FROM WAR VIRGIN TO WAR WEARY 191Nearby, a small wooded city park had been turned into a cemetery,
the entire green filled with fresh graves and makeshift markers. One grave
marker simply said, “Mak, Englez”—“Mack, Englishman.” Mack was
undoubtedly one of the foreign fighters drawn to this Eastern European
war zone to help whomever he considered to be the “good guys.”
We continued walking through the rubble and shelling and made it to
the Old Bridge (Stari Most), which at the time was the last bridge standing
over the Neretva River. The Serbs had destroyed every other bridge in
Mostar except the old stone one on which we stood. The following year, the
Croats would destroy this ancient bridge during fighting with the Bosnians.
The Bosnians promised to rebuild it “even better and older than before.”
After visiting the Old Bridge for the first (and last) time in my life, my
Croat escorts and I worked our way out of the battle zone by car and con-
tinued on our field trip. The next stop was one of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s
more tranquil tourist attractions, whose name I forget. At that point, ears
ringing, I was still in the process of decompressing after the close calls during
our Mostar city tour. After checking out the deserted tourist attraction, we
went “plinking” in the Bosnian boonies with a suppressed Heckler & Koch
sniper rifle. My Croat hosts wanted to see if this gringo could shoot, and
seemed delighted when I kept up with them, shot for shot. I explained I’d
grown up hunting in the American Southwest, although I couldn’t imagine
anyone not being able to hit a stationary target twenty meters away with a
suppressed H&K rifle equipped with a massive high-powered sniper scope.
We spent that night in a serenely peaceful monastery in Medjugorje, the
town in Bosnia and Herzegovina known mainly as a destination for Catholic
pilgrims. During our drive back to Zagreb the next day, we talked about our
personal lives. My Croatian hosts learned that I had been in Los Angeles
during the riots earlier that year. These guys who lived and breathed real
war on a daily basis were genuinely concerned for my safety and insisted I
take a JNA “red star” 7.65 mm handgun back to the States, along with my
beloved Czechoslovak Škorpion fully automatic machine pistol. Just in case. I
tried to refuse their generosity, explaining the situation at home really wasn’t
dangerous, but they wouldn’t hear of it. In the end, I gratefully accepted
their well-intentioned gifts but did not tell them I would be unable to transit
Frankfurt Airport—or enter the United States—so heavily armed. I left the
weapons in Zagreb, where they were likely later destroyed.