Hate. The word sounded too grand, too heavy for an eighteen-year-old. The deepest, most enduring resentment I could recall—a slow burn of impotent, familiar fury—was reserved for the corner of my unheated bedroom. It was a patch of cold, spreading dampness, a stain that blossomed most conspicuously in winter. The kitchen door was always ajar to share the meager heat of the old wood stove, and all the steam, all the moisture of our lives, migrated to my room, settling there, feeding that persistent, structural sickness. The house was old, we were poor; the stove fought a losing battle against the cold and the sodden outer wall. My grandfather and I would huddle in the kitchen, leaving the bedrooms as mere cold berths, insulated only by the mountainous weight of thick duvets. That was the entirety of my personal war, my deepest hatred—a battle against a spot of mold and the chill of poverty. Hate toward Serbs or toward people, even those who had wronged me, had simply never existed. Resentment and anger, yes, but hatred, no.
And now, here I was on the front line.
I’d watched the state-run Serbian television, the grainy images and the hysterical, venomous voices painting us—Croats—as some kind of resurrected Ustaša monsters, blood-crazed child-killers. Their narrative demanded an insurrection, a self-defense against this fabricated evil. Yet, I did not know a single Serb who was truly threatened, apart from the occasional, regrettable outburst of some drunk or hot-headed youth. The war, when it finally broke, was a bewildering, nonsensical storm. Even now, a year later, that confusion remains a persistent throbbing in my skull. Where did this monumental, tragic conflict truly originate, merely because a people desired independence? And the hatred—the great, all-justifying lie they constructed to mask their aggression—it felt like a cheap theater prop.
I shook my head, the gesture automatic, an echo of my inner bewilderment. Now, I was moving, a poorly equipped recruit, a foot soldier in this grotesque game, marching out to, supposedly, shoot at the “poor” Serbs. The same “poor” Serbs who were dug in at Paulin Dvor and Ernestinovo, bristling with heavy artillery. My own rifle, a clumsy, oversized 'papovka' (a common colloquial term for the M59/66 rifle), felt like a cruel joke. It was a struggle dubbed "David against Goliath," or Croats versus Serbs. The key was that they were the "poor" and "threatened," while the behemoth of a force was unwilling to accept our independence—a hungry beast intent on swallowing us whole.
We settled briefly in a house, huddled in its cold basement. Gajo, our Platoon Commander, a man whose face was already etched with the lines of too many nights like this, spread the map. He and Jura, the Squad Commander, laid out the plan of action. We were maybe a hundred meters from the parish church. We had to backtrack to that ruined landmark—it stuck out of the skyline like a blackened, chipped tooth—because it marked the intersection, the start of the narrow, dead-end road that ran toward the fields and Paulin Dvor.
The air was thick with the cacophony of war: the ripping sound of shells, the distant, thudding bass of artillery. It was night, but not bitterly cold, which felt like a strange mercy. We had to run, to sprint from house to house, under the heavy, indiscriminate barrage that was currently landing directly on the very street we needed to traverse.
Gajo's eyes, hardened but steady, locked onto each of us in turn, checking for understanding, for confirmation. We stripped down, shedding all but the essential 24-hour survival bags, cinching our steel helmets tight.
When we stepped out, I felt nothing. No surge of fear, no fiery hatred—only a dull, steady thump-thump of my heart beneath the din. There was only the terrible noise: the high-pitched shriek of incoming fire, the crash of explosions, the sickening sound of breaking glass, brick, and wood. You just moved. You just kept going.
We passed the church easily enough. The dead-end street, however, was a nightmare. Tank fire screamed down it from Ernestinovo, while mortar rounds from Paulin Dvor rained down a relentless, rhythmic series of echoes.
"You can always hear the mortars leave the tube,” Gajo had told me in the truck. His voice was calm, almost instructional. "Wait five to eight seconds until they unload, then you move, house to house. They need a few minutes to reload. That’s your window. Just listen to the firing and duck somewhere until the shelling passes, then run because you have a few minutes until the next swarm."
"Has anyone been 'killed' or wounded so far while running across?" I’d asked, a strange, childlike curiosity overcoming the anxiety.
"No," he'd replied with a calm, unsettling smile. "It's like playing chess. Once you understand the pattern of his behavior, you move to his rhythm."
And so it was.
We reached the first few houses on the side road. Immediately, a new series of about ten mortar shells landed, echoing one after the other, marking out a narrow, twenty-meter track ahead. They were ranging in, correcting their fire with chilling precision. Several shells landed just ten meters ahead, tearing up the asphalt and slamming into the houses.
We launched ourselves forward in our groups of five. Three houses, three yards. The detonations were a physical presence now, the air snapping with hot, acrid smoke. We ran through a dozen new houses in a blur of desperate motion. We were moving quickly, coordinated, propelled by Gajo’s practiced rhythm.
Boom!
Part of the roof above us disintegrated, a sick, splintering sound, and a shower of tiles and debris rained down on our helmets. The house across the street took a direct hit to its windows. Two more shells landed in the yard next to us, shaking the ground so violently that it felt like the earth itself was trying to throw us off.
We slammed to the ground, fused to the wet earth. I instinctively jammed my head between a comrade’s boots, the smell of damp leather and cold mud overwhelming everything else. Survival was not an act of nobility or courage; it was an animal response.
I scrambled up and ran. My 'papovka'—that wretched, clumsy spear—banged off the brick walls and snagged on the remnants of a wooden fence. It was too big, too unwieldy, a source of deep, irritating anger rather than fear. The others, thankfully, had smaller Kalashnikovs with folding stocks, making them much quicker than me. But I had no time for fear, only for the clumsy, desperate mechanics of survival. I focused on the tight strap of my backpack, ensuring it didn't bounce on my back, concentrating on the burning effort of my legs.
We reached the end of the street—the safe zone. We rushed one after the other, sliding into a deep, muddy ditch like clumsy baseball players, collapsing onto the ground, desperately seeking the cover of the earth. The silence here, relative and broken only by the continuous distant thrumming, was heavy like a ceiling crashing down on your head.
Comrades who had been there for the last 24 hours waited for us in the dark. We gasped, panting, muddy, waiting for them to tell us the exact situation ahead. The enemy shelling was stronger than anyone expected. And I, the eighteen-year-old who once hated only a spot of damp, waited for the next order, shaking my head one last time in that profound, lingering confusion, completely unaware of the true danger I had just survived.
"My friends, we are supposedly going on reconnaissance and attack, but it seems to me that the Serbs will launch a counter-attack and hit us. Because when they start shelling like this, it's a prelude to something bad coming our way. Don't be surprised if we meet them in the field in our trenches!"—I heard the commander who had met us there. He was addressing Gajo, but also all of us.
"Gulp!”—I don't know if that was me swallowing a large lump in my throat or a collective reflex of all of us when we heard we might expect a counter-attack. I saw myself with a bayonet, charging and fighting the enemy chest-to-chest. “Wait a minute, that could really… but really happen!” My first night on the front line, and this was what awaited me.
Comments
Post a Comment