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

I take off my blazer and lie down on the bench. I can’t be bothered with the mattress. I cover my head with the blazer. It’s all so cold and dark, just like it was then, a thousand years ago – cold, dark, unknown and terrifying. I close my eyes. The tape starts playing and I’m back there. Reality. I can hear the shouts and screams, feel the cold, the panic and the terror. I’m there again.

8 January 1993 – British National Support Element Base, Tomislavgrad

The Americans were about to bomb the Iraqis again. On the hour, every hour, the television fixed high in a corner of the dusty warehouse spewed out the impassioned, near hysterical commentaries of the drama unfolding in the Middle East. Iraqi non-compliance with some UN Security Council Resolution seemed to be the issue; cruise missiles were poised to fly, midnight the deadline. In another place at another time we’d all have been glued to the box as we had been in 1991, eagerly anticipating the voyeuristic thrill of technowar. But not this time, not here and not tonight. The crisis in the Persian Gulf seemed so remote, so distant, so unreal. Shattered and numbed by the day’s events, nearly all the soldiers had shuffled off to their makeshift bunk beds, stacked four high around the warehouse.

Being less tired and having nothing more appealing than a sleeping bag on a cold concrete floor to look forward to, I’d delayed getting my head down. I was alone at a small wooden table, determined to finish recording the day’s hectic events in an airmail ‘bluey’ to a stewardess friend at British Airways. I glanced at my bedspace and marvelled that Seb had somehow managed to stuff his massive frame into his doss bag. Even more astonishingly, he’d managed to doze off despite the freezing concrete.

2225. The time flashed on the TV screen as the latest news from the Gulf came in from CNN. I turned back to the letter. Over the page and I’d be done, ‘… so, once the Boss realised what was going on, the three of us spent most of the day driving like madmen to get down here, but it was all over when we arr —.’

Ink splattered across the page. The pen sprang from my fingers as I leapt out of my skin knocking over the table. The newsreader had disappeared from the TV screen, obliterated. My ears were ringing, my mind stunned as a deep WOOOMF slammed into the warehouse, rattled the filthy windows and rolled over and around us. The air was filled with a fluttering, ripping sound and then another shockingly loud detonation somewhere beyond the wall. I was rooted to the spot. My legs started trembling. Adrenalin gushed through my veins.

‘Fuck! Shit! Oh, Christ, not again!’ Expletives echoed around the warehouse.

Pandemonium. All around me soldiers cursing, grunting, wild-eyed, tumbled from their bunks clutching helmets, flak jackets, stuffing feet into boots, laces flying, others scampering off with boots in hand, determinedly dragging their sleeping bags behind them into the darkness of the back of the warehouse.

Seb was on his feet in the same state of stunned confusion as I was. Within seconds the warehouse had emptied. The soldiers seemed to know precisely what to do. Why didn’t we? The greater terror of being left behind seemed to unfreeze me. A corporal raced past. I grabbed at him.

‘Hey! Where do we go? We’ve just arrived.’ Panic in my voice.

He wasn’t going to be stopped. ‘Just follow me, sir!’ he yelled over his shoulder as he disappeared into the gloom. We bolted after him. Ironic that he should be our saviour at that moment; officers were supposed to lead the men. Ridiculous really, but I didn’t care, just so long as he took us to wherever it was everyone else was going.

Cramming ourselves through a small door at the back of the hall, we emerged onto a raised walkway of a loading bay. Turning left we hurried after fleeting, bobbing dark shapes. I hadn’t a clue where we were going and blundered on regardless, driven by panic. We raced through a cavernous, dank boiler room. Another salvo of shells screamed in. Through a door at the far end we were hit by a wall of freezing air. It had been below minus twenty during the day. Now it was even colder.

We were now slipping and stumbling over uneven and frozen gravel. Ahead, stooped and crab-like, dragging doss bags, the black shapes of soldiers darted and weaved – like ghosts caught in the chilling glow of a half moon. Another whirring and ripping of disturbed air. We flung ourselves down grazing palms and knees, cheeks were driven into rough and frozen stones. I clung to the earth as an oily, slithery serpent in my stomach uncurled itself. The night was split for an instant, spiteful red and white followed by a deafening, high-pitched cracking, ringing shockingly loud. Then a deeper note, a rolling wave through the ground beneath, the air swept with an electric, burning hiss.

The desire to remain welded to the earth, panting and cowering, was overwhelming. Although the brain screamed ‘no!’, no sooner had the pulse washed over us than we were up, stumbling across the gravel. With horror I realised we were running towards the impacts. It made no sense. Surely we should be legging it in the opposite direction?

Far in the distance, beyond the broad, flat and featureless plain, now cloaked in darkness, behind a distant, rocky escarpment, two soundless halos of dull yellow flickered briefly. Moments passed and then two flat reports.

‘Incoming!’ screamed a breathless, hysterical voice somewhere ahead.

For seconds, hours, nothing … nothing … then a fluttering warning which sent us diving headlong into the gravel again. More cringing and tensing, detonations, ringing – closer this time. What the fuck are we doing running towards it?

We moved forward, staggering and diving in short bounds for what seemed like an eternity, keeping the edge of the warehouse to our left. In the darkness it was difficult to tell how far we’d gone – time and distance distorted by panic and fear. We rounded the far corner. Beyond a concrete V-shaped ditch was a row of maybe five or six armoured personnel carriers, APCs, neatly parked, squat and black.

I still had the corporal firmly in my sights. In a single bound he vaulted the ditch, raced up to the rear of the left-hand APC, yanked open the rear door and hurled himself inside. Others flung themselves in after him. Another flash on the horizon. Shit!

I was the last into the vehicle and feverishly pulled the door to before the shell landed. It wouldn’t shut. Too many people and too many sleeping bags. It was the bags or me.

‘We don’t need this sodding thing,’ I hissed in desperation, hurling one out into the night. I wrestled the door shut and hauled down on the locking lever just as the shell exploded somewhere to our front.

Inside the APC it was pitch black. Nobody said a word. Nothing could be heard save ragged, terror-edged panting as each man fought to recover his breath. Someone in the front flicked on a torch with a red filter. What little light managed to seep into the back cast eerie patches of dull red across strained, pallid faces. There were far too many of us crammed into the vehicle – knees and elbows everywhere. On my left was a slight youth clad in a boiler suit, who didn’t look like a soldier at all. Opposite me I recognised one of the batch of colloquial interpreters, a staff sergeant in the REME, *evidently posted up to Tomislavgrad, TSG, and now stuck in this APC. He looked terrified. It was his sleeping bag I’d slung out. Two down from me and next to the youth was Seb, still panting furiously. There were others too. Seb’s driver, Marine Dawson, had somehow ended up in the commander’s seat, and somewhere up there was the Sapper corporal, whom we’d blindly followed. There must have been about eight or nine of us stuffed into the small APC.