Indiana National Guard – The Land Bosnia - Herzegovina

I fell in love with the Bosnian countryside. Winding roads curve through the mountains which are everywhere. You often come upon a small steep meadow seemingly lost in the woods around it. Someone makes the hard climb up the mountainside to tend those nearly inaccessible postage stamp meadows. Then in the winter they will haul that hay down for their livestock. Clusters of small farm plots appear like shingles on the sides of mountains. The farms here are small, almost like large gardens. You witness human ingenuity as farmers find a way to make crops grow on what seem impossibly steep slopes. No tractor could stay upright, but men behind horses and donkeys cut down the trees, roll the rocks into fence rows and plow the sod. If it is too steep for even a mule, they create meadows for grazing sheep or growing hay. Sometimes the slopes will be impossibly steep, and so the trees and rocks are undisturbed. More level ground is found in the river valleys, but the peoples long ago filled those with homes. Land that persisted in production has been parceled into smaller and smaller plots as sons begat more sons. Our modern American farm combines and planters could not work here. You’d make one brief swipe and you’d be finished with the entire farm.

The painter Claude Monet would have loved Bosnia. From early evening to twilight the vibrant colors of the day are replaced by dreamy scenes. At one high point just outside Olovo we pulled over and just watched darkness and mist creep into the valleys as the land rolled down toward Sarajevo. The mountain tops faded into the distance seeming to extend into forever.

Our area of Bosnia had many narrow winding roads through mountain passes. In these places, driving around a turn was always an adventure. In one way it was “Déjà vu all over again”, as Yogi Berra would say. Memories of my months in Kosovo surfaced. Here again were the horse carts, babushkas, dead houses, swarming kids and bleating sheep. As soon as I saw a guy pass a line of cars on a blind curve like this driver, I knew I was back in the Balkans. I bet the last words of many drivers are “Sure, I can make it.” It was like slipping back into an old pair of battered but comfortable army boots that I’d misplaced and found two and a half years later.

Usually the sights were much more benign and traveler friendly. Scenic overlooks were common, but there was no place to pull over. It was very tempting as driver to find myself looking out over a beautiful valley instead of the road ahead. So I and SFC Lee took turns driving and being sightseeing passenger. You could pull over at restaurants that dotted the route. They were tempting, especially when you were tired from driving for an hour on a rainy road behind a truck toiling up the mountainside. You could see and smell lambs turning on open flame spits, some powered by water wheels. In the spring and summer there was an additional fragrance of pine forest and flowers. Our Medical Officer told us not to eat at these inns because truck exhaust and road dust made up some of the special seasonings on the meat. General order number one prohibiting alcohol meant I also could not have beer or wine to enhance the meal. I loved many of the Bosnian dishes and soups, so this was a sore temptation. I followed doctor’s orders.

Flying was another way to see the countryside. We had a helicopter shuttle that worked its way from camp to camp with replacement parts, and personnel including chaplain teams. As you fly over the countryside you see the fruits of hard work in the carefully plotted fields and orchards. In the spring fruit trees look like rows of white cotton puffs as they blossom. In the fall bright oranges, reds and yellows replace the greens in one last burst of color before the trees slip their greenery and accept the grays of winter. From this height the sheep looked like grains of rice that somehow move in unison down a road or over a meadow.

Towns in the mountains radiate out into draws in the ridges until the road is just too steep to haul up building materials. Homes lining these trails at night look like strings of Christmas lights that someone threw out on the ground. Sometimes a trail seems to end in the trees, and then a mile or two further, and higher up the mountain, it reappears and at its end will be a single home or a small hamlet of 5-10 houses perched on the slope or at the end of the ridgeline. Here in Bosnia families of fathers, sons, daughters, aunts and uncles often live together in clans. What I was seeing were locations where such families hacked a small patch of farms, orchards and gardens out of the wilderness and built homes for raising their children.

