Five years in Bosnia

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Five years in Bosnia

Tension marked early days
of peacekeeping effort

By Ron Jensen
Stars and Stripes

Michael Abrams / Stars and Stripes file photo
Pfc. Tom Dietz, with the 501st Military Police Company from Bad Kreuznach, Germany, keeps a watchful eye, from his Humvee, on the streets of Bijeljina, Bosnia & Herzegovina.

For nearly four years, a brutal and horrific war had been waged in the southeast corner of Europe while the United States and Europe pointed fingers and urged the other to do something about it.

Finally, in November 1995, at an Air Force base in Dayton, Ohio, leaders of splintered Yugoslavia agreed to a deal that stopped the fighting in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Soon 20,000 U.S. troops joined 40,000 from other nations in Operation Joint Endeavor, a peacekeeping effort that continues to this day.

One of the first to reach Bosnia was Lt. Col. Stephen Riese, then a major and deputy engineer for the Germany-based 1st Armored Division.

Hitting the ground

Riese was one of the Tuzla Ten, an early component that arrived Dec. 6, 1995, at the air base near Tuzla — now known as Eagle Base — with orders to prepare it for the arrival of the multinational troops, to be known as the Implementation Force, or IFOR.

"I remember mud," he says in a telephone interview from Fort Leavenworth, Kan. "I remember lots of mud."

Not far behind him was Chief Warrant Officer Bob Tisdale, now at Babenhausen, Germany. He flew into Tuzla on Dec. 18 to set up artillery radar.

"I had a cold MRE for Christmas dinner," he says. "It was not fun."

Master Sgt. Tommy Jackson, now of 3rd Corps Support Command in Wiesbaden, Germany, arrived the day before Christmas at the Tuzla air base, part of the 29th Forward Support Company of Vicenza, Italy.

"One of the real problems was just dealing with the cold," he says. "We were in warehouses, but the warehouses had holes in them as big as doors. Really, it was just crazy cold. There was no relief from it."

A handful of IFOR veterans were interviewed by telephone recently and asked to recall their memories from five years ago this month when IFOR rolled into a country so torn by war.

The mission was a delicate one. The warring factions had to be separated and the zone of separation that resulted quickly joined the vocabulary as the ZOS. On one side were the Bosnian Serbs and on the other were the Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats. Between them was a no-man’s land in which no was supposed to move except IFOR troops.

Building a base

Ken George / Stars and Stripes file photo
1st Armored Division soldiers caught meals wherever and whenever they can during the early days of the IFOR deployment.

Anyone now seeing Bosnia, and particularly Eagle Base, for the first time would require a vivid imagination to picture the conditions when IFOR arrived.

The former Yugoslav air base in Tuzla was depressing. Buildings were shabby and broken. It bore no resemblance to an American base. Much of it was off limits because of land mines and unexploded ordnance.

"There were land mines there," recalls Riese. "There was a small crater in the road where the U.N. forces had lost a soldier due to some shelling."

The base capacity was 400 under the United Nations.

"We told (U.N. officers) we wanted to bring in 2,000 and they just laughed," Riese remembers.

To ensure enforcement of the Dayton peace accord, IFOR came with muscle. Tanks and armored vehicles were common sights on the muddy, bumpy roads.

Brian Hodges encountered some resistance when he tried to examine a Bosnia Serb weapons storage site.

"The next thing I knew I had two Apaches hovering over my back," he said.

The message was clear. He was allowed to examine the site.

Hodges, now a civilian at Fort Leavenworth, also recalls some primitive conditions. He was with the 3rd Field Artillery. The unit went first to Hungary and then by bus to Croatia, stopping on the way at a U.S. base in Slavonski Brod, Croatia.

"There was my last shower for about three months," Hodges says. "It was ice cold."

Other than flying into Tuzla, the main route into Bosnia was across the Sava River. But this was winter and the rain was heavy and the river was rising.

