO, turns up to assess the damage. It’s bitterly cold. This icy wind just howls down the gorge and cuts right through you, so it’s time to get back to Split.’

      ‘What has all this got to do with anything? What’s the relevance of this bridge?’

      ‘Nothing and everything. Just illustrates what it was like out there. Something blows up and the UN has to crisis-manage the problem. Secondly, the date is fundamentally important: that’s when I started working and it marked the end of the honeymoon period between the Croats and Muslims in Central Bosnia. Obvious now but it wasn’t so obvious then. We reached Split that evening just in time for the 1700 O Group. The whole HQ is crammed into the briefing room. Chris Lawton tells us that someone had tossed a grenade at someone else in Mostar that day, and then Richard Barrons briefs us on ICFY’s Vance–Owen Peace Plan, which has just been announced.’

      ‘Which was?’

      ‘Which was never going to work, in my opinion … now. But not then. I didn’t know anything about these wider plans then or their significance. But in essence the VOPP map divided B-H into ten cantons; two for the Croats, three for the Serbs, three for the Muslims, one a mixed Muslim/Croat (number ten). The last canton (number seven), around Sarajevo, was mixed and of special status, having some sort of UN/EU administrator running the place. On paper it all looks fair and square, but in practice, on the ground, different groups are all mixed up in each other’s cantons-to-be. Worse still, all three parties have completely different aspirations, none of which can be stuffed into that VOPP map. The 4^th of January 1993 is the day it all went horribly wrong.

      ‘The next day we start touring and travelled up to Tac stopping off at all the British locations – TSG, ‘Fort Redoubt’ on Route Triangle, the company base at GV and the main Cheshires’ base at Vitez. All the routes were iced over – vehicles and aid trucks stranded all over the place. It made operating virtually impossible.’

      ‘Well, we managed it in the Arctic.’ Niki had been the Assistant Adjutant in 29 Commando and had done a winter deployment to Norway.

      ‘You may well have done, but there’s a huge difference. You lot stopped training at –30°C and went into survival mode, didn’t you?’ She nods.

      ‘We’re not talking about –30° here, Niki. We’re talking freezing. It was the coldest winter for decades. The lowest recorded temperature was –67° with the wind-chill factor. Everything froze. Nothing would work. Diesel jellied up in fuel tanks, but guess what? The locals kept on fighting. We were sort of all right with a lukewarm Discovery wrapped around us. But the locals kept on at it. They’re the hardest bastards I’ve ever seen. Just beyond Fort Redoubt, on Triangle over the mountain and through the forest, there was an HVO checkpoint – big Croatian flag hanging vertically off a wire stretched high across the road. We’re stopped by this soldier, a mad longhair with broken teeth and wild eyes. He’s wearing trainers, cammo trousers and a lumberjack shirt open at the neck and with rolled-up sleeves. He’s clutching some bottle of poison and he’s waving and grinning like mad at us. And, we’re freezing inside the vehicle! We think we’re hard as nails in the Paras, but these boys are in a completely different league.

      ‘We’re based on the fourth floor of this hotel in Fojnica, which is at the top end of a valley. The rest of the hotel has been given over as some sort of convalescence centre. So, all you see are blokes hobbling around on crutches, legless, armless, all war-wounded – youngsters and old men for the most part. But, it’s a good location for Tac with BHC in Kiseljak only fifteen minutes away and the Cheshires half an hour. We end up doing a lot of touring around. Brigadier Cumming never failed to pop in and chat to local commanders. He was trying to assess their mood. Thus, I ended up doing quite a lot of interpreting. It is vital to get to grips with military speak when your language is virtually domestic. ‘Pass the bread, Mum’ hardly prepares you for ‘anti-aircraft artillery’. Had to learn that fast.

      ‘I met Nick Costello on that first trip. We overnighted at Vitez and sat in on Bob Stewart’s O Group that evening. Nick was sitting just in front of me wearing one of those green shamaghs, which he gave to me when he left. We called it the interpreter’s shamagh. Someone pointed him out to me and that evening we’re in the Cheshires’ Officers’ Mess, an ex-night club on the main road. It still had one of those glittery balls hanging from the ceiling. You could just imagine it being a sort of speak-easy before the war. The 9/12 Lancers had even shipped in their leather furniture from their Mess in Germany and everyone’s drinking from Cheshires 22^nd of Foot silver goblets.

      ‘On 7 January we were on the road again. Cumming wanted to get up into the Tesanj salient so we took along the Cheshires’ LO for the area, Captain Matthew Dundas-Whatley. He’d already fixed up a number of meetings to go to with all the local commanders. All for me to translate. The first was with this horrendous creep – a really nasty piece of Croat work in Zepce who at the time was making life intolerable for the Muslims in the town. He wanted them out. D-W had warned us that he was thoroughly unpleasant, but even that hadn’t prepared us for a torrent of racist invective. Brigadier Cumming was so outraged that he simply said to us all in English, which this monster couldn’t understand, ‘I’m not listening to this anymore. We’re off!’ And off we went, deeper and deeper into this salient, this light bulb-shaped bit of the front line, attending meeting after meeting. By the time it was dark my head was thumping and my teeth aching; I’d been interpreting for almost eleven hours on and off. We were in this sort of bunker quite close to the front line at Jelah and I just gave up the ghost. I remember Cumming’s question to this commander being something really simple but my brain ran out of oil and the engine seized up. The Serbs then opened up with the most almighty fire-fight which just got louder and louder. It was their way of saying “Happy Christmas” to the Muslims and Croats – “Happy Christmas … we’re still here!” That was a long day. I fell out of love with interpreting that day.

      ‘The next day the Serbs shelled TSG throughout the afternoon and we just tore down there in the Discovery, all over those dreadful roads and iced-up bottlenecks. That’s when we had to hole up in a Spartan with the Serbs dropping shells all around us. And the Bosnian Deputy Prime Minister