...PORTSMOUTH - 19 December 1994
The customs official was adamant.
He wanted to examine the cargo. We were tired and in no real mood for his antics. On the dash of our truck was our itinerary and beneath it a signed letter from Prime Minister John Major, to be put on display for the British UN forces in Bosnia. I toyed with the idea of digging it out and shoving it under the obdurate official’s obdurate official nose.
We were tired after working through the night and early morning to complete the loading of our two vehicles, which were now crammed to bursting point with toys, medical goods and food for the Christmas parties we planned to hold for war-orphaned children in Bosnia.
Then there’d been the send off rigmarole in Eastleigh, the vehicles parked in the High Street while passers by gave us their well wishes, the newspapers and television cameramen did their stuff and the local Mayor, MP and other dignitaries made their dutiful appearances. Then we were driving slowly off accompanied by an entourage of fire engines with sirens moaning and blue lights flashing while local taxi drivers joined in and began honking their horns.
It was now 10.30pm and the ferry was due to leave Portsmouth harbour for Le Havre in something like 30 minutes.
"We have to examine the content of your vehicles," the customs guy repeated.
The six members of our team stood next to our two donated white trucks and I tried to look more pissed off than I felt. It wasn’t hard. I unlocked the back of the truck, being careful not to let anything fall out. The last items we had loaded were five hundred loaves of sliced bread and one thousand bread rolls, donated by Manor Bakeries in Eastleigh.
Both trucks were over their legal laden weight limit but a generous weighbridge master had signed our clearance tickets for the trip.
Mr Official was joined by some colleagues and they began taking stuff out of the truck.
"You’re going to put all that back, I hope?" I said, more a statement than a question.
"Where’s all this going?" he asked.
I was beginning to suspect he had an IQ of 03. My own truck sported a 20-foot long Union Jack, taken from the mast of HMS Ark Royal which was then at the Southampton/Portsmouth naval base and had been donated to our convoy following a request to the Royal Navy. It was wanted back, the Admiralty said, when we returned. I had fastened it to a length of scaffold pipe we had bolted to the front end of the truck. Both trucks also had bright red logos reading "Bosnia Children’s Christmas Party 1994" on either side.
Mr Official and his cronies had started unloading the bread rolls. I’d had enough.
"You guys are gonna look great on the front page of my newspaper when we get back from Bosnia," I told him. Up ahead the long traffic queue had started to move towards the ferry loading area.
Mr Official and his cronies exchanged glances and a few minutes later all the goods were back on the truck and we had joined the moving traffic.
"Stupid bloody moron," I said over the two way radio to Ken, the driver of the second truck. Ken was a mechanic from a Winchester Hendy-Ford service and sales garage who had agreed to bring his knowledge of vehicles on the trip with us.
Everything on board the two trucks had been donated to the mission except for the clothes we wore. Even sets of waterproofs and thermal underwear for our party had been provided.
Eventually we were aboard the ferry and I was presenting our tickets at the check-in. Our return passage had been donated by P&O and we were surprised to see it included six double berths.
We wandered down to the bar for some food and a few drinks before turning in to get some rest through the 10-hour voyage to Le Havre in preparation for the long drive ahead.
The Bosnia Children’s Christmas Party project started in earnest when Mike Gillman contacted me to write an article in the local newspaper for which I worked in Winchester, Hampshire. It was a good job - I had editorial discretion and freedom, working in the dual role of news editor and chief reporter.
Mike, then 82 and still working as a taxi driver in Eastleigh, had already featured several times in the paper over the years. A former personal chauffeur to Lord Cadbury, Mike had every Christmas for over twenty years jetted off to Cambodia, taking bags of presents and visiting orphanages across the country where he would play Santa to the many hundreds of war-orphaned children. He was also responsible for setting in motion events that established over 20 play schools in the country.
The previous year, 1993, he had jetted around the world on chartered airlines in a bid to break the Guinness Book of records entry for flying the quickest non-stop trip around the world. It was all done to raise cash for his next visit to Cambodia.
He broke the record and gained an entry in the book, yet despite being sponsored was still left out of pocket. He even had to sell his washing machine to fund his trip to Bosnia to pre-arrange his project. I had recorded his efforts over the years.
