What Was I Thinking: A Memoir (10 page)

Arch did phenomenally good infomercials. He gave the
advertisers
an extra minute on the phone, which was very valuable
to them. And in return they wanted to be nice and offered him their products.

You had to be careful with that sort of thing. For a start, there are only so many glow-in-the-dark crucifixes you can use. Most of us when we were offered great things accepted them politely. We might say that we would do our best for the advertiser the next time they were on, but that was the extent of it. Arch visited them and got to know them personally and took more great things and more great things. That was crossing a line he could never see.

One day, to my horror, it was announced that Arch Tambakis would be doing breakfast with me. It was not uncommon for him to come in, bail me up in that nasty little glass conservatory we used to call an office, shake his fist in my face and discuss the day’s programme.

‘If you fucking talk over me again, it’ll be the last fucking thing you do’ was a typical suggestion. He once threw a chair at me in the studio, which was remarkable for several reasons. The chairs in the studio were huge and wired loosely to the ground. Arch got up while we were on air, picked his chair up in his chubby little arms, using every ounce of strength in his incredibly unfit body, and threw it at me. It failed to hit me only because (1) he wasn’t very strong, and (2) it was connected to the floor by wires.

I thought briefly that some brilliant radio might have come from the combustion created by putting the two of us together, but I always knew that the chance was extremely small and it was obvious that wasn’t going to happen after a few days.

Arch wasn’t capable of brilliant radio; he was capable of doing bad radio brilliantly. In the end, he had to go. I think Brent kept him until there were simply too many court cases pending for various offences inside and outside work. His career with Radio Pacific ended in court. Derek Lowe stopped me one day to tell me that Arch was suing.

‘There’s an employment hearing,’ said Derek. ‘Arch has taken us to court, awful man. You’ll need to be there.’

I turned up with my written statement and all I had to do was read it and Arch Tambakis would be out of my life forever. I was in the waiting room, ready to do my bit, when Arch came out of the courtroom and walked up to me.

‘You fucking turd, you absolute fucking turd,’ he began, putting his fists up. ‘You fucking say one fucking thing against me you little shit and I’ll fucking pound you into the floor. Don’t think I can’t fucking do it.’ That possibility never entered my head.

Arch was so incapable of seeing his own flaws that losing was not an option for him. There was no way people weren’t going to see through all these arseholes ganging up against him.

So they got rid of Arch and I went on holiday to Australia. While I was there, Brent rang me to say that I’d been taken off breakfast and the show was being changed. I wasn’t too worried. I was going to Bosnia to do some reporting, and when I came back from that Pacific would find work for me. I was focused on the Bosnia trip. After Arch Tambakis, I was looking forward to the more relaxing work environment I would find there.

I THOUGHT IT WOULD
be a good idea to go to Bosnia and cover the war there for Radio Pacific. It was 1995 and this was to be a one-off. Because Derek Lowe didn’t really have anything else for me to do, he agreed. Without either of us knowing it, there was a little seed planted then that would grow into something very big later.

I was left to make my own arrangements. I managed to get the New Zealand Army to agree to let me accompany them on the ground. I flew over and met them in Zagreb where I was getting my United Nations accreditation to go into Bosnia.

I was beyond excited — I was going to war with the New
Zealand Army and I would find out everything that was going on. I didn’t realise, never having done it before, that my personality was really cut out to do this. I also was yet to learn that I couldn’t excel if I was just going to be the lackey who went with the army.

It became obvious that the benefit of having access to the army’s logistics and their knowledge on the ground was outweighed by the fact that any opportunity to find out what was really going on was stymied because I was there with one prejudiced player. My reports were compromised no matter what. If you reported the army was doing great work — which they were — who would believe you weren’t just saying that to keep them onside?

I was constantly pushing them to do things that they wouldn’t normally do: ‘How about you just give me a couple of guys and we go to the front line? You were saying that there’s a minefield over there? Can you take me over there?’

‘Sorry, Paul. We’re not really supposed to go there.’

‘Assign me a couple of people, take me to the minefield. I want to see what a minefield is like, I want to see what the trenches are like.’

And they did. The soldiers themselves were excited because they had never seen a minefield either. Soon we were in the thick of it. We were picking over bodies in trenches. I found a Kevlar helmet with bullets and half a head in it, like something that had been mashed up in a mouli.

