The Balkan Express

14 WHAT IVAN SAID

— Why did you volunteer for the Croatian Guards?

— I don’t know, something in me made me do it…

— Because others were volunteering, too?

— It’s not that so much… there were only a few of us at the beginning. But something drove me to it. I kept thinking I must join up, I must.

— How did you explain this to your mother?

— It was really bad for her, she thought everybody who went to fight would be killed.

— Was there fighting going on in Vukovar by then?

— Yes, my fifth day in I was already sent to mop up.

— What does that mean, ‘to mop up’?

— It means you get the Chetniks and take the weapons they have stashed away.

— How did you know who had hidden weapons?

— Well, some of their own people told us, those who were scared of us, because they heard we were going to butcher them.

— And what does ‘mopping up’ look like?

— We came to these houses, but they already knew we were coming. When we jumped off the truck, snipers started shooting at us. We took shelter in some houses nearby and started to shoot back, and a group of us managed to sneak up from behind, from the back.

— Who was in those houses they shot at you from, who are the Chetniks?

— The Serbs who lived there and the imported ones, the ones sent from Serbia. The reservists.

— Was this your first action?

— Yes, it was in the middle of July 1991.

— What was your job?

— I had to cover the others because the commander wouldn’t let me fight, I was the youngest. What you do is you take a position and keep a look-out.

— You had a gun? You knew how to use it?

— An automatic. I learned to shoot way back, in April. The older guys taught me.

— Where did they get the weapons from?

— Bought them.

— So people had already been preparing for war?

— Yes, for quite some time. In Vukovar the Croats were getting armed. The Serbs already had weapons, they would walk around and boast about it.

— And how did you feel going into your first action?

— Can’t say I was totally cool about it.

— Fear?

— It’s not exactly fear, it’s like… you’re afraid you’re going to get killed. That’s all you can think about.

— What kind of feeling is it, then, if you say it’s not fear, how do you tell it apart from fear?

— I think fear’s got more to do with panic, and this is… like, you’re afraid of dying, why you, what if now… and you can’t get it out of your head…

— Let’s go back to your first action.

— There was only one house with Chetniks in it, the rest of them ran away into the wood across the Vuka river, into Brsadin. There were perhaps two or three of them in that house and we wanted to make them surrender. We went into the house but couldn’t find them. Then we saw this narrow door leading to the basement, one of our guys was about to open the door when a bullet pierced his hand, it came from down below. You couldn’t get down there, the staircase was too narrow. We asked them to come out, we told them nothing would happen to them, they’d be tried in court. And they kept yelling from below, you’re Ustashas, you’ll slaughter us. Then another of our guys tried to get down there and got shot in the shoulder. Then his friend got really mad, went behind the house, opened a small basement window and threw a bomb inside. And then, when we went to the basement, that’s the first time I saw it…

— What did you see?

— People blown up and torn to pieces. One or two men, it couldn’t have been more than that. The basement was small, you couldn’t really tell how many of them were there. They were mincemeat, all that was left of them was blood stains on the wall. Everything was spattered with blood. I went out. I didn’t really care because I’d had no part in it, it wasn’t me that…

— But when you see that…

— But it’s not… the feeling isn’t the same.

— Later you got used to seeing things like that?

— I remember one Saturday, it was raining and we were resting, like. And there was this air raid. They mostly machined-gunned from the planes, seven of our guys were wounded. That day was the worst for me. I saw a shell fall on a car and it burst into flames. There were people inside that car.

— Were they civilians?

— Civilians. A neighbour of mine was driving, he used to live a hundred yards from my house. His brother was sitting in the back. The fire had already caught him and he was all scorched, we tried to pry the doors open but he was already dead. For the first time in my life I saw skin melt off a man, that was… everything is in flames, the car is burning, the man is sitting inside with his eyes wide open, and there’s nothing anyone can do. His head just sinks lower and his face melts. A bullet wounds you or kills you, but this, it’s like the movies, like setting a wax doll on fire. The flesh on his arms burned off to the bones.

— They say that corpses were lying in the streets of Vukovar.

— I first saw a heap of corpses when someone came and said people couldn’t sleep because of the stench of dead bodies in the cornfield. Because they left their dead behind, even the wounded. They never came back to pick them up.

— Who came to tell you about the corpses?

— The guys who held the position in the houses at the edge of the city, near the cornfields. It was summer and very hot, they said it stank like hell. Dogs were coming, there was a danger of diseases spreading. Something had to be done, the place had to be cleaned up. We loaded a truck full of corpses.

— You also helped to load the corpses on to the truck?

— No, I couldn’t do it, I just stood by. I couldn’t really take it. As soon as I got there, I began to vomit. People, dead people, rotting, decaying, flies coming out of their mouths. I just collected weapons.

