My War Memoirs: How Danielle Steel Saved Us from Shells in 1992
We were supposed to go home. Those words, "going home," carry the weight of a ton of lead in war, yet they shine like pure gold. After twenty-four hours at a forward position, where your only friend is your own fear, and a week of non-stop fire in Ivanovac, we were promised two days of rest. Two days of civilization. A shower, clean sheets, a mother who doesn’t ask, "Did you kill anyone?" but rather, "Are you hungry?" That was the standard for the reserve units. We used to joke at our own expense that we were "weekend warriors" with a full-time job in hell—unlike those young guys in the active duty units who were in the field for months, until their faces turned as gray as their camouflage uniforms. In reality, we all shared the same fate; the active duty just had more testosterone.
In our company, the average age was forty. Me? With my eighteen years and the face of a fifteen-year-old boy, I stuck out like a sunflower in a field of poppies. I was 그hat irritating "fng" (greenhorn), full of adrenaline, with a slight touch of ADHD that kept me constantly sniffing around, and that naive need to prove myself to men who could have been my fathers.
"Old bones, God forgive me!" my comrade would groan—a man in his fifties, clutching his back in the damp trench. He didn’t need glory; he needed Ibuprofen and a warm bed. And just when we hoped for that peace, the order arrived: "No going home. The situation is critical. The enemy is pushing, we are few, they are too many. You’re staying indefinitely."
That’s how it goes. Hope is the fastest-moving target in war.
We found ourselves in that "safe house," waiting for a new deployment to a forward position. We had an entire sunny winter day to ourselves. The cannons were silent; I guess those on the other side were cleaning their barrels or sleeping too. That silence was always the worst—it sounded like a deep breath right before someone slaps you across the face.
Hyperactive as I was, I couldn’t stay still in the basement. That basement... it was a collective grave for the living. Humidity, the stench of sweat, fear, and unwashed feet. I decided to scout the "neighborhood." Cautiously, of course, sticking to the yards because the streets were a playground for snipers. Every house within a two-hundred-meter radius was a monument to human stupidity—riddled with holes, smashed, gutted.
And then I saw it. One house, almost leveled to the ground, but one wall of the study stood defiantly upright. And on it—a shelf. Perfectly arranged books, as if they were in some library in the center of the city, not in the middle of this hell. It was the intellectual corner of a man who had likely fled for his life, leaving his treasures behind.
I wasn’t picky. I grabbed an old bag and stuffed about ten books from the top shelf into it. I covered the rest with plastic—some strange civilian instinct kicked in to preserve what could be saved—and bolted back. I returned to our house, but I refused to go down to the basement. I’d had enough of the dark. I went to the ground floor, into a kitchen that still smelled of a former life. It was pure masochism or crazy courage, I don't know. Everyone told me I was an idiot, that a shell goes through a roof like a knife through butter, but I needed the light.
I built myself a "bunker" in the middle of the living room. I turned the sofa toward the wall, propped up mattresses from the master bed as extra protection from shrapnel, and crawled into my military sleeping bag onto scented linens I found in a closet. Light flooded the room, coming through a nearby window. I was safe. At least in my head. That window was the only one in the house that looked toward the barn in the yard, remaining hidden from shrapnel and bullets. A brief joy overcame me as a sunbeam pierced through the glass, shattering the spirit of death that lingered around us. For a moment, I thought I was home.
I pulled out the first book. Author: Danielle Steel. Title: Season of Passion.
I look at the cover, I look at my filthy hands and the rifle leaning against the wall. "For God's sake," I think, "out of everything in the world, I find romance novels?" I flip through the other books—all Danielle Steel. Women's fiction. Stories about the rich, the beautiful, about castles, affairs, and tears in silk. Not exactly for warriors.
But when you have nothing, even Danielle Steel is Hemingway.
I started reading. The story sucked me in. I forgot about Ivanovac, about the tanks, about the fact that I was eighteen and could die before I even learned how to shave properly. In that little bunker of mine, I was in Paris, in some luxury hotel, not in the Slavonian mud.
And while I was slowly sinking into that surreal romance, Gajo and Jura bust in. They see me, they see my "architectural feat" with the mattresses, and that blissful look on my face. At first, they laughed—that mocking, soldierly laugh—but when they caught the scent of fresh linens and saw the sun streaming through the window—instead of the basement dampness—the joking stopped.
"Taking in roommates? It really stinks down there," they said almost in unison. Within five minutes, the room became a construction site. They brought a thick, heavy rug from upstairs and spread it on the floor so the cold wouldn't bite them, and then the real fortifying began. They dragged mattresses from the neighboring bedroom, but they didn't stop there. They tore apart the hallway and dragged in some shelves and a massive wardrobe, forcing it against the wall right behind where they decided to sleep. They built a real wall within a wall, a barricade of particle board and clothing meant to stop any potential shrapnel. When they were finished, the room was no longer a living room, but a small, upholstered castle in the middle of the ruins.
By evening, the entire platoon was "infected" by the books. We sat in that improvised living room, three grown men with fingers on the triggers, devouring sentences about forbidden loves. We analyzed the characters with such seriousness, as if we were drafting a plan for a breakthrough.
The following night, when we had to return to the trenches, the image was surreal. Scene: the front line, a sniper clipping branches overhead, a tank heard in the distance revving its engine, and us... we were trading "romance novels."
"Hey, Karić! Who has Five Days in Paris?" shouted a comrade from a neighboring trench, while an enemy burst tore through the trees above him.
I became the librarian. I kept the records. I was the most important man in the brigade because I was the only one who knew who owed whom the sequel to the saga of family and passion.
There was an older comrade, a mountain of a man in his fifties, for whom this was likely the first book he’d picked up since elementary school. I look at him; he’s lying in the mud, leaning against the damp wall of the trench, rifle in his lap, and in his hands—Danielle Steel.
"Did you see, kid, what that Tom Harper did to Kate in Season of Passion?" he yells toward me from ten meters away, while bullets hiss around his head. "Do you know if there’s a sequel? I can't die until I see if they get married!"
And that was the point. That banal, sugary prose became our shield. While we read about other people's imaginary problems, our real problems—death, cold, lack of ammo—became tolerable. We laughed in the face of death, telling each other: "Don't you dare die until you give me that book back!"
Psychologically speaking, we were in a state of collective regression. We returned to a childlike state of imagination because reality was too sharp for their "old" and my too-young bones. Danielle Steel gave us the illusion that a world exists where the biggest problem is who will dance with whom at the ball, not whether shrapnel will blow out your knee.
I was "precious cargo." They protected me because I carried the bag with the books. I became a symbol of normalcy in a world that had gone completely insane.
A man will find a way to survive even when everything is taken from him. He will find beauty in the worst literature, he will find peace on an old mattress leaned against a wall, and he will find humanity in a joke about death.
The war tried to turn us into machines, into active and reserve units, into numbers and targets. But Danielle Steel—as cynical as it sounds—helped us remain human. Because only a human can be foolish enough to worry, in the middle of hell, about whether Kate and Tom will finally kiss in the end.
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