Then in the morning we got the order to move, finally. Not knowing really where, but we were to cover a certain area against intrusions of the other side, we being the scouts squad. I was assigned the radio in the major's jeep (actually a kampanjola, the italian thing). The snow has started the day before, still slight but already all was white. Fuck the month of march, it looked so nice the first day. I kind of knew, or he knew me, Brlja and we pretty much counted as war pals since this. Turned out he worked in Bangro on their computer, and thag ginger kid of the june 1985. competition was his brother-in-law (who, last we heard a dozen years later, was somewhere in Luxembourg, in a satellite tracking unit, with the big „just do it“ kill switch on each satellite's controller). Fefi was in the crew of one of the trucks with all the radio equipment.
I started taking the rakija from my canteen later in the day, as I developed a toothache. It didn't help; the tooth hurt a bit more and my temperature regulation got kind of shot. It was warm in the jeep, but only in the front; the warm air didn't really catch in the back where I was. I remember we got to the barracks downtown at some point, where I managed to get some food from the kitchen and warm up a bit. The wind was serious already.
Then, an hour later, we were trying to find the truck where Fefi was, and they were sort of camouflaged by being in the middle of a frozen field, perhaps a kilometer from the road. The snow wasn't too deep, maybe 15cm, but the Italians didn't make the vehicle for this, and the Albanian who was the driver was probably freshly transfered from Čapljina, which is way too close to the sea to have any snow. So he kept driving straight, through their tracks, and of course our wheels are closer by and our floor is lower. We didn't get maybe 200m from the road when we were sitting on a pillow of densely packed snow. We got out and tried to dig ourselves out. The wind was 60km/h, temperature -18C. It's not that my knees were trembling, my spine was. Then I got the saving idea "we can get them on the radio to pull us out!" and the major just barked "quick, inside!". So I fired up the good old prcovka (PRC something, canadian made, had that during my training), and got Fefi as if on a local extension. They came and pulled us out.
While we were having fun on this field, in the middle of the night, the show was over. I guess we won, because we were the red side - the blue side always loses, as planned.
The next day we were just milling arround, doing mostly nothing. Perhaps this was the time when we were taken to another place to do some target shooting, to get the hang of those m72s. I think I missed most of mine - didn't even have the time to see which way it carries, and I didn't really care. The vojska let us off on 5th, and of course it was dark again, and we were 7km away from town, and there was the usual mess with returning of the weapons, snafus one after another, but eventually we filled the prescribed time slot and were let go. Luckily, someone with an empty little truck just got by and let us all in the back, so it was, for me, just 1km walk. Good, back to normal life again.
21-XI-2020 - 17-I-2026