"Keith, I’m not going to Cambodia this year. I want to go to Bosnia. I think what I want to do is needed more there now," Mike told me during his telephone call to me at the paper.
"I’ve just come back from a trip there to get the ball rolling. I’ve been given permission by the UN, right from General Rose at the top," he said. He’d actually driven from the UK to Croatia and then on to Vitez in central Bosnia in his own car, despite the war.
"Keith, you know me, I’m not getting any younger. Can you do a story for me to get a collection of toys going. I need some help too, so I’d be obliged to you if when you do the story you can make an appeal that I’m looking for any volunteers who can help," he told me.
I began the story that same July afternoon. At home later in the evening I continued working at it to meet the next day’s deadline and as I put the paragraphs together calling for volunteers I realised, with my array of contacts, there was probably no one better placed to help Mike than myself. I called him on the phone.
We discussed the matter at length and by the end of the call I had decided I would help him all I could and, with his agreement, go on the trip also.
My partner at the time, Linda, who I met during a Marie Curie charity cycle ride from London to Southend, agreed to accompany me. Over the next few months, with extraordinary help from businesses and the public, thousands of items were donated to our appeal, many hundreds left at a large empty shop we were given permission to use by the management of The Brooks shopping centre in Winchester.
Tesco and Sainsbury’s provided the material for a monster Christmas cake big enough for 500. We were in business.
Hendy Ford car suppliers of Winchester came forward with the offer to pay for all fuel used in the trip and also to provide us with one of their mechanics, Ken Martin as a driver. The newspaper story also attracted three other volunteers, forty-seven years-old divorcee Ceren Davis and nineteen years-old Kelly Shiers, taking our final party to six.
Ceren threw herself wholeheartedly into the project and seemed to work at it almost with a vengeance. It was as if she had suddenly found a new meaning.
A few days prior to our departure we collected all of the donated items and housed them for sorting in a community hall a few yards from my home. They completely filled the large floor space and it took a team of a dozen volunteers, which included my 21-year-old daughter who I had met for the first time earlier in the year, well over a day just to sort and load everything into the two vehicles. Several schools had made our project their own Christmas bash and provided an incredible assortment of donated goods.
The Ministry of Defence flew the ingredients for the cake from Brize Norton airbase in England to Trogir airport and from there transported it to the large UN security base at Vitez, where a British army cook had been assigned the task of making the cake.
The six of us continued to meet every week or two as the months rolled into October, to thrash out any new ideas and strategies. Then I hit on the idea of staging a final push with a fund raising concert.
We hired the Guildhall in Winchester for the 15th of December and received tremendous help from Jim Cozens, a Winchester-based entertainments agent. Through his help we obtained Brian Poole as one of the acts, with the BBC radio comic and show presenter Mervyn Stutter and Winchester Hat Fair creator Jonathan Kay agreeing to host and compere the show.
A call to Pete Staples, a founder member of the 60’s superband The Troggs who was then living in Hampshire, promised the original Troggs band would come together for the show - their first live performance in 15 years. They pulled off a showstopper too, bringing the house down with a powerful rendition of their big hit, Wild Thing.
I’d wanted a major celebrity to give the show punch - the Guildhall was capable of seating up to 2000 and I wanted it as full as possible. I’d placed several telephone calls to Phil Collins but received no response - he was in Switzerland at the time getting to know his latest love.
Instead I drove with Linda out to Rye in Sussex, intent on tracking down Paul McCartney. I knew roughly where he lived and called in at a local newsagents.pst office shop, thinking if anyone knew his location, the newsagent/postmaster would.
He did, but at first refused to let on.
"I’ve been given strict instructions not to tell anyone how to find the place," the man said.
I explained exactly what I was up to, showed him my credentials and eventually, wanting to help, the man described how I could find the place.
"Just don’t say I told you, that’s all I ask," he said.
I made a bad mistake on locating the farm where Paul and Linda lived. The entrance was off a very narrow country lane and I drove past it twice, unsure. I had spotted a building in a narrow entrance, before an open gate. The third time I pulled in and made the mistake of stopping at the building. A security guard appeared and approached my car. He was having none of what I tried to explain.
