Under Pressure. Faruk Šehić
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have decided to write sparsely.
End of war not in sight.
Mon. – drunk.
Tue. – drunk.
Wed. – ditto.
Thu. – 0.
To Eternity
1.
The plan was quite simple: We would stretch out and form a firing line. The nine of us. The distance between each two fighters 5–10 metres. Frontal assault from the Standard Operating Procedures. Baldie will fire a rocket from his shoulder-fired Yugoslav Army Zolja launcher. That’s our artillery prep. We will rise up from the grass. Start shooting and shouting the Takbir as we dash for their trenches. Whoever survives, survives.
Now we lie about and smoke in the safety of our own trenches. We’re wearing our helmets, and our ammunition vests are stocked with thirty-round magazines. Baldie is slinging his Zolja over his back. Our mighty artillery. Faćo is the only one of us who has a rifle with a wooden stock. He says it’s his lucky rifle. The trenchies are offering us cigarettes and coffee, eyes ablink with happiness because they’re not participating in the operation. Everything for the commandos. Small talk, nobody mentions what is to come. As if we were going on a picnic, not a trench raid.
October wind musters out veteran beech and hornbeam leaves. As they fall, they brush leaf against leaf, rustling like Indian silk. The pines are indestructible. Their dark green needles comb the wind. We wait for the battalion commander to give the off via a Motorola. Night is in force. We’re in the forest, where our strange firing line in the shape of a horseshoe is formed. Below the forest runs an asphalt road. Further down is a great big hollow, as dark as King Kong’s gullet. Three hundred metres across the hollow our line continues. So we’re bulging into their line. An un-fuck-with-able salient exposed to guns of all calibres.
Baldie motions us to move. Hafura and I go on a recce, just in case, although midnight blue is the colour-in-chief. We head out of the forest. We walk like camouflaged ghosts, and sneak up to a stretch of stunted undergrowth. If somebody opens up on us, we’re fucked because we’re between the lines. We can only move by ear. We hear indistinct human speech. We hold our breath. Some kind of tapping sound is coming from their trenches. Dull thuds. As if they’re digging in. Now? What the fuck? Baldie approaches with the rest of the detail. We take up positions as planned and start to crawl. Golo brdo. Has there ever been a stupider name for a hump than Barren Hill? We close up to the spot. We can’t see their trenches. It seems they are just below the brow of the fell, on the last slope. Baldie gets up, telescopes the Zolja out. He takes aim, eyeballs it. The rocket flies above the hill and on to Zanzibar. He must’ve hit a barn or some such strategically significant facility. Doesn’t matter, it’s just a psychological trick anyway. Explosions stoke fear, and fear makes you see things, your eyes pop out and gleam white, like those of an ox about to be slaughtered.
We dash, we shoot, we shout.
Metres seem like kilometres in a marathon race.
Time stretches like the rubber strips on a catapult.
Tracers fly every which way.
Enemy fire slows us down.
We just lie on the ground, without any cover.
That’s it. Golo brdo. A dying range.
Hit the deck, graze the grass.
‘Baldie, me gun’s jammed, come over ’ere!’ yells Faćo.
Baldie kicks his gun clear. Faćo puts the rifle’s wooden stock in front of his face to shield his forehead.
‘Fuckin’ ’ell, it’s a tough one!’ I hear Hafura.
‘Tits up, this. Pull back!’ bellows Baldie.
No time to talk. We’re rolling downhill towards our line. We’re shielded from the bullets as we’re just below the shoulder of the hill. Hand grenades explode in the place we were a second ago. The blasts ring out like in a well. We reach the forest. None killed, none wounded. The recruit hangs his head, stares at the ground. His pale complexion lends him the appearance of a zombie. His aquiline nose, hanging from his face like an upside down butcher’s hook, turns him into a walking caricature. He bends over at the waist as he walks, as if to measure his insecurity with strides. To have a raw recruit in your unit is to be blighted by bad luck. It’s incredible how death sticks to them. At times I was convinced I could make out the sigil of doom on their faces.
‘All the king’s ’orses couldn’t take this fuckin’ ’ill,’ Hafura says.
‘Yep, it’s a tough one, fuck.’
‘Night raids are a lottery,’ Merva makes himself heard.
‘Everything’s a lottery: breakin’ the lines, holdin’ the lines, goin’ about in mufti on leave, you can catch death wherever.’
‘Nasty fuckin’ business, this,’ Baldie speaks up.
‘To top it off, me gun keeps jamming’, complains Faćo.
Baldie winks and smiles. We descend to the asphalt road.
‘Right lads, see ya, then,’ the guard from the dugout far left takes his leave of us.
We move in a group. We footslog like tin robots. We’re going back two hundred metres towards our rear. When we get there, the house we’re quartered in emerges from the murk. Merva and I take first watch. The others go to bed. We’re standing in front of the door looking at the green in front of the house. To our right gapes a large hollow. Our positions are some half a kilometre up the mountain. For all intents and purposes, we’re a picket. The dark thickens, like when a train suddenly flies into a tunnel.
‘Tomorrow, I mean in the mornin’, we’ll be attackin’ again, it seems.’
‘Gettin’ fucked is what we’ll be doin’!’
‘They’ve dug in down to the centre of the Earth, can’t scratch ’em,’ Merva moans to himself.
In the distance, a drunk is shooting tracers into the sky. I piss on the corner of the house. Live to fight another day. Me wanger.
2.
Same thing again. Only this time we’re attacking by day. What was the sky like? Was it sunny? I don’t remember. The uniform has a uniform unisex smell. The grass is wet and grey-green like the walls of a public lavatory. It is perfectly quiet those few minutes before the attack. The sounds of nature, too, die down. Or the brain doesn’t register them, focused as it is on one thing only: staying alive.
My body is like a sweaty clenched fist. The firing of the Zolja. Some shooting and shouting of Takbirs. We’ve cracked their line with unexpected ease. Hopped into their empty trenches. A twitch crumples up my face. Expanding bullets are popping like popcorn. Redžo Begić is kneeling on my right. Stalks of straw jut out from under an army blanket. We rummage through some army bags we find there. The owner of the one I’ve got is called Duško Banjac. His name is written in pencil on a piece of paper from a graph pad. We stuff cardboard packets of ammo into our pockets. A jet of thick blood spurts from Redžo’s mouth. He gurgles. His face assumes the hue of lye. At first I thought the bullet had gone through his mouth. We get him out of the trench and further, some ten metres below it, to cover. His death took only a few seconds. We didn’t even have time to bandage him. The bullet went through his chest from above. Ripped up his heart. We covered him with a shelter-half – when you see a dead man you’re reminded of your own mortality.
The recruit retches and chucks up slimy morsels of undigested food. We leave him with the casualty to wait for casevac to come from the rear and pick up the body. Fighters from the adjacent brigade have broken enemy lines on the right flank and burst into some houses level with Golo brdo. We’re making our way through short stalks of un-harvested maize. A shell lands between Hafura and Husin. Both go airborne, together with mown off maize stalks. Husin is wounded in the left shin, a wound worth three or four months of leave. Hafura is blast-injured. Baldie