And The Night Fell Over Yugoslavia
The war in the mirror is always closer than it appears.
No Distance Left
Years of conflict in Africa had not prepared me for what was coming in November that year. A two-hour flight could take me to either Belgrade or Zagreb. This time, the war was in the heart of Europe.
Imagine going to war as if on a morning commute. On one side, the coffee is still warm on the tray table, Mozart playing in the airport lounge. On the other, gray rain over a post-communist landscape, soldiers at checkpoints, a country breaking apart.
And still, I looked like everyone else in the street. I kept repeating to myself, I am in Europe, as if to pinch my mind awake from a dream that had gone wrong.
This Europe felt poor and muted, heavy with old anger and ethnic memory. No border stamp, no ritual of crossing, just a wormhole through time, a step into another century.
War in White
Another gray, cold, rainy day.
We had driven a couple of hours toward the Serbia–Croatia border, in a VW Golf rented in Belgrade. We knew heavy fighting was going on; surely the hospitals needed help.
On the way we stopped at a roadside restaurant for food. Always a good place to get the latest information before the front line. Inside the air smelled of wood smoke and boiled cabbage and potatoes.
We had barely started eating when a group of paramilitaries entered.
Their boots were heavy with mud, their laughter silenced the rest of the room.
The one who led them wore a spotless white Stetson and matching white mittens.
Like immaculate trophies. He walked with defiance, a handgun at his belt, eyes scanning the room for something no one wanted to find out.
Everyone kept their heads down.
We all knew who they were, men sent ahead of the army to do the work no one would claim. They called it “cleaning.”
It meant killing whoever was still alive.
Often worse.
I signaled the waitress, got an old newspaper to wrap the food.
We paid quickly and left before they could take notice of our presence.
Yugoslavia had already become unsafe for journalists and aid workers, and these men knew exactly why.
Outside, the air was cold but I welcomed it as salvation, a way to disguise the sweat that had begun to show. Even from the road, their voices and laughter carried out into the damp air. No one else would laugh in a place like that.
Highway to Hell
We’d convinced the soldiers at the roadblock to let us through.
Now we were driving, zigzagging rather, between obstacles scattered across the road.
Inside the car, that familiar thick smell of fear mixed with the cabbage sandwiches we’d grabbed.
Long silences filled the space, each one saying what we didn’t want to admit:
we had no idea what waited ahead.
The landscape was wrecked.
Rows of buildings without windows, black streaks of fire across their facades.
Trees split and leaning, charred to their skeletons, riddled with bullets.
Bodies left in the street.
Rubble, branches, shards of glass everywhere.
And the windows, hundreds of them, each one a possible sniper’s nest.
I was driving fast. It wasn’t a place to linger. It felt like survival demanded speed.
When I saw the unexploded RPG, it was already too late.
I drove over it.
It tumbled and clanged beneath the car.
My eyes half closed, shoulders tightened, time slowing to a single heartbeat.
Waiting for the blast.
Nothing.
I looked at my friend.
We were breathing again.
Lucky.
The grenade must have been defective, its failure a blessing.
A cold sweat slid down my back, under my arms.
I whispered to myself, What the fuck are we doing here?
Nightlife
Back in Belgrade that evening, the city looked almost normal beyond the taped windows. Neon reflected on wet asphalt. Taxis idled outside hotels.
It always stunned me how life goes on in the middle of war.
Yet what else could it do?
My stress was high; the day had been intense. I couldn’t sleep, so I went down to the basement club.
Cigarette smoke, girls in cheap perfume, bad whiskey, better vodka.
A pop song played through the speakers, Let’s Talk About Sex, an American hit that year.
Soldiers crowded the bar, just back from the front.
Their faces young, flushed, already drunk.
A few women in short skirts moved between them, the men’s laughter heavy with meaning I didn’t like. I knew this place too well. A poor substitute for therapy.
Cocaine easier to find than water.
I sat at the counter, trying to drink the day out of my body.
One of the soldiers came up to me, maybe twenty, eyes too bright.