There were five of us walking along in this place where soldiers wouldn’t normally go when all of a sudden the guy in front shouted, ‘Stop!’

Although it looked like a pleasant scene, with the silver birch trees standing straight and their leaves covering the ground, he had spotted a hillock where earth had been piled up for a gun. He looked to the other side and saw another one. Then we realised we had wandered into the middle of a minefield. 

That is the eeriest thing, because you know that as long as you don’t move you’ll be perfectly safe, but eventually you will have to or you’re going to starve to death. There is nothing wrong with the ground you are standing on but there are several choices to be made about how to get to safety.

Do you retrace your steps? You are taught that, if you possibly can, you should do that and get back to the point where you know you’re safe. If you have wandered a long way into the minefield, all you can do is look for the quickest way to safety and follow that. There were so many leaves and we’d walked so far in, we couldn’t retrace our steps. You never shimmy. You don’t step gingerly because that means you have to take more steps and increases the chance of stepping on a mine.

You have to leap. If you leap onto a mine, of course, you’re fucked. But if you step on one gingerly you’re fucked too.

I was the third in line. When you can’t retrace your steps, you choose the person who is closest to the shortest route to absolute safety. That person leaps out and you follow him. The other advantage of leaping is that you make very clear footprints for the next person to leap into. The person in front of our group was blessed and we followed him safely out.

It’s bloody frightening. If the person in front gets blown up, you wait for it to settle and then you keep going on that path because not only has that mine exploded, but you can be pretty sure that if there had been another one within cooee it would have been set off too.

But what is likelier in that case is that your guy is still alive, albeit writhing on the floor in agony, so you’ll need to get him out. It’s very complicated. Let this be a lesson to us all: do not lay mines. It’s only going to cause strife for yourself or others.

I also managed to get the army to take me to Tuzla. I stood there as the refugees from the Srebrenitsa massacre arrived on the back of trucks. These people had just seen their
families killed and they told the most harrowing stories. Dutch peacekeepers were still putting tents out and digging trenches as huge numbers of refugees, mainly women and girls, arrived. The men and most of the younger boys made up the majority of the 8000 people killed. The survivors had made this torturous trip from their home and seen the most horrendous things. They all had stories of seeing their families torn from them and killed before their eyes.

I followed one girl through the process. She climbed off the ute when it reached the camp. It drove away and left her standing at the end of a wide corridor of razor wire. She just stood there for ages, then she walked all alone, down the centre of this corridor into the refugee camp. She knew nothing about what was going on or what she should do. She was greeted by someone who looked in her mouth, patted her down and told her to go over to a wall where the surnames of people who had already arrived had been scrawled. This was one of the few ways people had of finding out if they still had any living relatives. In her case, she had been separated from her immediate family before they were killed. Other family members had been killed in front of her over the three days it had taken to get to the refugee camp. After seeing no one’s name on the board, she wandered off and was taken to a tent where she would live with people she didn’t know for God knows how long. She had no idea about anything.

I had a $30,000 satellite phone. It was so high-tech I didn’t fully understand it. The phone was rented and every time I used it, it cost £9 for a connection and £9 a minute. So the first minute was £18. Sending a photo on its analogue system took about 20 minutes and chances were the link would fall out halfway through. I never sent photos but the costs were still phenomenal.

I was on the land phone reporting back whenever I could get access to one. Derek had been supportive but I knew not to
spend a cent more than necessary so the satellite phone was used only sparingly. In many situations you can’t bring them out because you become a target as soon as anyone sees it. They were inefficient things. They were the size of a suitcase and I remember people dying around me while the phone was saying ‘Searching. Searching. Searching.’

After being a foreign correspondent for a few days I realised that the best way to do this was to turn up at the war, uninvited, as it were. There would be logistical problems but I could bullshit my way through anything, or thought I could.

Halfway through the assignment I was starting to worry because arrangements were being made to get me out when my time was up and I didn’t want to go. By then I had found a lodging house to stay in on my own, just so I had a bit of distance from the army. I was breaking away. I had also made contact with the British Army and spoken to them. I had got to know other journalists.

‘There’s a whole interesting bloody landscape here,’ I said to the others. ‘How do we find out what it is like for the people who are just living here?’ The atmosphere in an army town was obviously different from that where the ordinary people were just going about their daily lives as normally as you can in a war.