Before coming to Bosnia I would have thought that such isolated hamlets would be the perfect place to ride out the storm of war. I was sadly mistaken. During the conflict, roving bands targeted such isolated homesteads far away from help. They would drive up the road and those families found they had no exit but to flee into the cold mountains. The saddest sight I see, as we fly along, are the isolated pockets of ruined homes. It’s like coming upon a rookery of a rare and exotic species of bird and finding that some mindless beast has trampled through and smashed the nests, leaving behind only the broken shells.

Rebuilding will take many years. As you drove devastation could be found around nearly any turn or over any hill. We were in Bosnia nine years after the war ended. Many buildings still lay unattended, their owners dead or displaced. The empty, ruined homes stared down at us like unearthed skulls.

I saw rock formations to rival the Garden of the Gods. Some stretches of countryside mirrored the Appalachian trail and Great Smokies. Any number of canyons and mountain lakes can appear just around a turn in the road. You can go over a mountain ridge and think you’ve landed in the forests of Northern Michigan, middle Pennsylvania or New England. With the horse drawn wagons, men pitching hay with forks, and free ranging sheep and cows I found myself thinking of our helicopter as a time capsule that had taken me back to America in 1880. The one thing you do not find is Kansas or Northern Indiana. There are no “Great Plains” in Bosnia - Herzegovina.

One evening, on our way home from a visit with the Turkish Battalion in Zenica, clouds were rolling through the valleys. We flew over what seemed like rivers and seas of mist. The setting sun tinged the mists with golds and reds. We flew away from the pastel colors and into the gathering twilight. As darkness crept over the cloud surface the illusion became even stronger that we were flying over the sea at the dawn of creation. “And God said … ‘Let the dry land appear’.” Mountain tops pierced the fog like islands. In other places the mist was a flood rolling over the land and plunging over ridge lines as a Niagara of pure vapor. In all of my flying I’ve never seen anything like it. We were flying through one of those magical ten minutes that springs up suddenly in life, never to be repeated.

One time I was able to “hitch” a ride to Mostar on a flight taking some quickly need parts to our soldiers there. Mostar is the site of the famous “Unity Bridge”. Before the war Mostar was a multiethnic city, and the bridge allowed the different ethnic groups to join and communicate with each other. The bridge came to symbolize their unity. The people of the town took pride in that symbol and what it stood for. The town’s name, “Mostar”, means “protectors of the bridge.” It’s one of the oddest looking bridges in the world, almost like it was going to be a standard curved arc span and then the builders lost the middle sheet of the blueprints. So they just jammed the start and finish together without the middle. Unfortunately, some Croat troops, seeking separation rather than unity, shelled and destroyed the bridge.

The story has what I believe is a great ending of good triumphing over evil. UNESCO, the World Bank, the City of Mostar and SFOR took on this task of rebuilding the bridge. Hungarian divers located the bridge’s stone blocks in the river. A Turkish engineering company helped assemble it. Many nations contributed funds. We were in Bosnia when Prince Charles of Great Britain reopened it. Our helicopters and soldiers were part of the security details. The new bridge gleams almost white in the sunshine. I had thought I would never be able to see the bridge; it was in Great Britain’s command area, well out of our AO (Area of Operations). Driving there would take at least 6 hours to reach by car, and I did not have a day free for such a trip. The UH 60 helicopter got us there in less than an hour. As much as I enjoyed seeing the bridge, I will more remember the flight. We passed through incredible gorges and along marvelous rock formations as we wound along the river valley that led from Sarajevo to Mostar. Vast stretches were uninhabited; it was just nature in its naked glory. It took me a few moments to realize that this was my one chance to photograph this stretch of Bosnia – Herzegovina. I made up for the delay by clicking madly with my little digital camera. I only stopped taking pictures when I noticed my rucksack making its way to the open door of the helicopter. I was belted in and periodic turbulence made it unwise to unbuckle. I did not want dad to get a “Dear sir, we regret…” letter that said “died while trying to save his rucksack.” I was able to snag it with my foot and then went back to taking pictures.

There is so much more to say about this lovely country. I’ve only scratched the surface so to speak. My service with SFOR 15 blessed me in many ways. One of those blessings was to see another part of God’s good Earth. May Bosnia – Herzegovina continue to have peace so that its peoples may enjoy its bounty and beauties.

Fr. Stang Bosnia page