WE WERE EXPECTING a bombing campaign to start at any moment. Milosevic had been typically recalcitrant and Madeleine Albright was being typically, well, Albright. Kosovo was tense; people were edgy. Early in the month my team went on mission to a village near Recane. It was a Serbian village, and we had received reports that some of the men there were armed and had been threatening nearby Albanian villagers. Hell, everyone was armed and threats were commonplace, but we decided to roll through the village and talk to some of the residents because we hadn’t been out there in a while.
I was working with our translator Sanije and my Canadian colleague, Gavin. We were traveling, as always, in one of our fully armored Chevrolet suburbans outfitted with radios, two satellite telephones and some sort of super hush-hush tracking unit under the passenger seat so that people at the other end of the world would know where we were if we got into trouble. In theory, if we didn’t update the code regularly or if we put in the special come-get-us-we’re-in-trouble code, Special Forces guys from Stuttgart would fly in to rescue us. I don’t think I knew the special code, and it probably would have taken way too long to figure it out in extremis anyway.
Gavin was a Newfoundlander, one of two Canadians sent to augment the U.S. team. For whatever reason, we were working together in one of the U.S. vehicles rather than the Canadian Suburban—Canada One—and I was on mission with him instead of his usual partner and compatriot, a soldier named John. Sanije and I had worked together often.
The village was off the main road, just outside of Suva Reka. We had been through it a few weeks earlier, so we knew the way. Nonetheless, Gavin properly had his big map and a GPS out alternately sitting on the dash or on his lap.
It was a crisp autumn day, with a sunny and mostly clear sky. We were following a city bus down the street. When it stopped, four men stepped off. As the bus pulled away, Sanije said quietly, “These guys are Serbs.” The four men walked towards our vehicle, one of them stepped up to my door and motioned that he wanted to talk to me.
We joked constantly that you could always tell the Serbian bad-guys, because they all wore hip-length, black leather jackets. Now I realized the truth behind this stereotype; sure enough, the guy standing at my door was wearing one. Our vehicles had three-inch thick windows that didn’t roll down, so the only way to speak to someone outside or to pass a document was to open the door. Our standard procedure was that only the person driving, usually the mission commander, would open the door. I kept the power locks on for the rest of the vehicle, but unlocked my door and cracked it enough to speak to the man.
Unfortunately, this was enough for him to grab the doorframe and yank the door fully open. Just as I noticed that his three friends had taken up positions at each corner of the vehicle, this guy stuck his pistol up to my temple and started yelling at me in Serbian.
Okay, so let’s review. We drive to a Serbian village where we know everyone is armed and the locals have been making threats against Albanians. The United States is clearly viewed as siding with the Kosovar Albanians, and NATO (aka the United States) has been threatening to bomb the hell out of Serbia. We have a 1:50,000 scale map and a GPS sitting on the dash of our fully armored vehicle that has big American flag magnets affixed to the doors. Then, I open the door to four guys in Serbo-Bob leather jackets. I suppose I should not have been at all surprised that one of them was holding a pistol to my head and screaming at me. But somehow, I was.
“Why have you come here? Are you going to bomb us?” The guy was yelling in Serbian and Sanije was translating very calmly from the back seat of the Suburban. He didn’t wait for a response.
“I’m going to kill you right here and then we’ll fuck this little shqiptar.” Every time he reached a point in his rant that needed emphasis, he tapped the barrel of the weapon against my skull. He was talking, yelling actually, very fast and so this was happening every few seconds.
Of everything that was said that day, one word I remember very clearly is shqiptar. It’s a derogatory term the Serbs used for Albanians and to hear him say it, almost spitting the word out of his mouth like it was something that tasted bad, gave me the sense that this guy wasn’t rational. He was operating under a different set of rules, those set by the nationalist ideology that had already destroyed most of Yugoslavia and was fast on the way to burning Kosovo, too.
The guy was holding the pistol in his left hand. I remember thinking that since most people in the world are right handed (I’m a lefty, so I think about these things), he was likely less coordinated with his left hand than with his right.
With his right hand, he was pulling on the door handle of the back seat passenger door behind which Sanije was sitting, calmly (it seemed) translating his ranting, screaming threats.
Gavin, who spoke considerably more Serbian than I did, but probably only enough to get us into trouble, was trying earnestly to diffuse the situation by asking the guy questions, I think, and telling him over and over again that we were diplomats in his country with the approval of his government in Belgrade.
