Third installment

Day in, day out, it was the same routine, sleep, guard, fire off a few rounds in the general direction of the enemy, there was not much else to do, the main thing was to stay alive by keeping inside every time mortars or artillery came flying in to the village. The only time that there was a lot of activitie was when we were buzzed by planes, everybody would rush outside, Ernie would jump on the transporter and fire the machine gun, I used to run to the machine gun that was mounted on a tripod at the end of the street and also fire at the plane, everybody else would be outside firing their ak47s, there was not much chance of hitting it or bringing it down but it took only one lucky shot and that would give everyone hope. After the plane had gone out of sight that the transporter was Ernies because he had shot at the enemy leaving the damaged transporter with a sniper rifle, so Geordi the commander in charge of the defense of Osijek had given it to Ernie, I also found out that he worked for a newspaper in Spain but had become disillusioned and had swapped his pen for a rifle, no wonder he was respected by everyone. The astonishing thing about this whole situation was that although we were in constant danger everybody seemed to be enjoying themselves, how weird was that. One day Ernie had a idiotic idea, he decided that we should rig up a sound system outside, so we used the battery from the transporter, telephone wire, an old amplifier and cassette recorder and "voila" we had an open air concert, they were all dancing in the street like a scene out of "one flew over the cuckoos nest" they were behaving like a bunch of lunatics and loving every minute of it, Ernie was taking photos while people drank beer. they were having such a good time that they didn't hear the mortars flying over the top of us, we must have upset the enemy by not inviting them to our party, if it had not been for the mortars you could have sworn we were on a beach in LA, "what a war" is the best way to describe it. A few days later we aquired a small pig, gutted and cleaned it and then spit roasted it. There we were sitting outside the cellar on old chairs cooking our dinner. Even though we were at war and the enemy in the next village it seemed as if nothing was going to stop them from carrying on as usual even if there was a chance that someone might die, it was here that I found out a few things about our enemy in Laslovo, they were an army of extremeists from the Yugoslavian army called "chetniks" and were responsible for massacres of innocent civilians both young and old, I also found out that they don't take prisoners especially foreigners, now that was something I had to think about. The only way to tell them apart from regular Yugoslavian army was that they had beard and wore different berets and they were dressed in green. They had not attacked Laslovo yet because it seemed they were trying to surround us and had taken Vukovar, once that had happened they would certainly attack as we were on the way to their main objective Osijek, if they achieved that then no one would be able to escape it would end up being a blood bath, I hoped that wouldn't happen. The people in the village had been told to defend not to attack or provoke, that order didn't apply to us or our unit didn't care that was more truthful. There were quite a few silent days as if it was a ceasefire so we would go out and fire everything we had in the general direction of the enemy. Nobody in the village really wanted a ceasefire all they wanted was to kill as many of the enemy as possible like revenge for what they had already done to them, Vukovar and villages like theirs that had already fallen or about to fall into their blood soaked hands.