09/07/2008

Over the next few weeks, allmediascotland.com is to publish, each weekday, extracts from the memoirs of Scottish war correspondent, Paul Harris. ‘More Thrills than Skills: A Half-life in Journalism’, is being scheduled for publication next year.

At one bar, a grinning, moustachioed character asks me to hold out my hand. Thinking it might be another beer, I stretch it out to find a grenade clamped in my palm. I just hold on, pushing the pin in, grinning furiously, until the beer is finished. Much amusement all round.

Meantime, Judy discovers she has run out of film. She asks if I will lend her some. This was always my least favourite request in a war zone. The film you lend is invariably what you will need later in the day. When I decline, she looks distinctly put out and asks where the shops are.  I tell her, somewhat brusquely, and in an evidently unappreciated attempt at humour, that it's Sunday and the shops are, of course, closed. Heavy artillery explodes resonantly in the background.

By the time we reached a small village - Prekopakrac - on the outskirts of our destination, let's say I was really feeling quite brave about things. That was rather fortunate because it was under constant bombardment. I abandoned the girls when they went to the bathroom and was taken in a fast, bullet-scarred car down into the town. I tried not to think too hard about the bullet hole in the windscreen, directly in my line of vision, the shattered glass spreading out in great tentacles over the field of view.

Down in Pakrac there was an awful lot of the grim reality of war around. Nothing had prepared me for the scene of senseless and utter devastation in a town which had then been under attack from the Yugoslav army and Chetnik irregulars for 20 days. Some buildings had totally disappeared into enormous craters caused by heavy artillery; others were pockmarked and holed by machine cannon or rocket attack from the air. All the time there was the sharp 'crack' of sniper attack. Not only was the town surrounded by the Yugoslav federal army who were shelling it, but the Serb guerrillas were actually inside it; an invisible enemy holed up in flats and shell-shattered buildings and literally shooting at anything that moved.

More disturbing, even, was the information gleefully imparted to me by my guide that many of the snipers were Yugoslav Federal Army special forces: crack shots with high power rifles. He handed me a vicious-looking bullet of Czech manufacture. Narrow and very pointed, it thickened out disturbingly at the back end - or whatever you call it. This agent of destruction doesn't just enter the body at one point and pass cleanly through on the other side, leaving a nice neat hole. The hole may be neat enough at the front, but, as it spins its way through flesh and bone, it tears away a great chunk of the body as it emerges on the other side.

I stuck this nasty little agent of unpleasant death into a hidden pocket of the fisherman's jacket I was wearing. This I would regret later. It was not received well at London's Heathrow airport the following week when the X-ray scanner picked it up. I've still got the receipt from police Special Branch somewhere.

* Send your Scottish media news and gossip, in the strictest confidence, to  info@allmediascotland.com