"You’ll have to contact his London office," was all he kept saying. He refused to telephone down to the McCartney home and I eventually disappointedly drove away. Further down the country lane I realised I was heading the wrong way and spent a few moments awkwardly reversing and turning the car around. As I did so, two LandRovers came down the lane from the direction of the McCartney home and I recognised Paul and Linda in the front vehicle. Then they passed by and were gone.
I did contact the London office but disappointingly never received any response.
When the day of the concert came around I greeted guests and performers as they arrived and was surprised when one guitar player arrived whom I didn’t know. He’d flown in that day from Norway to join the Troggs as their own bass guitarist was ill. After the close of the concert at about 1am, he left to get a taxi back to London for a return flight to Norway. He never asked for a penny for his efforts.
Another jazz band who’d agreed at first to play for free called me two days before the show to say they wanted payment. I’d offered all performers free food and drinks for the evening and told the band I’d have to put a story in the paper to say what was going on. They turned up to play and played well but sadly acted like sour grapes for the whole evening. At the end of the evening I was handed a bar bill for £380.
The star act, Birmingham-based Steve Gibbons had asked for and I’d agreed to cover travel costs, but when I presented him with the envelope containing the cash at the close of the show he stuffed it back in my hand with a generous handshake, said how much he’d enjoyed attending and wished us all luck.
We’d had a panicky few hours preparing for the show - our sound system supplier failed to materialise and eventually Brian Poole agreed the whole show could use his stage sound system, saving the day.
Sadly, only 180 people turned up for the show, which included a performance by Bosnian folk singer Vjecko Dvorzak, then living in London having fled the trouble in his home country. The evening however proved a huge success and we covered all costs involved and ended up with several hundred pounds towards our venture.
It was also a strange time for me personally. Just a few months before I’d been reunited with my daughter Niko, then 21 and who I had last seen when she was a baby. I had always ensured Niko always knew how to find me, and one day she telephoned my home out of the blue while I was at work. Linda had been home at the time and took the call.
"Your daughter telephoned," she said, when I got home that night.
I was stunned. "What did she say?" I asked, eager to know. We had been separated when she was less than one year old and I had only ever seen her once, when her mother met me for a few hours in a London park when Niko was three.
"Not much, she hung up," said Linda. "It was your daughter though, I know it was," she said mysteriously
Niko had had a stepfather for several years and I no longer felt I was part of her life. Her mother always knew where to find me and I’d come to the conclusion if either of them wished to have contact with me, they would. It was not an easy decision for me to make and hold to.
Once I had been invited to go to Niko’s home when she was at school - she lived on the very top 36th floor of Sporle Court, London’s tallest high rise apartments, in Battersea.
They were all away on holiday, and Niko’s young uncle had bumped into me in London and thought I might like to look in on my daughter’s life.
I stayed in the empty maisonette for two days, poring through Niko’s school books and feeling oddly happy and thoroughly miserable.
I’d telephoned the Confectioners’ Benevolent Society in London’s Covent Garden, where I knew Niko worked. It was the first time we’d ever spoken.
"Hi Niko, this is your Dad," I said, feeling a little lame. "Did you call me?"
She had, she said, but hung up out of embarrassment when a "strange woman I didn’t know answered the call".
Two days later I drove to London and we met and spent several hours together. Several weeks later her boyfriend of the time, German-born Jens Hucke, had a guitar stand at the London Earl’s Court Music Show and I went along.
Niko and Jens came to the concert, and also helped us sort and pack the items into the trucks.
*
We drove off the ferry at Le Havre at about ten o’clock in the morning and began the long drive to our initial destination at Trogir, where we were due to rendezvous with Colonel Michael Smith, the deputy commander of British forces in Bosnia. We'd planned getting a ferry from Italy to Split but had great difficulty in coordinating dates and in the end decided on an overland route.
Our journey took us through Paris, across towards Dijon and onwards towards Switzerland. We spent several hours resting overnight in France, the vehicles parked closely back to back in a large motorway rest as a precaution against would-be looters, of which we had been warned.
