whatever i want

This evening I was confronted with the daunting task of writing in my diary. Daunting? How can I possibly bring it up to date after months of neglect, after all that has happened? I don’t have to bring it up to date; I can write whatever I want here.

When I went to Bosnia the first time I went as part of Psychological Operations, a scary name for possibly the coolest job. It is not my regular job – I was just lucky enough to go with them because of my languages. Basically, Psyop folks are the face of America, ambassadors in the street so to speak. I lived and worked in the area around Banja Luka, a predominately Serb area. I am getting ahead of myself, though.

We flew into Sarajevo Airport. The airport is in a large bowl in the mountains, requiring pilot to fly high to get over the peaks and drop straight down to the runway. It is actually a pretty tough airport to land in under the best of circumstances. The day we arrived was overcast and drizzly. Folks who considered us an “occupying force” were still taking potshots at us and the sides and ends of the runway were still heavily mined. Several plane carcasses littered the runway. We were flying with the doors open, every house along the approach was destroyed and the hillside was pocked with huge craters. It was a tense landing. We had to run at a crouch from the plane to a protective barrier. Wherever the French and Italians go they build their barriers of huge mesh baskets filled with rocks. All I remember seeing are sandbags, barbed wire and those mesh basket barriers. There was nothing left of the terminal but broken glass and twisted metal. With everything I owned in the world on my back I climbed into a deuce and a half with no canopy. No one was laughing or joking. Other than our vehicles there were no cars on the streets – few working automobiles and no gas. I remember a trashed two car tram with its windows and doors blown out slowly making its way, clanking and screeching on about a half mile strip. All of the rest of the track had been destroyed. It was packed full of people, though – anything to not have to walk even for a minute, to pretend everything is normal. Everyone was miserable. Everything was grey; in fact, as I think about it, I don’t remember a single color from that day. I lived an entire day of my life in black and white. We arrived exhausted, freezing and wet at what would be our home for two weeks – the destroyed Olympic facility, known to us as Ice Station Zetra. It was colder inside than out, but it was pretty cool. The electricity wasn’t working, so walking around with flashlights was rather like spelunking, especially since the pipes had long been broken and water dripped and ran in small streams through the corridors. There were even small stalactites. The walls had been originally painted that late 70’s brown. You could wander for hours in there lost, so someone put white tape arrows to show the way. We set up our cots as directed in the rifle range. The floor was slimy and it smelled really bad. When the shelling of Sarajevo had been at its worst, folks hid inside Zetra. People couldn’t go out for months at a time and they needed to put the bodies somewhere until they could bury them – the rifle range. Within three days we all had fungus – mine started in my hairline and worked its way across both cheeks, leaving my face a flaky, scabby mess – I was one of the lucky ones, though, as I never got it in my eyes, ears, nose or throat. Eight months later, on our way out, we noticed that the rifle range was closed.