— Do you know who those dead people were?

— Their men. All older guys, reservists and volunteers with beards. Only two of them were from Borovo, that’s a town nearby, they joined the Chetniks. We took their IDs from their pockets and piled them all together in a big heap; they were all from Serbia, from Pazova, Nis, mostly from Sid. We drove the truck to the bank of the River Danube, there was this large hole and we buried them in it. But after one truck-load the hole was full. There was no place to bury them any more, so we made a pile of bodies near the water tower and burned them. The money we burned, too, nobody was allowed to touch their money. The commander’s orders. We just kept the IDs.

— Did you get used to the whole thing?

— I did, you turn into a machine. You simply work like a machine. You think like a man and act like a robot. You’ve got to. Because if you have any feelings left… there… in the war…

— How do you know you’ve turned into a machine?

— You just know it, you think in a different way. See, we caught one of theirs, from Sid. He was a reservist, thirty years old, but very extreme, you could tell straight away. He had a membership card of the Chetniks’ party and a photo of Seselj, the Chetnik leader. We gave him some hope, we told him it’s going to be all right, we’d trade him for one of our own although the chances for trading prisoners were slim, they killed our guys on the spot. But one of our fighters was missing. We called their barracks, we thought that maybe we could work out an exchange of prisoners. The whole conversation took place in front of this Chetnik, he could hear everything. From the barracks they said: those men of ours that you’ve captured don’t deserve to live if they’ve allowed themselves to fall into the hands of the Ustashas. When we capture yours, you know what we do to them. And they hung up? And this reservist, he started to laugh, he was proud of it…

— Proud? Of what?

— Of what this man in the barracks said, that we know what they do to our guys. Like he was nuts, like he didn’t cotton on to the fact that he was our prisoner. The guys jumped on him, started to hit him. All those days while we held him prisoner he kept cursing us and our Ustasha mothers. We gave him food, nobody beat him, nothing. You came up to him and he spat at you. Then, of course, one of our guys flipped out, came to the commander and said, you take me to court, but I’m going to kill this man. The commander forbade it, but… we went down to the basement, this guy untied him. The Danube river was two hundred yards from us. He made him go into the water and then he killed him.

— Although the commander forbade it?

— But, you see, the war had already started. In war you listen to your commander but the commander allows you to do what you think is best for you. Because he gives orders, but it’s you who’s going to get killed.

— Have you seen many things like that happening?

— I never saw our guys butcher anybody or use a knife on a reservist. I did see something else… a man being beaten to death.

— A reservist?

— No, he was a local Serb who turned Chetnik, he was twenty-five. It was a hundred per cent certain that he had murdered some of our people. He himself admitted to two of our fighters that he’d killed their parents – the father and mother of one and the father of the other. He told them that openly because they used to be friends before.

— Did he tell them why he did it?

— He just said, you’re Ustashas, this is Serbia. One Serb escaped from their barracks and confirmed all that had been said about his slaughtering people. When we caught him, the boys whose parents he had murdered came, two brothers, one twenty-eight and the other twenty-three. This man butchered both their father and mother. And the third guy, he’s twenty-three and his brother was killed. One day this man cut the throat of his father, and on the next day his brother was killed in the battle… And he says, Is it true what they’re saying, that you killed my father? And the man says, Yeah, it’s true, I killed your father. And this guy says, Why? The man says, Because you’re Ustasha. And this guy says, And earlier, when we were pals, was I a Ustasha then? No, he says, but you went over to them. Our guys got really mad like and jumped on him. They beat him like hell, it’s hard to describe. They beat him and they cried, because he used to be their friend.

— And you saw this?

— We all stood there and watched, fifty of us.

— Fifty of you just stood there and watched as the three of them beat him up?

— They beat him up one by one. Later the others went mad, too. This used to be a tight group of friends, those four guys and a couple of others. They were friends until July, and then this Serb went away and when he came back, he was a Chetnik. They had been together since they were sixteen. And when they heard he was caught after he had killed their parents…

— What did they beat him with? Did they kick him with their feet?

— They beat him with everything, sticks, everything… And I couldn’t condemn them for what they did. If someone told me he had murdered my parents, I’d kill him right away. I didn’t feel sorry for him, not a bit, though I knew him, too. I had no feelings towards him, but I didn’t want to beat him. I just stood there, didn’t get involved, because they were beating him. And suddenly this other guy grabbed him by the chin and twisted his head. He just grabbed him and wrenched, like this… They beat him until he died. Then they threw him into the Danube.

— Did any of your commanders know about that?

— They did…

— But they couldn’t do anything?