The following night, after a second long drive, we pulled in at a Swiss roadside inn, having trouble getting the heavy trucks up into the steep, snow covered car park. Each time we got up and stopped, they would start to slide back again. Poor Mike Gillman - he desperately wanted to drive but we were uncertain about letting him take charge of one of the heavy trucks. We were speeding at an average of 90mph along the continental motorways, the huge Union Jack flapping in the wind at the side of the truck and encouraging hoots, waves and smiles from other motorists. Ken’s truck also sported a flag, though much smaller. I was glad I prevented Mike from driving, though sorry for him too, but when we reached Slovenia and Croatia driving conditions became treacherous and, I am certain, would have proved altogether too much for him.
At the 20-mile tunnel through the Alps we ran into a small problem. Linda, Kelly and myself were in the lead truck with myself driving and we entered the tunnel first, after paying the costly toll. Some miles later we realised the second truck, driven by Ken, was not behind us. I tried contacting Ken on the radio to no avail. Eventually we emerged on the far side of the mountains and parked up to await their arrival. Thirty minutes later they still had not appeared and we began to get worried.
Using the radio with twenty miles of solid mountain separating us was pointless. We also found there was no direct telephone contact between the operatives at either end of the tunnel - at least, none was made available for our use after we explained, with some difficulty, our predicament.
We also decided not to head back into the tunnel in case we passed each other on route. About an hour later Ken’s truck emerged and pulled up next to us.
We learned they had run short of cash to pay the tunnel toll and had to drive to a cash point to draw out some money. Our journey then took us on past Milan to Padua and eventually to the Slovenia border just past Trieste, where we again met more problems due to bureaucracy.
We were required to produce papers to enter and cross Slovenia - documents we had obtained prior to our departure. We also had documents from the Croatian and Bosnian embassies. We were not prepared for the next development however.
The armed border guards examining our documents of transit told us we required a signed release from a medical officer for some of the canned foods listed in our stock. We had zero success in attempting to discuss the matter and were forced to pull over into a holding area along with several dozen other vehicles all awaiting clearance.
For the next few hours we wandered from shipping office to shipping office trying to locate a medical officer. The only one was at another border crossing miles away and everyone had to wait for his arrival.
Yes, he’s on the way, we were told, but would not arrive for several hours. We stuck it out in the sub-zero temperatures.
By the time we had finally obtained the clearance, heavy weather had set in and snow was falling fast and thick, reducing our progress to a frustrating crawl.
The road leading from Slovenia to the Croatian border was barricaded. We'd made it as far as Postojna. Snow ploughs were crawling up and down the streets in an almost futile attempt at ridding them of snow.
The cop at the barricade told us we could not go further.
"The mountain pass is closed. We are not able to get, what you say, snow tractors up there," he explained in passable English. I asked for how long and we heard it would probably be opened in the morning.
I asked for and was given directions to a hotel where we booked in and spent the early night in pleasant company in the hotel’s bar before turning in.
Like an earlier overnight stopover in France, we made sure to pack the trucks tight back to back to deter possible looters.
The next day on asking for the bill I was staggered to be asked for upteen million Slovenian Tolars but sighed in some relief when the landlady explained it was only eight English pounds each, including our evening meal and breakfast. It felt strange adding a few million in gratitude for their friendliness.
*
The cop was right and the pass opened in the morning. The Croatian border officials thought that our papers might prove insufficient to cross into Bosnia and advised us to call at the port authority office in Rijeka, to which we were given directions.
We were given a helpful reception when we found the port authority offices. Our requirements were telephoned to another department and a faxed approval sent in return, which the harbourmaster then signed. A few hours later we were driving out of Rijeka, bound for the long haul down the scenic Croatia coast road to Trogir, two hundred miles south. We’d made telephone contact with Colonel Smith to advise him on our progress and location. He had to tie in our expected arrival time with a UN convoy to take us into the heart of Bosnia.
Were it not for the UN vehicles and the many young armed soldiers in varieties of military uniform carrying weapons it would have been difficult to believe we were just a few miles from a savage war.
One hundred miles later we came to our next delay - this time lasting seventeen hours.