In times of crisis, I think we all fall back on our training and in some cases our upbringing. Since I hadn’t been trained in how to react to someone holding a pistol up to my temple and screaming, I fell back on my Southern heritage. My mother always told me that it is considered rude to interrupt others who are speaking and that only one person should speak at a time. So I kept my mouth mostly shut except for the odd comment to ask Gavin to shut the fuck up or to Sanije to tell Gun-Boy something that was probably irrelevant.
“Unlock the doors,” he demanded.
One of the guys in the gang stepped up to the truck and pulled on the other passenger doors. They were all locked, so he stepped back to his position a couple meters off the passenger side taillight. Gun-Boy didn’t try to unlock the other doors. He either didn’t understand the concept of power locks or really didn’t care about getting into the vehicle. I suspect it was the former.
While all this was going on, the bus these clowns had gotten off had long ago pulled away down the road. We were alone.
Gun-Boy continued accusing us of being spies and of targeting the village for the NATO bombing campaign. Of course we weren’t, but I made a mental note, briefly, that if we got away from there, I would make sure to let the NATO targeters know about this place.
I don’t think I had time to think about this at the time, but it struck me later that Sanije never once sounded upset or afraid, never raised her voice much beyond what was necessary to convey the tone of what she was translating. All this while a handful of armed Serbian thugs were working to get her out of the vehicle.
Gavin meanwhile was still carrying on his discussion with Gun-Boy. I don’t know how much Serbian Gavin actually spoke, but it sounded rather like Tarzan-Serbian at the time. Of course, I spoke about seven unassociated words of Serbian. All of those quite poorly.
I never turned my head away from facing the front, so as I looked out through the windshield, I saw that the bus these guys had come in on was returning. There was a turn about a kilometer up the road and I could see the bus making the turn and starting to come back towards us. I suppose it was just a local, public transport bus and had dropped and picked up passengers in Recane and was returning to Suva Reka.
We were still sitting in the middle of the road. I hadn’t moved the truck since we pulled up behind the bus on its way in. It was a narrow road, paved, but just. This being farm country, there were ditches on both sides. Gun-Boy was standing in the bus’s lane with my door wide open and his arm fully extended, so as it approached, he stepped half a step closer to the truck and moved to shift the pistol to his right hand so he could pull the door a bit closed with his left.
I didn’t think about this at all—if I had, I likely wouldn’t or couldn’t have done it—but when Gun-Boy took his half step out of the door, I quickly reached out and jerked it closed. Thinking back, a number of really bad things might have happened. But what did happen is that Gun-Boy acted instinctively. He pulled his arm back to keep it from being caught in the door. The door slammed. I hit the power lock, and shifted into reverse, then stomped on the accelerator. I heard a loud thump as we jerked backwards and I hit one of the guys standing behind the truck hard enough to knock him down—away from the wheels luckily.
I was driving backwards on a narrow road, trying to go as fast as I could, when I heard a couple of pistol shots. About two hundred meters back up the road, there was a little culvert in the ditch where tractors could cross and get into the fields. I figured the weight classification of that culvert was probably less than a ton, certainly no more. And I was in a 5,000-pound vehicle. But, my only choice was to do a quick two-point turn or drive backwards all the way to the highway. I slowed a bit, cut the wheel quickly, stepped on the brake and popped the shifter into drive. In a few seconds we were heading as fast as the Suburban would carry us towards the highway.
It was probably only a mile or so out to the highway, then a right turn towards Bruqe Mountain. I was driving as fast as the vehicle would go up the hill when Gavin calmly said, “You can slow down now.” I gradually did. I don’t remember breathing heavily or feeling my heart racing, but I was obviously amped up.
We called in to our headquarters in Kosovo Polje and told them what had happened. I don’t remember much conversation on the hour-long drive back to the office.
Once we got back, things seemed almost normal. The translators in the office mobbed Sanije to support her and hear what had happened. Gavin and I sat with our reports officer and our boss to debrief. I think Gavin wrote the report on that day’s mission. I don’t remember what it said but it was probably short.
It’s hard to imagine all the things that might have gone wrong in that moment when I had grabbed for the door. I suppose Gun-Boy had been distracted by the bus passing just behind, him so he didn’t immediately see my hand dart toward the door handle. Otherwise, what might he have done? It would have been easy to pop off a few rounds from his automatic inside the vehicle.
What if the guy behind the truck had been a step closer to the center of the vehicle? It’s likely I would have badly injured or killed him.
Did they shoot at us or only into the air? I don’t know. There weren’t any holes in the vehicle that I could find afterwards.
It’s easy to second-guess and speculate, to “what-if” that moment to death. The bottom line for me is that those guys were bullies and we had strayed onto their playground. They wanted to scare us a bit. For my part, they succeeded. I don’t think they wanted to kill or even really hurt us. If they had wanted to, things would have turned out differently.