— There’s not much anyone can do. When someone tells you he has murdered your Mum and Dad. Even if the highest-ranking commanding officer came and told you you mustn’t kill this man, it wouldn’t work. It’s revenge.

— And this was the worst thing that happened?

— The worst was when I killed a man for the first time.

— You mean, from close up?

— Yes. There were three of us, my brother, myself and a friend of ours. We went out to meet them. We hid in a house some fifty yards from their barracks and we saw them coming, three of them, carrying backpacks.

— What were they?

— Reservists.

— How can you tell who are reservists?

— You can tell them right away, they have beards, they’re shabby, they stink of liquor, they really stink, that’s no lie. They went around robbing people’s houses. We let them approach to about five yards away, they were coming towards us but didn’t see us.

— To five yards precisely?

— Yes, but they couldn’t see us because the sun was in their eyes and we were in the basement. When they came close, this friend of mine, who was on the ground floor, came out of the house and told them to drop their weapons. We wanted to take them prisoner. Then they pointed their machine-guns at us and we just blew them away. We came up to them to take their weapons, we took their backpacks, too, because we thought they might be carrying bombs, but we saw it was phones so we left them there.

— Phones?

— Phones! And all sorts of things, they’d even steal clothes. I couldn’t sleep all night. I had done it before… from afar. I saw the man fall when I shot him. But the feeling’s not the same, not even remotely. You’re standing right before him, he begins to lift his gun and you just… It’s like a machine, there’s no feeling to it, no thinking. Either he’s going to get you or you’re going to get him. And then what was really terrible, I took the gun from the man I had killed and I saw that it wasn’t even loaded! He did aim at me but he couldn’t really shoot: the gun wasn’t cocked and wasn’t loaded. He raised his gun mechanically while he knew all the time he couldn’t shoot. I was younger, he thought I would get scared and throw down my gun. But when I saw him aim at me, I just shot him, just like that and… it was over.

— Do you still remember what the man looked like, his face?

— Yes…

— You remember the faces?

— Yes, you do… The next day we were keeping watch in a house near the tank route and we saw two soldiers coming. My friend took the sniper’s rifle, he wanted to kill them without making too much noise so we wouldn’t be noticed. But then he lowered the gun, he said these soldiers were young army draftees, not reservists. They were about fifty yards from us. They had white belts, they were their military police. When they got to about ten yards from us, we yelled at them to stop and drop their weapons, but they began firing at us. In fact, they fired at the house, they didn’t see us. One of them almost shot my brother, then my brother returned fire and shot him. The other one threw himself on the ground, we could only see his arm with the gun. My brother and another friend sneaked up to him with grenades, came to within two or three yards of him and when they saw he was wounded, he cried for help. They told him to give himself up and nothing would happen to him. Or they’d throw a grenade. When he gave himself up, we saw he was really just a kid.

— So he was a draftee and not a reservist?

— Yeah, a draftee from Nis. We felt sorry for him, he was born in 1972, like me…

— What happened to him then?

— We took him to the hospital, they bandaged him there and he was sent to Zagreb with the first convoy out of Vukovar. He could choose, he could go to Belgrade, if he wanted to. We talked to him, we took some juice to him because there was no juice in the hospital and finally we made friends with him. His name was Srdjan. He told us to bring him the red star from his cap and he’d eat it before our eyes! He had only now realized that they’d been made to go to war against Croatia and he wasn’t guilty, he said, because he didn’t volunteer, he was drafted. Within fifteen days only two out of his entire group of thirty-six had survived. The rest were killed. And all of them were born in 1972 or 1973, just like us…

— Did you look for him in Zagreb?

— I did, I thought he might be at the Rehabilitation Centre, but I didn’t find him. I only found a friend of our commander who had lost both legs.

— How did this happen?

— It was the day of the big battle on Trpinjska cesta. We couldn’t find our commander and the other fighters told us to look for him in the hospital. We asked the doctor where our commander was but the doctor said, I’m not going to tell you anything, go down to the basement and see for yourself. The commander was lying there and beside him was his brother, stroking his head. When we came closer, we saw that the commander’s left leg was blown in half, the lower half was missing, while his right leg was scorched completely and so was his right hand. We stayed with him for two hours without saying a single word, we just wept. He’s twenty-two. I think that’s when I felt worst.

— Why then?

— He was our commander not because someone appointed him but because we picked him to be our commander. He was a brave man, tall, six feet eight perhaps, and strong. He wasn’t afraid of anything. We looked up to him, all of us. And when I saw him lying there, without legs, crippled and totally helpless… I felt terrible.

— Did it perhaps occur to you to quit at that moment?

— No, it didn’t, once you’re inside you can’t get out, you can’t quit.