My War Memoirs: The Green Recruit (Chapter 22.)

The Green Recruit 

The thought struck me not with the force of a revelation, but with the subtle, insidious chill of deep dread, colder than any winter. I rushed too much with the decision to go to war? It wasn’t a question; it was a verdict delivered by the churning anxiety in my gut. All that immense energy I had spent for years trying to prove myself had now imploded into pure, paralyzing fear. I was eighteen, hopelessly green, and standing immersed up to my teeth in the war machine, my hands already slick with sweat. It wasn't ordinary perspiration: it was the icy sweat of stress that broke through every pore of my body, even though the night outside was deceptively warm.

I was impulsive, reckless, and dangerously naive—qualities I hadn’t fully grasped, yet they now defined the foolishness of my presence here on the front line of defense. It was I, the boy, who had sought this hell, desperately craving validation from others.

I heard the voice of my neighbor Ljilja, clear as the shriek of an incoming mortar shell. The voice echoed from the last time I’d seen her, standing in the doorway of her kitchen, the air still sweet with the smell of her baking.

“It’s obvious that things haven’t been going well for you at home since your grandmother passed away, and you’re managing on your own, searching for answers. You need a father to guide you and a mother to support you. You have nothing. I keep sending my son Saša back to the center. If it weren't for me, who knows where that young man would have ended up!” — my dear neighbor Ljilja would continue. She was a little younger than my mother, and they hung out a lot in their youth until my mother remarried and moved away from Našice.  Ljilja was always very protective of me because she had known me since kindergarten, and her son Saša was a year younger than me, and we were inseparable as children, along with another neighbor, Dalibor. The photo of the three of us sitting on the steps still adorns my gallery today and is one of my favorite photos.

When I told her I was going to war, she was appalled. I often had lunch at their place, and she would often ask me to bring a bag of dirty laundry so she could wash and iron it properly. She couldn't stand to see me living with my grandfather and struggling. I was a neglected child, and still hot-headed, eager to prove myself in order to get confirmation that I was worth something. Saša was calm because he had both a father and a mother, a wonderful grandfather and grandmother, and he was as well-adjusted as Dalibor, unlike me. It never occurred to him to go to war, and rightly so. They were teenagers, like me, who matured late.

“My dear, you're going to war so green!” Ljilja was left in shock.

“I have to, someone has to. No one in my family will. I'm ashamed,” I'd mumbled, already reaching for the easy distraction, the comforting, artificial violence of Saša’s console—Super Mario on the X Box. Saša was playing the game and inviting me to join him before lunch his mother was preparing. We were naive: teenage amusement was still paramount in our growing up, not war.

“You have a father and mother, an uncle, and a cousin, so let them go,” she returned. Her anger was born of pure, protective love. I merely shrugged, still drawn to the flickering screen where the pixelated challenges of the video game offered immediate, solvable rewards. She watched me go into the living room to join her son Saša, her expression a mixture of sadness and weary resignation. They’re still children. Life is still a video game for them.

The truth of that last sentence was a hot wire against my consciousness as a mortar shell whizzed past, its scream concluding in a heavy, muffled crash in the abandoned field just beyond our deep, muddy canal. The canal was our only sanctuary, a scar in the earth that led towards the enemy. We were reconnaissance, a platoon of twenty men slipping into the vacuum of no man’s land. The center of Ivanovac village and the safer shelters slowly vanished as we moved away. I had the feeling of having pushed off from the seashore into the great, wavy blue ocean, from which I didn't know what would surface. And the waves themselves were already a danger of drowning.

The atmosphere was a painter’s palette of night smoke and fog. Gunpowder smoke, heavy and metallic, mingled with the thick, natural steam rising from the damp, winter earth. Through this chemical fog, enemy tracer rounds shone—bright, malevolent streaks of red and green that seemed to be aimed directly at my forehead.

“Let’s go in front of our trenches to those last houses and the cattle shed on the left,” commanded the unknown commander in front, who had taken over the reconnaissance.

This was the edge of Ivanovac, five hundred meters of pure nothingness separating us from the first houses of Paulin Dvor, where the enemy was dug in. We were supposed to establish an outpost and try to hold the position there. We moved in small, cautious groups until we reached the skeletal outline of those outlying houses. The canal ran across the entire field, winding its way to these exposed houses, trapped in no man's land.

Suddenly, one of our men, jumpy with nerves, stitched a burst of fire between the dark shapes of a house and a barn. There was a hideous thud followed by a strange, wheezing, gurgling sound. Instinct took over: I lifted my own semi-automatic rifle and fired a few bullets in the direction of the sound. Silence descended, heavy and absolute, broken only by the distant, rhythmic hammering of heavy artillery.

We approached slowly. Our firing was not a tactical mistake of revealing our position; the entire area was a maelstrom of automatic fire and grenade explosions—our burst was a drop in a chaotic ocean. We rounded the corner of the shed, and there she was: a domestic cow, massive and dark, lying on the ground, struggling for its last, ragged breaths.

Did my bullet end her life, or did the burst finish her off before me?

The question was irrelevant. The punch of truth was unbearable: my first combat action was not directed against a human enemy, but against a poor, trapped, completely innocent animal caught between two fires. The absurdity of it was a physical blow, a mockery of my desire for heroism. The cattle teams that usually evacuated the livestock had missed this poor cow because it was wandering through the thicket and the field, and now it had finished its story in the mud. We exchanged wide-eyed, silent glances, the shared shock of senseless death binding us for a fleeting second.

We pressed on, finding temporary shelter behind a haphazard pile of rubble—bricks, rotten wood, discarded construction materials. It felt safe, for now. I looked around at the experienced comrades around me, their faces grim, their movements precise, absorbing their stony composure. They had already crossed this threshold. They knew the rules of the new game.

Until yesterday, I was jumping over buttons on the X Box console, and today I was hiding behind a ruined wall. My life was hanging by a thread, and I had massacred a creature that asked nothing of the world but to be obedient to it. An innocent victim of a chaos.

Maybe I should go back after all? The thought returned, this time desperate and irreversible, as I watched the commander’s hand rise in the air, inviting us to follow him further into the darkness. Further away from Saša’s comfortable couch and the Super Mario game, and the smell of  Ljilja’s baking. We were heading deeper into the terrifying darkness of the unknown battlefield.