We were travelling south on a high elevation of the Croatian coast road. To our left rose the northern extremes of the Dinaric Alps while to our right, perilously close, the ground fell steeply away in a series of steps to a bay inlet. It was now dark and up ahead I could see the lights of a long line of traffic. Further ahead the road snaked in and out of view and the lights seemed to go on a long way, possibly a few miles. We came to a halt in the line of traffic, wondering what the problem was.
The wind had picked up and was gusting strongly, shaking the truck violently. If it had not been so heavily laden there was a chance it could have been blown off the road and down the mountain. For perhaps thirty minutes, we remained stationary, then crawled forwards for a few hundred yards before the traffic again stopped.
The queue was a mixture of civilian cars, vans and a few heavy lorries. It was exceptionally cold - a clear, starry and moonlit night, the moon reflected in the dark waters far below. Suddenly we caught sight of something flying through the air - it was the awning from the top of an articulated lorry’s cab, tossed by wind like a sheet of paper down the mountain, rolling and tumbling before it eventually came to a halt against some big rocks. Linda, Kelly and myself exchanged looks.
An hour later and we still hadn’t moved. Several times impatient drivers pulled out and tried moving on up the queue but I guessed they wouldn’t be getting far and we stayed put. We’d equipped ourselves with the facilities to make hot drinks and we had plenty of snacks. I was concerned about the amount of goods we were carrying, stuck here in this remote location with the hurricane winds howling, but most people were staying in their vehicles. It was just too damned cold to venture out.
Some of them looked totally unprepared and were literally in their shirt sleeves in their vehicles, as though they were just out for a drive down to the shop. I guessed we were twenty miles or more in either direction from the nearest sizeable area of habitation.
Our two parties stayed in touch via the donated two way radios and eventually we killed the engines, restarting them every now and then to warm the cabs. Lights were killed in the queue and we settled down for an unknown wait, hauling out our sleeping bags and draping them over us for extra warmth.
Eventually we all slept in fitful snatches.
It was a full seventeen hours before the sounding of horns alerted us that the traffic was on the move. A mile or so further along the road we came to an articulated lorry lying on its side just off the road, several yards down the rocky mountain slope and I wondered if there had been an accident. No one was near the vehicle, which looked abandoned. About eight miles on and we came to a short, narrow tunnel through a rock overhang, wide enough for just one large vehicle to negotiate. We wondered if two vehicles had met in the tunnel, causing the hold-up, but never discovered the actual cause of the problem.
We were now running many hours behind schedule. We were now well into the 23rd of December and were already due at Trogir.
There were no further delays and we eventually reached Trogir. We telephoned Colonel Smith and were given instructions to find the UN base a few miles from the city, close to the main airport. We were told to report to the main guardhouse at the base and ask for the Colonel.
When we eventually located the base, primarily an aid supply depot, the Gurkha guards on duty refused to believe what we tried to tell them and declined to make any telephone calls into the base. After an hour of annoying waiting, we eventually collared two English officers entering the base and explained our difficulty. They obtained clearance for us after a heated argument with the Gurkha guard, during which one insolently asked for but didn’t get one of the British officer’s pistols, then we were escorted to Colonel Smith’s headquarters.
Four hours later Colonel Smith had booked us into a hotel being used by the UN in the small, attractive medieval coastal town of Trogir, some 30 kilometres from Split. It was occupied just by ourselves and about twenty French Air Force pilots whose job was to fly supplies from the nearby airport into beleaguered Sarajevo. One girl working at the hotel was a refugee from Tuzla, a city that had fared badly from the war.
The approach run to the airport at Trogir came in over the mountains and most aircraft would make a winding path on their approach route. Not so the French pilots. They’d come in straight over the rugged mountains then do a full belly flop drop to the runway. It must have given the air traffic crews daily headaches.
The pilots, on learning we were civilians on a charity mission, bombarded us with goodies and crates of wine and would not permit us to buy them even a drink at the bar.
"No," they would say, "we are Air Force pilots, we are paid to be here, you are not. This is all on us."
Daily they would leave the hotel at 5am to risk their lives flying into Sarajevo, only returning to the hotel in time for the evening meal at about 9pm, tired, but in good spirits.
