WHERE HAVE ALL THE FIXERS GONE?
The 22-stories-high former Bosnia-Herzegovina parliament build ing in Sarajevo was almost gutted, riddled with gaping holes from high-explosive tank and artillery rounds. At one time it served as a seat of government; now it was being used as a key observation post and counter-sniping position by the besieged Bosnians as they defended their capital. Below, candles and lanterns provided dim illumination for home less refugees who lived in dark rooms and corridors in the basement, taking refuge from enemy guns until thirst and hunger forced them up and out onto the treacherous streets that surrounded the Parliament building and the nearby Holiday Inn. The main drag was called “Sniper’s Alley” and those few people with gas for their cars drove with pedal to the metal, swerving around shell craters and hurtling across intersections at manic speed to evade sniper fire. Some did not make it. Overturned and burned cars filled with bodies littered the road. For those (network or major press journalists, or U.N. personnel) who could afford them, armored vehicles were the transport of choice, but the local residents relied as much on luck as on driving skills.
A few weeks earlier, after the disintegration of Yugoslavia was turning quite bloody, I contacted my old friend and running partner, merc Bob MacKenzie, to see if he was up for a quick trip to Sarajevo sniper land to play journalist and get an adrenaline fix.
“But of course,” he replied and with that we were off to the charming tourist town of Split on the blue Adriatic, where we would link up with members of the Croatian Defense Council (HVO) Foreign Press Bureau, an organization set up by another Vietnam vet, J. P Mackley, who I met during the Gulf War. The plan was that they would facilitate our movement to Sarajevo. Well, that was the plan. However, like with any military oper ation, plans change once the first round is fired. In this case, the plan went awry the minute we got off the plane in Split.
We found out that the only flights into Sarajevo from Split were those occasional ones flown by U.N. aircraft. They occasionally graciously al lowed journalists to ride along. If they were in the mood, that is. So one day, two days, three days, four went by, and nothing. We were all used to the wait, wait and wait some more, but that did little to make it any more pleasant. Meanwhile, we picked the minds of other journalists as to how to best get stories and stay alive. The rules were simple:
“You need to check in to the well shot up Holiday Inn which, though on the front lines, had a bar in the basement. Preferably a room with glass in the windows. An opportunity to a get a free workout as the elevators didn’t elevate. Sometimes the water ran . . . keep the bathtub full of water . . . sometimes the electricity was on. . . just make sure you insist on a room on the back side of the hotel. You will still hear plenty of gunfire to lull you to sleep,” they collectively told us.
“Get a fixer,” one added. “He will have a vehicle . . . will know who to see to get you access to the action. And, of course, he will translate. Ask the hotel desk for recommendations for fixers.”
“Oh, and by the way, don’t get shot,” one smartass said.
Simple enough. Mac and I bummed a ride from the airport to the hotel, got a room on the opposite side from the gunfire and let it be known we were in the market for a “fixer.” We then decided to recon the area. Going out the back of the hotel, we noticed a number of armored jeeps and SUVs. This was the only war I knew of where journalists went to the front in their own personal, or leased, armored cars. We saw a jeep of in determinate age with “Washington Post” daintily painted on the driver’s door with a couple of civilian males babbling about something nearby. I wasn’t thrilled about asking somebody from the Post for anything, but what the hell.
“I am Robert Brown, publisher of Soldier of Fortune magazine and here is my fellow journalist, Bob MacKenzie.”
I told Jim Rupert from the Washington Post, “We are looking for a fixer.” Fate smiled on us, or so we thought.
“Tell you what, I am leaving tomorrow,” Rupert said. “You can hire my fixer.”
“Sure, why not?” we figured, working on the not unreasonable assump tion that if this dude was good enough for the prestigious D.C. mouthpiece of liberalism it should work for us. Wrong.
“One hundred dollars a day is what we can afford if you can get us where we want to go and to who we want to see,” we told the fixer.