I decided to hire a car to take me to Split. I had no idea what car-hire facilities were like in the middle of a war but thought I could find someone to give me a lift. I ran the idea past a British Army contact. ‘Oh, you’ll be killed’, I was told. ‘You can’t just rent cars in a war zone. Between here and Split there’s like 25, 30, 40 front lines.’ That many front lines sounded extremely exciting.

I found a one-armed local taxi driver with a beaten-up old Mercedes who was prepared to do anything for money. I went to see the liaison woman at the New Zealand Army.

‘I’ve decided to make my own way,’ I said.

‘Well, we’ve got a huge armed convoy that’s going through in a couple of days. Why don’t you wait for that?’

‘No, no, no. I’ve organised a driver.’

‘Well, we can’t have any responsibility for anything that happens to you.’

That was fine and in fact I learnt more in those few days than I could have in months with the army. In particular, I learnt how close you can get to the heart of a situation, and how much of a feeling you can get for how things really are for people living through something like this.

I felt huge relief when I prised myself away from the New Zealand Army, even as I climbed into this wreck of a Mercedes with my driver and his bad fibreglass arm. Its hand was clenched like it had a bad case of fibreglass arthritis, and it wouldn’t move. It was more like an imitation of an arm. He was both embarrassed and proud of it. He had to use his real arm to move his fake one to any position it needed to be in. For instance, if he wanted to drape it casually over the back of a chair he had to heave it into place. The only thing worse than his arm was his English.

The real downside of having a driver with a dodgy false arm was that the car was manual and a lot of the driving was through areas that had been rendered suitable only for four-wheel drives. He had to position his fibreglass arm on the steering wheel to free up his good hand to change gear. If we hit a pot hole there was only his fake hand on the steering wheel to keep the car on the road. And he was very nervous. Anytime we heard any sort of noise he would start to sweat.

I had been told by the army that this was a dangerous trip. Ultimately I planned to go through the heart of Bosnia to Croatia and eventually to Split, but we were first going to the coast towards Dubrovnik. At that time there were shells reaching Dubrovnik, and there were hot pockets everywhere. And because it was guerrilla warfare you never knew where the front
line was going to be, hence the British Army’s high estimate of death. It was unlikely we would pass many other taxis.

Previously I had souvenired a few items: some bayonets, some poorly exploded hand grenades. They were entirely safe but they were ordinance. I had also secured a small firearm for my own protection. All these things were secreted in the boot of the car.

‘I will tell you if we need these items,’ I told the driver. ‘If we need the gun I will tell you.’ So we set off through the war zone, driving through beautiful little villages that had been obliterated.

Travelling this way I experienced the raw emotions that you don’t get when you’re cosseted by the army. The primary reaction to us was mistrust. Why was this person travelling through this godforsaken zone? We saw kids playing football in minefields, surrounded by the bombed-out shells of houses. Serbs and Muslims were playing together, in the middle of a war between Serbs and Muslims. I stopped in little cafes where half of the cafe was gone and they were still serving that thick coffee you suck through sugar cubes. I wonder if there has ever been another conflict as bizarre.

The funny thing is I wasn’t scared at all. I would have numerous similar experiences in the future and I can’t remember ever being scared, no matter how dangerous the situation. I can remember times sitting in hotels afterwards, looking back and thinking, ‘That was ludicrous. That was such a stupid thing to do.’ It’s the adrenalin and the excitement that get you through. Also, if there’s nothing you can do — which there usually wasn’t — there’s no point being scared.

One of our destinations was Mostar, site of a famous bridge that had been destroyed, and an important symbol of the whole conflict, representing as it did people coming together. As we approached Mostar there was a lot of heavy fighting going on around us. There were lots of roadblocks. In cases where these were manned by locals, when they saw it was just some fool in
an old Mercedes with a one-armed driver, they let us straight through. UN roadblocks had a traffic-light system that told you either you are entering a safe area; there’s some dodgy stuff going on; or don’t move because it’s happening now.

Near Mostar we were in a red area so it was active, which just meant that the UN had been involved in some skirmish within the last few hours.

We were approaching a bridge that spanned a gully, with steep granite mountains on the side. The terrain could not have been harsher. Two angry-looking men had been manning a pillbox and blocking the bridge, but when they saw us coming they came over to block the road. We were told to get out of the car at gunpoint.

‘Just do whatever they say, follow my lead,’ I told the driver. I got out and looked around. I realised there was nowhere to run, let alone anywhere to hide, which severely limited our options.