The Walter Mitty in Metkovic was one of the harmless ones. I approached the guard on the depot gate. ‘Who’s in charge of the UN hangar?’
‘Go to the office at the end of the line. There’s a bloke there’ll put you right.’
So I walked into this office and there’s this guy. Looked just like a British Army quartermaster – moustache and all! I didn’t say who I was, just that I was in charge of the convoy going to Tuzla. I showed him my UN papers and the letter of safe passage from the Mayor of Tuzla, Selim Beslagic. He seemed happy enough with the paperwork. There was a bit of small talk, then I said ‘You British Army, are you?’
‘Yeah.’
A bit more small talk, then I asked, ‘What regiment were you in?’
‘Special Forces, mate.’
I still didn’t say anything. A bit more small talk, then ‘Impressive that, Special Forces. Which Special Forces would that be then?’
‘Two Two, mate.’ He glanced around importantly as if to check no one had overheard the amazing secret he had just revealed.
Got him! I had him hook, line and sinker now. A bit more small talk, then I went on, ‘It’s amazing, you know. I don’t know if you’ve been in the UK recently, but there’s loads of books out on the SAS.’ I paused a moment for effect, then ‘I’ve read a couple of them.’ He went a bit quiet at this point. There was more small talk, then I said, ‘I read in one of these books there are four squadrons. Which one were you in?’
He fell right into the trap. ‘Nine Squadron, mate.’
I couldn’t believe it! There isn’t a Nine Squadron in the SAS of course, but there is a Nine Squadron in the Royal Engineers. It’s their Para squadron. He obviously didn’t know that I’d been in the RE too. Unbelievable! It took a superhuman effort of willpower to do so, but I had to hold back from laying into him. We needed him, or more precisely we needed his forklift truck. You could not exist without goodwill out there. That’s the name of the game in hostile territory. At the end of the day, we got the forklift truck, and got the pallets loaded onto the four-tonners.
Leaving him to his fantasies, we set off for Mostar.
The weather was closing in and the landscape was changing. Grey skies, bare trees, patches of dirty snow, muddy and rutted roads, knocked-out tanks skewed into ditches, roofs with their red tiles blown off, their timbers gaping like wild dogs baring their teeth, smashed homes, and brutalized people wandering along the roadside. In the convoy, the mood had turned sombre. Reality was hitting home. After a few hours, we reached the outskirts of Mostar. I was shocked. This once-proud city, the biggest and most important in Herzegovina, was a complete wasteland. After relentless bombardment, it looked like Stalingrad in the Second World War. Terrible place. I’ve been in a few war zones, but this frightened even me. It was like entering a nuclear wilderness. The city was completely blasted. As if to welcome us, the first thing we saw was a huge bus depot on our right. There must have been something like two hundred buses there. All blasted. Riddled with bullets, they were resting at crazy angles, wheels all shot away. Without a soul in sight, it was an eerie atmosphere.
Then we came to the checkpoint. The surly-looking guards were obviously trigger-happy. They were shifting about, fingering their weapons. We’d come well prepared. We were primed for this. What they wanted was grease. Out came the bottles of Johnnie Walker Black Label. No other brand would do. And not the large bottles either, but cases of miniatures. This was the currency round these parts. That and the Marlboros. They’d got to have Marlboro cigarettes. Must have seen too many adverts. They wanted to strut around the place all macho, posing and smoking Marlboros. We’d been well briefed. It did the trick and they waved us through.
The seriously big mountains loomed up in front of us on the other side of Mostar. I was relieved in many ways. In Bosnia there were constantly shifting lines of conflict. You never knew when you might get caught up in no-man’s land between the Muslim and Serb forces. At least we had the advantage of cover on the thickly wooded mountain tracks. We struggled on into the night, grinding up near-vertical passes on nothing more than mud roads. This was going to be a long haul. And a dangerous one. We were in bandit territory. It wasn’t safe to stop. Besides, there was nowhere to stop. It was too remote. You don’t get too many Travelodge motels in the middle of the Bjelasnica mountain range.
The mountains here towered up to 7,000 feet high and were cut through with steep-sided canyons 1,000 feet deep. Wolves, wild boar and bears roamed freely around. This would have been a seriously difficult area to traverse in the middle of summer. It was now the middle of winter. Orlando was right – we would certainly need to push on here. No stopping. From now we would be rolling twenty-four hours a day, switching drivers to get a few hours’ kip. We were on hard routine – going without all normal ablutions. No shaving. No washing. No cleaning your teeth. All water reserved for drinking and making tea.
Eventually, after several days and nights of torturously slow progress over the mountains, we descended down the other side to the Cheshires’ forward operating base, the last outpost of the British Army before Tuzla and the front line. Colonel Bob Stewart – ‘Bosnia Bob’ – was in charge. Orlando bowled up in his Range Rover and, to my amazement, started to unload cases of vintage port and Stilton. That’s how he’d managed to get hold of the Warriors for top cover! This was what I call long-range planning. He’d sourced the goodies in London before we left and brought them with us. It was just before Christmas. He’d promised to deliver port and Stilton to the Officers’ Mess!
After resting up overnight at the Cheshires’ base, we went to the Ops Room for a briefing. The ops officer, a captain in the Intelligence Corps, gave us the bad news. ‘Well, boys. That’s it. You’re on your own now. We have to pull the Warriors off.’
‘Oh, charming,’ I thought. ‘Thanks a bunch.’ I asked him why.
‘The roads forward of here are DF’d by Serb mortars. We’ve had a recce patrol up in the hills overlooking the road and we identified the mortar firing positions.’
I jumped in. ‘Why didn’t you take them out?’
He stepped back in shock and horror. ‘Take them out! We’re NATO. We’re UN peacekeepers. We can’t take anybody out. We’re non-aggressors.’
‘So what you’re telling me is that we’ve got to go down that road and face those Serb mortars with no covering fire from you?’
‘Precisely.’
The world’s gone mad, I thought. Wrong kind of war again. Because of tip-toeing around political sensitivities, the lives of our convoy were going to be put at unnecessary risk. I felt the heavy weight of responsibility on my shoulders. It’s a lonely place to be when there’s only you to make the life-or-death decision. We couldn’t turn round now. We’d come too far. Retreating isn’t exactly in the DNA of the SAS. The trouble was, I didn’t have any backup. In the Regiment, I’d have half a squadron of SAS behind me. Now I was it! I’d get the blame if it all went pear-shaped and lives were lost. I could just see the headlines now: ‘Pete Winner, ex-SAS, fucked it all up.’
I came to a decision. It was all about mitigation, about managing the situation as best I could. I can assure you, if you want to miss a mortar you have to be going at speed. So I got hold of a guy from the REME. ‘These trucks of ours,’ I said. ‘They’re diesel. They’ve got governors on the fuel injection pumps. They’ll only do fifty miles an hour. That’s way too slow. We’ll be sitting ducks. Can you take the governors off so we can put our foot down?’