Three days later, we hadn’t gone anywhere or seen anyone. Our mission was to do an inside story on the Sarajevo counter-sniper units and ascertain how effective they were. Our fixer couldn’t fix anything. Maybe he couldn’t score credentials for us or he may simply have not wanted to go there. Even in the relative safety of the backside of our hotel, the rattle of small-arms fire provided a fairly constant background melody. Explosions from in coming mortar, recoilless rifle and artillery fire echoed around the city every half-hour or so. The fixer had to live that shit 24/7 and couldn’t be blamed if he didn’t care to risk his life so a couple of nutso gringos could get a few photos and interviews while dodging rounds of various calibers, all of which were quite lethal.
MacKenzie and I, bored to tears, hung around the Holiday Inn waiting for our local fixer to arrange a visit to some of the defensive positions in Sarajevo. That night in the Holiday Inn bar we were picking the minds of other journalists. I was interviewing a French report about the Foreign Le gion. Mac was a few yards away with several alleged reporters. He suddenly broke away, approached my table and with a disgusted look on his face growled,
“You are not going to believe this.” “What now?” I replied.
“See that good looking blonde at the table I just left? She must be all of 20. She is dumber than a fence post. When discussing the ruthlessness of the Serb Snipers, she became agitated and said, “Well, why don’t they just throw land mines at the snipers. The editor at Elle should be strung up for the yardarm for sending her.”
One positive thing came out of Mac’s round table. A free lance jour nalist who had been in Sarajevo for a couple of months volunteered he could get us to the frontlines. It wasn’t ‘til we hired him did we find out he had a case of tourrette syndrome. We had almost given up because only a suicidal maniac would try to dodge the unending incoming fire, despite the supposed ceasefire in effect, just to escort a couple of journalists trying to get a story.
SNIPER’S ALLEY
That is when I first met Mark Milstein, a fanatic of a journalist who had figured out the ropes of how to get the necessary papers after several months in Sarajevo. He was relieved that professional soldier MacKenzie would join him interviewing a unit tasked with suppressing snipers in a Serbian-held suburb on a hillside overlooking part of Sarajevo. Since I was able to get an appointment with the French Foreign Legion unit securing the Sara jevo airport, MacKenzie and Milstein headed out for the front lines.
The following is MacKenzie’s report: “We didn’t have to go far to find the front; it was about a block away from the Holiday Inn. We first crept around the sides of the hotel, trying to make ourselves invisible to gunmen on the hillside above. On reaching the edge of the dreaded Sniper’s Alley (the dread was real enough—a civilian had been shot in front of our hotel the previous afternoon), we firmly grasped our camera bags, tightened up our rear apertures and sprinted across a hundred meters of empty boulevard and center divider. It was almost an anti-climax when we got to the cover of some shell-pocked buildings on the other side of the street without draw ing a single round of small-arms fire.
“As Milstein had been there before, he led the way around parking lots and pedestrian concourses to the local command post. There we presented his paperwork and spoke to a succession of increasingly senior Bosnian Army soldiers until finally the area commander, Ante, appeared. We must have impressed him, or maybe it was a slow day, because he decided to show us around himself.
“Ante’s unit was responsible for 800 meters of front along the 10-meter-wide Miljacka River, which runs through the middle of Sarajevo. Ruined factories, burned out skyscrapers and scarred apartment buildings (still occupied!) provided his men with excellent cover and observation of similar Serbian positions, which in some places were only 20 meters away across the river. As my friend and I followed Ante through the rubble, we asked him about his troops. He prudently wouldn’t tell us their strength, except to say that he could get as many men as he had arms to issue.