Colonel Smith had arranged for us to rendezvous with a six-vehicle UN supply convoy heading into Bosnia the next day, 24th December. But somewhere in the short time between our arrival and meeting up with the convoy, we were driven into Split where we visited a war orphanage in a residential part of the city.
Despite the distance from the war zone, we found a teenaged boy of 16 was keeping guard at the entrance to the orphanage with a loaded Kalashnikov. It was an unnerving sight. We met with and spoke with the staff and some of the residents, and left a stock of presents and food to add to their Christmas.
The convoy, when we eventually met, was to escort us to another rendezvous point far inside the war zone in preparation for the first planned party on Christmas Day.
That night we all went gratefully to our rooms to rest. We were too tired even to go down to look at the seaside town with its walled central area and castle. Yet we were to find the time to visit sooner than we knew.
*
Early in the morning of Christmas Eve we drove out to the Trogir base to meet the Colonel and rendezvous with the convoy. We were treated to breakfast in the base mess, then met two young English soldiers who were to escort us by jeep to meet up with the main convoy, a four truck contingent taking supplies to one of the UN bases in Bosnia and led by a young Dutch officer.
Our rendezvous point was about 40 miles away at another UN location. We bid our goodbye to Colonel Smith, who had provided us with some further contacts along our planned route who would further assist us.
We had to travel a fair distance south before meeting up with the rest of the convoy, then turned inland and headed up into the mountains. It had been warm and sunny at Trogir, warm enough to go out in a tee-shirt despite being midwinter, but as we moved the short distance into the mountains the temperatures plummeted and the roads became icy. No snow ploughs operated in this region due to the war.
High in the mountains and close to the Croatia Bosnia border, one of the trucks blew a tyre and the convoy halted while the soldiers replaced the wheel, as high as a man. The convoy leader decided it was also a good time to put snow chains on the vehicles. We strolled around as the work progressed, deciding not to put our own snow chains on at this point.
We had halted on the edge of a steep incline that fell away several hundred feet to a village nested in the valley below. We had already seen signs of war damage, shelled buildings building pocked with heavy calibre machine gun fire. This village was no exception. Looking down, many of the buildings, mostly private homes, were badly damaged. One of the soldiers came across to chat with us as a car drove by without any number plates.
"See that?" said the soldier, nodding at the passing car. "They just steal them. Help themselves, rip off the number plates and keep the cars. The police here know that all cars without number plates have been stolen but just leave them alone. Most of those stealing them call themselves freedom fighters."
As I paced to keep warm in the cold wind, the ground crunched beneath my shoes. The stony area at the edge of the road was littered with spent rifle and machine gun cartridges. I asked what had happened there."Oh that. Yeah, the Serbs come down over the mountains up there and lie here sniping into the town down there," the soldier explained, flicking away the cigarette he was smoking. "I’d better get back." He said, and joined his mates who had almost finished their work with the snow chains. A few minutes later we were back on the road.
We were headed for the border crossing at Gramicni Pruelaz (Rupa), in a wide plain beyond the peaks of the Dinaras. It wasn't to prove so simple. Several times the Dutch officer leading the way in his jeep took wrong turnings up into the mountains and we would double back. Eventually our small convoy stopped in a remote area. Several houses lined the one side of the road overlooking an open field area. The bulk of the buildings were pockmarked with shell and bullet strikes. In one window, an elderly man sat looking out with an ancient looking rifle clearly visible at his side. All the young men we saw were armed with sidearms or carried rifles.
The Dutch officer came across and warned us to keep the our camera hidden. "Don't let them see you taking pictures. They get nervous," he said.
After a debate with the crew of one truck, we restarted, this time with the truck leading the way. The young officer had given up, or perhaps the truck driver was more familiar with the territory.
It had grown dark by the time we reached the summits of a barren ridge and began the slow decent down the narrow, ice covered mountain road to the plain far below. There was just one distant twinkling of lights in the centre of the whole, vast plain. We guessed, correctly, that it was the border crossing. Far in the distance across the plain we could see the occasional burst of tracer machine gun fire.
It was tricky controlling the vehicle on the ice covered road and I was glad it was heavy, it made it easier to handle. Eventually the lights of the crossing loomed close to hand and we drew to a halt.
