First installment

That evening after the men had done their recces and written their reports, George and I went to command and handed the report over in a sealed envelope with my signature over the tape, it took five minutes to open and read, he, Peter and the general were all in the room looking at a large map of Osijek and the surrounding areas, it was amazing to see that they were not concerned with the fact that we were listening what was being discussed about the situation, if I had been a spy I would have all the information needed to allow the Serbians to attack, I could see everything on the map but it was a good feeling that they trusted George and myself enough to let us stay in the meeting, Peter had been promoted to second in command of the brigade and Ron was to take over as commander of Peter's old unit. The general was a good and clever man who I respected a lot, he had spent quite a few years with the former Yugoslav army and was now a sort of tactical adviser, he spoke perfect english and I would always try to talk to him as I knew that he was very knowledgeable and would listen to what I had to say. There we were listening to the tactics of the people who were in the room, we were just soldiers but listened to our state of the war, I could speak directly to them as the general understood completely and if they didn't understand then George interpreted for me, I told them that the enemy had no need to attack as they had a very good front line and just continue to bomb us especially as trouble was brewing up in our neighboring country Bosnia and they would have to send troops and armour there. Why should they attack us if they had accomplished everything that they had wanted especially taking Vukovar, there had been little resistance from the Croatians up until now and they could move Serbian families into the occupied areas and proclaim those areas as Yugoslavia because of the people living there. There was no need to attack Osijek as they could just pound the city with tanks, artillery and mortars, why risk their infantry when all they had to do was obliterate the city from a distance and move in if that's what they wanted. If they did try to attack there were quite a few obstacles to overcome first, they could not cross the Drava as we had blown the main bridges, they would need to construct pontoon bridges and we would attack them constantly, they couldn't come through Briest as we had mined the whole area in front of our lines and also not from Tenya as it would result in a great loss of life within their ranks. There were only two alternatives left open to them through Briest or surround us cutting off our main supply route and wait until our supplies ran out but of course we were just talking. They seemed to agree with some of the ideas that George and I put forward but they who were in charge of the defense of Osijek had to make all the decisions. In the end after a couple of hours they agreed to our requests and told us we could pick them up from the main barracks and every week after that. We had got what we originally came for so we said goodnight and left and everything was going as we wanted it to. As usual before going to bed I telephoned home and I didn't worry how long I was on the phone, Ernie was not here so there was no one to shout at me. During the meeting the next morning we reported everything from the night before and that we wouldn't have to worry about supplies, everyone was happy about that. That day we did our recces and again took the reports to Osijek, for once they seemed quite interested and that there was only a small amount of enemy in the next village to ours but enough to make us believe that we could not risk attacking without taking casualties. When we got back we found out that Ernie would be away for a couple more days, probably having a holiday I thought to myself.