“Some of his troops were members of the Bosnian Army and some were from a police counter-terrorist unit formed to provide security for the 1984 Winter Olympics. Some had served in the Yugoslav Army and some had no previous military experience. However, all were fiercely de termined to defend their city from the “Serbian invaders.” The few cam ouflage-clad female combatants in the group, some of whom were reported to be counter-snipers, were in obvious agreement. A platoon leader told me that of his 3 7 men, seven were Orthodox Serbs, five were Catholic Croats and 25 were Muslim Bosnians. He said they were fighting together because they had always lived together and wanted to do so in the future, without interference from politicians in Belgrade, Zagreb, the United Na tions or their own city hall. That attitude, widespread among all ethnic groups living in Sarajevo, denied the Serbs the easy victory they hoped for when they started fighting there in April 1992.”
MAUSERS AND .50 CALS
The unit was armed with a variety of weapons, which provided them with good counter-sniping capability and included scoped German K98k Mauser rifles and Yugoslav copies; Russian Dragunovs and Yugo M76 snip ing rifles; and the M72AB 1 N-PN Yugo FAZ weapons-family light ma chine gun variant with a folding metal stock, which was also fitted with bases for telescopic sights. At one position I noticed a small, neat pyramid of .50-caliber shells which, when I asked, were said to have come from a .50-caliber bolt-action rifle.
The unit’s several machine guns had also been used with some success by responding to muzzle flashes at night with short bursts. Rounding out the unit’s weaponry were Yugoslav AKs, a scattering of hand grenades, some anti-tank rockets and, as always in Bosnia, a variety of civilian shotguns and hunting rifles.
Whatever the weapon in use, after months of practice the Bosnian counter-snipers knew their jobs. Their hides were always well back from windows or shell holes and they had easy routes to dozens of alternates.
Since Serbian counterfire often took the form of a tank round, “shoot and scoot” was one of their most closely followed operating principles. With every two or three shooters was an observer equipped with binoculars or 40x42 spotting scopes, who also carried maps and sketches of scores of known Serbian positions and bunkers.
As I climbed many, many stories up the parliament building, I had a firsthand look at the Bosnians’ biggest problem in trying to suppress enemy snipers. On the hillside opposite were literally thousands of empty windows and thousands more trees, bushes, and piles of debris, each one a potential firing position. One of the worst areas was an overgrown cemetery, about 300 meters away, where each crypt and tombstone could hide a rifleman. Clearly, the Serbs were proficient in their tactics and use of ground.
These phantom shooters seldom were highly skilled military techni cians with specialized equipment, selectively taking out justifiable military targets at ranges of up to 1,000 meters. More often than not, it was a Chet-nik taking potshots at baby carriages from 200 meters with an AK. It was simply the callous, terrorist assassination of innocents. Most journalists and U.N. observers agreed that the sniping of civilians was premeditated— the objective being to force civilians to leave the city.
Ironically, some of the Serbian sharpshooters had served in the same police counter-terrorist unit as their Bosnian counterparts and they were all known by name to each other. Perhaps the most discussed was a former shooting instructor who had trained some of the same people trying to shoot him. An Olympic-medalist marksman, he was reputed to be very capricious in his choice of targets. The first week only women, the next week only journalists, the following week firemen, etc. His former students were very much in dread of his cross hairs, as he reportedly never, ever missed. If he dropped the hammer on you, you got more than your ticket punched. Why this former policeman, once dedicated to law enforcement and who specialized in anti-terrorism, had now become virtually a terrorist himself, was the subject of a good deal of conjecture. As with many things during the war in Bosnia, there were no obvious answers.
Unable to take Sarajevo by storm, the Serbs resorted to murder-by-rifle-fire and indiscriminate shelling to force the surrender of the city. Since the battle had started the previous year, some 10,000 people had been killed and 60,000 wounded, the vast majority civilians. Serb troops cut off the electricity and water and were trying to prevent food from getting in, hop ing to break the resistance of the inhabitants. The populace was now being forced to boil sewage for drinking water. The Serbs made a mockery of U.N. forces, closing the airport and stopping convoys whenever they felt like it. All this happened while American and European political leaders bickered over whose fault and whose responsibility the war was, and issued statements condemning the actions of just about everyone. It was enough to make a grown man weep with frustration—or maybe take a rifle and go shoot a Chetnik.