There were two rows of huts, separated by perhaps fifty yards. One was manned by Croatian soldiers, the other by Bosnians. The officer commanding the convoy began talking with the guards.
A few minutes later shouts rang and some panic erupted with the convoy soldiers running backwards and forwards. One of the UN trucks had overheated and caught fire underneath and the soldiers moved fast to successfully quell the flames. We were asked to produce our papers for the guards.
As we did, the deafening sound of a mortar bomb exploded a few yards from our parked trucks, just beyond a low earth barrier. The sides of the truck shook with the force of the blast, which sucked the air from our lungs. At the same time, small arms fire erupted together with machine gun fire and tracer bullets whizzed overhead from somewhere close by. The girls looked petrified as the UN soldiers hurriedly armed themselves. The convoy was made up of trucks only and was not accompanied by any armoured vehicle.
We’d tried to brace the girls for such possible trouble but now here it was, the real thing, and they were scared. We all were.
Amazingly, the guards had ducked quickly when the mortar exploded but then straightened up and seemed casually to go about their business as if nothing at all was wrong, despite the continued firing. After several minutes the worst of the shooting subsided but sporadic shooting still continued somewhere close by, mostly small arms fire. A few minutes later the convoy leader came across to us.
"They’re not going to let you through," he told us.
It seemed the guards realised that we were not ‘official’ UN personnel and were unwilling to let us proceed after the firing erupted.
"They’re not sure if the firing is real or just high spirits at Christmas," the officer said.
It seemed real enough to us - the exploding mortar had been uncomfortably close. I could still smell the cordite, or whatever it was that was used in the damned things.
"Christ, we’re supposed to get through to our next point this evening - everything’s laid on for tomorrow. We have to be there," I said.
"I know," the officer replied. "I’ll try again but I’m not hopeful. They seem pretty determined." He walked off towards the guards.
We watched him talking with them for a few minutes but could see he was getting nowhere. When he returned to us we already felt we knew the worst.
"No go," he said. "Don’t worry, I’m going to try radioing base to see if maybe a telephone call or radio contact might change their minds. Stay here, in your trucks."
There were no working telephones at the guardhouses. They relied on their own radio system. After fifteen minutes the officer reappeared.
"No good," he said. "Colonel Smith advises that you head back. He’s going to try arranging something else for you. I’m sorry."
So were we.
"I can’t spare any of our people for your return, I’m afraid," the officer told us. "Can you find your way back okay?"
I nodded. We were lucky to have a very detailed, large scale map of the country - a rarity and I felt sure we’d be okay. Two of the border guards approached.
"We are sorry," one of them said. He was looking at the side of the truck and reading the writing. "Christmas parties?"
Mike Gillman tried persuading them to let us through but like the officer said, it was no good. We had no choice but to disappointedly return. We watched the convoy drive away into Bosnia then turned back.
Forty minutes later we were slowly and gingerly driving up the steep mountain road to the summit pass high above and were about half way up, light from our headlamps bouncing off the ice covered road. No other vehicles were in sight. It was about 8pm.
To our immediate right the mountain slope fell steeply away. Then from out of the darkness a good distance beyond the already distant border crossing, heavy machine gun tracer fire started up again. A few minutes later we watched horrified as the tracer menacingly arched towards us from the valley.
I hit the radio switch to Ken.
"Jesus Ken, they’re shooting at us! Kill your lights!"
We shut off our headlights and inched slowly up the mountain, thankful that the snow and ice and clear sky made it possible to sufficiently make out the road ahead. Tumbling off the mountain would not have done at all.
The tracer fire continued though it was obvious whoever was shooting was now shooting blindly. I remember praying that we could soon reach the safety of the road beyond the summit. We did.
Once over the top we took a short recovery break and I reminded Ken to leave his radio switched on. We each had gyrocompasses fastened to the dash as an added aid. I was sure we’d find our way back and Ken was sure he remembered the route we’d come along.
We were in low spirits for the remainder of the long drive back to Trogir, especially Mike, but we all remained determined that our mission was going to succeed come what may. I too was very frustrated by the maddening turn of events, having put in many, many hours of work on organising the trip over the preceding months.