190 AMERICAN SPYstage. I felt my way back to the main entrance and burst through the exit
door to the street, gasping for air.
Alcohol and AKs always seemed to go hand in hand in the Balkans. One
night while talking to my daughters from inside the Intercontinental’s phone
booth, I was evicted by a pair of inebriated Croatian soldiers who wanted
the phone. Not one to argue with a drunk with an AK, I complied with their
very reasonable request. After which I retired to my room to listen to some
George Strait on my portable cassette player before falling asleep.
After a week or so of official talks in Zagreb, my Croatian security
service contacts took me on a “field trip” to tour the front lines in Croatia.
Permanent-looking fortified trenches were dug and manned along rarely
moving front lines separating JNA/Serb and Croatian forces. We also
visited sandbagged frontline command centers, where officers briefed us on
what was happening in their theater of operations. Military maps showing
both friendly and enemy positions covered the walls and tables, and ciga-
rette smoke was ubiquitous. The entire experience made me feel as if I’d
been transported back in time to the European battlefields of World War
I, which was characterized by trench warfare (although considerably more
death and destruction than what I witnessed in Croatia). At the same time,
many of the Croatian Army’s few tanks, weapons, and military vehicles
appeared to be left over from the more recent World War II.
After visiting the front lines, we drove to the divided and dangerous city
of Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The fighting was fairly intense in the city
that day, with mortars landing uncomfortably close to us. It turned out the
previously allied Croats and Bosnian Muslims had just turned on each other,
and much of the fighting that day was between the two groups, who popu-
lated and controlled most of the city. My new buddy “Colonel Markica,” the
head of Croatian Army counterintelligence, would shrug after every mortar
hit, saying it was someone else’s problem, since we were still breathing. As
we made our way through the largely destroyed city to the beautiful, ancient
Ottoman bridge for which the city is named, I noticed what appeared to be a
couple of newlyweds inside a bombed-out Catholic church. He was in a tux,
while she was in a white wedding gown, holding flowers, and the two of them
were stepping over rubble. The scene was surreal, but as is often the case in
these situations, people were not going to stop trying to live their normal lives
simply because they were in a live fire zone. Life goes on.