Honour Among Men by Barbara Fradkin Page B

At a glance, Green could see Norrich’s name at the bottom of the report. “There was something I thought didn’t quite add up. Oliver had been on track for making sergeant, and moving up the ladder as an NCO . But two years after he got back from overseas, he quit the reserves. So things can’t have been as rosy as they painted it.”
    â€œNot to mention the strange behaviour of his friend when he returned from overseas.” Green stopped abruptly as a thought struck him. McGrath had said the friend’s accident was six months earlier. Daniel Oliver had been killed in April 1996. Counting back six months yielded the fall of 1995. He sucked in his breath as another coincidence hit him between the eyes. “What was the friend’s name?”
    She rummaged through the files, scanning rapidly. “I know I’ve got it in one of my interviews with Patti. I’m sure I wrote it— Ah-hah! Ian MacDonald. Corporal Ian MacDonald.”

EIGHT
    May 28, 1993. Sector West, Croatia
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    Dear Kit . . . The APC broke down again this morning and Danny spent half the day tying the fuel pump together with wire. He’s a wizard under the hood, which you have to be with some of the equipment we got. The tracks belong in the war museum! Whenever anyone in the platoon has a problem, they send for Danny. He jokes he’ll be good enough to get his mechanics papers when he gets back to civvie street
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    So we had a day around camp instead of going on patrol, which was a nice break. Peacekeeping is a lot different here on the ground than the politicians think. Neither side trusts the other, and they sure as hell don’t trust the UN to protect them. Our platoon commander says that’s because other UN battalions haven’t done their job. Some of the third world ones are so poorly paid they take bribes from both sides and turn a blind eye when Serbs or Croats sneak weapons in or cleanse a village or whatever. Besides even when we find weapons, all we’re supposed to do is turn them over to the local police, who probably hid them in the first place
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    Don’t get the Hammer started on the UN rules, because the bureaucrats have no idea how the militias, the police, and the locals are in it together. Both sides trust their own militias way more than they do UNPROFOR or any fancy ceasefire plan dreamed up in Zagreb. And each local militia’s got its owncommander who thinks he’s the boss and he doesn’t have to obey orders from his own command, let alone us. So every day we catch guys sneaking behind the lines to lay mines, and every night the two sides shell each other back and forth over our heads
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    Anyway, the strategy of our battalion CO is to try to get the locals to trust us by building relationships with them, and helping them fix up their homes and roads after the bombings. Our section house is near a little village that used to be Serb but now it’s Croat, although there are two Muslim refugee families, like Mahir who escaped from Sarajevo with his mother. Sarge has kind of taken her and Mahir under our wing. The kid’s only fifteen, but he wants to practice his English so he does our translating. He hates the Serbs. He says when the Serbs ran away from the village, they burned their houses so the Croats couldn’t use them. But I’m not sure, I think maybe the Croats torched the village to chase the Serbs away
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    Lots of our guys think the whole place is just nuts, but I’m trying to learn how all this started. It’s hundreds of years old and each side accuses the other of atrocities. The Serbs hate the Croats for collaborating with the Nazis to massacre thousands of them. The Croats say the Serbs took over their land and were the enforcers under the communists. And both of them have hated the Muslims since the Turks massacred and looted their way through the area during the Ottoman Empire. Five hundred fucking years ago, for crissakes.