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Chapter VI Briest-Film-Livana

Well I was now on my own, in command with no one to answer to, Ernie and Peter in Zagreb and James had gone back to America on "so called business", it was quiet in the office but that was not the way I liked it, I would make sure that everything ran like clockwork and with George and Nigel to help I was quite looking forward to the next few days. We continued with the recces, the only difference was when they arrived back I wanted a written report so that in the evening I could take it to command in Osijek which they all agreed on, I was determined to show the commanders in Osijek that I was capable of running PIV without Ernie. Every morning we would sit down and plan the day, who was going on recce, who was on guard and who was going to clean the house, any problems were sorted out there and then, it was always better to talk about any problems than to immediately blame one person, I was constantly telling Ernie this but his idea of man-management was to shout at anyone close. In one of the meetings we talked about the food situation and how to improve it, we decided that we could not rely on just acquiring food from different places so we made a list of all the provisions that we needed for a week and I would take to command along with the recce reports. After the meeting I was left on my own and I started thinking about what one of the men had mentioned before Christmas concerning what he had seen on Serbian tv while on holiday in Austria, they had reported that Ernie, James and myself were war criminals and that if we were caught outside Croatia by Serbians we would be taken to Belgrade and tried on war crimes. Until now I had paid little attention to it as I wanted to enjoy my holiday with my family but I think that Ernie and James were more concerned about it than I, but even so here I was thinking about it. We had done nothing wrong in Laslovo apart from killing quite a few chetniks, that was what we were there for and there was nothing wrong with it apart from the fact that we didn't kill enough, why had they pronounced us as war criminals, I didn't know but I assumed that it was all propaganda, I had to stop thinking about it and not think about the past but concentrate on the future, helping the Croatians. 

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