He tried to talk in broken English, about his friends, about revenge.
I caught only fragments: Croats… bastards… they killed my brother.
He wanted me to agree, to hate with him.
I tried to tell him the ones on the other side were just like him, young, angry, used.
But he couldn’t hear me.
The music was loud. The hate was even louder.
I left before the tension could build.
Outside, the rain had stopped.
I walked once around the block for air.
Streetlights flickered on the puddles like candle flames.
I went back to my room.
The empty streets offered no distraction, only the echo of that song still playing somewhere underground.
A strange contrast that stayed with me long into the night.
Eye of Vukovar
In Vukovar, nothing was breathing.
Smoke had stopped only because of the rain, yet the smell lingered low over the streets.
The map was deceiving, but we found the hospital, or what was left of it.
Inside, some corridors had collapsed from shelling.
A generator was humming somewhere, but there was no light, probably kept only for the operating theater.
The smell of blood and concrete dust.
No sign of that familiar disinfectant scent that marks a hospital anywhere.
Civilians were everywhere, lying on stretchers, on blankets, on the floor.
Some moaning, some already silent.
A nurse passed with a bundle of gauze, no gloves left, no mask either.
A once-white uniform she must have been wearing for days.
On one side, the wall had been ripped open by shellfire, safety pouring through the wound. No one cared about the Geneva Conventions here.
Patients lined along the wall, shivering under coats and sheets, wounds wrapped in makeshift bandages, despair filling their eyes.
Yes, the eyes.
Too many of them gone.
Dozens of patients with bandaged sockets, their heads tilted as if searching for light somewhere in heaven.
I thought of the man with the white Stetson.
My stomach turned.
The doctor leading us spoke without stopping, the list of everything missing.
I already knew. It was always the same.
He wanted me to take notes.
I told him we would send kits, already prepared and packed.
No notes needed, just numbers, how many kits, how many people to help, if the place ever became safe.
Right now, I wouldn’t send anyone here. Only the kits.
He showed me the breach made by shelling. I indulged him, but needed no convincing.
They didn’t feel safe, not even here.
Cold wind ran along the corridors.
Rain had left the floor wet and slippery.
Water dripping from the level above mixed with the low complaints of those who still had a voice to expel pain.
For a moment I came back to my breath.
It was a lot to take in.
Everything inside me wanted to leave, but the thought of crossing the city through the devastated streets held me there a little longer.
Even in despair, humanity felt better than the deserted silence outside.
By the time we stepped out, the cold bit harder.
The day was fading.
Once more, the world had turned silent to human misery.
Even the birds were gone.
Ghosts of Europe
No one stopped us at the checkpoint. A soldier waved us through, his face unreadable in the gray light. Behind him, the land stretched flat and colorless, a wide plain dissolving into mist and an early winter night.
The drive back to Belgrade was heavy with silence. Neither of us spoke.
There was nothing left to say.
We both tried to let go of that ball in the chest that builds up when you try to focus and divert the rage, the emotions that bloom from the absurdity of war. The exhaustion you feel facing a lost battle where giving up is not even a choice.
Every time I hear politicians talk about war on the news, all suited and polished with their chosen words, I want to grab them by the neck and drag them through a battlefield. Let them smell the blood and the fear. Let them shit their pants and then send them home. I am furious.
Soon we were on the highway and life looked normal again. A short commute, I thought, with bitter irony. War is always a stone’s throw away.
At the edge of the city, lights appeared through the fog, small and trembling.
The radio coughed with static and fragments of an old folk song. I thought of the men in the restaurant, the patients in the hospital, the young soldier at the bar. Different uniforms, same emptiness behind the eyes.
War takes lives; it takes souls even more efficiently. Mine included.
It felt as if the war would never end, only change location and costume. Europe was rehearsing its oldest lesson.
I realized that the past is never gone. It only waits for permission to return, only enough generations to forget the horror and we begin again.
And the night had fallen over Yugoslavia.
And I carried it home.
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