"The river started rising and rising in a short amount of time," recalls Command Sgt. Major Johnny Fowler, now at Fort Drum, N.Y. He was command sergeant major of the 1st Armored Division Engineer Brigade in 1995.

Then all of a sudden the water poured over its banks, "like the dam broke," Fowler says.

Tents and the mobile field kitchen, set up on a dry land a few days earlier, were suddenly underwater. Weapons were lost, but no soldiers and no important equipment.

"We just had to back up and start over," Fowler says.

Flooding wasn’t the only problem facing Fowler and his soldiers. He knew — everyone knew — that Bosnia was littered with land mines. How many was anybody’s guess, but millions was the most common estimate.

"Everywhere the U.S. soldiers were, the engineers cleaned the entire area," Fowler says. "It’s not something I want to do every day."

He recalls looking at a field strewn with land mines that had been uncovered by rain and floodwater.

"You just wondered about the ones you couldn’t see," he recalls.

Riese, too, had land mines on his mind.

"The one thing that concerned us as engineers was the land mine situation," he says.

U.N. records examined by Riese and others mentioned four suspected minefields in the U.S. sector of eastern Bosnia.

"In the next three months, we collected records from the factions of over 18,000 minefields," Riese says. His staff worked around the clock simply recording and mapping the minefields.

Another question faced by the international force was: How would the factions respond?

IFOR arrived in Bosnia loaded for bear, expecting its muscle and might to dissuade anyone from taking it on. That worked, for the most part.

Protecting the troops

Michael Abrams / Stars and Stripes
1st Lt. Kevin Smith kisses his bride, 1st Lt. Kristen Reisenweber, following their Valentine's Day, 1996, wedding on the pontoon bridge spanning the Sava river that makes up the border between Croatia and Bosnia

But Maj. Gen. William L. Nash, commander of the 1st Armored Division and the American sector, took no chances. He ordered his troops to wear flak vests and helmets whenever they were awake. Foreign troops laughed and called the U.S. soldiers "Ninja Turtles" after cartoon characters of the time.

"It was heavy," Sgt. 1st Class Terry Bottjen, who was among those deployed to Tuzla, says of the "battle rattle."

"And it was uncomfortable walking in and even sitting in a Humvee."

Not everyone in the first wave went to Tuzla, however. Some troops were sent to Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital and home of the IFOR headquarters.

Maj. Steve Larsen was then a captain and a psychological operations officer.

"Psy ops" was responsible for spreading the word of the IFOR mission and the mandates of the peace accords to Bosnians throughout the country. Newspapers and broadcasts were the main avenues of communication.

"It was pretty primitive when we first got there," says Larsen, now at Fort Stewart, Ga., recalling the city that was the victim of a 1,000-day siege that killed thousands and destroyed hundreds of buildings.

"There was still a lot of shooting and shelling at the time," he says. "It was really frightening, especially traveling."

Crossing the river that slices the town in half was especially challenging.

Two shots from a sniper were put through the hood of a Humvee when one soldier working with Larsen crossed a bridge.

"We were fired at a half-dozen times crossing that bridge," says Larsen.

During the first few weeks of the mission, thousands of shots were fired at IFOR troops in Sarajevo, Larsen recalls. That number fell as the French antisniper teams became active.

Parts of the city looked similar to many German towns at the end of World War II. No window in the city was unbroken. Water and electricity remained scarce for months even after peace arrived.

Rebuilding homes, lives

Effie Bathen / Stars and Stripes file photo
A Chinook of the 159th Aviation Regt. flies over a destroyed village in Bosnia early in the IFOR mission. The scars of war were a familiar sight for IFOR soldiers in Bosnia.

Larsen remembers visiting the home of one boy hired to do voice-overs for radio spots about the dangers of land mines. The apartment walls were pockmarked with bullet holes and a smelly mold was growing on walls and the ceiling, a byproduct of the dampness of a windowless home and the lack of cleaning solutions in the city.

Larsen and others gave the family some materials the Army had provided.

"We came back a week later and the place was spotless," he says.

Larsen and the boy, now 19, have remained in touch. The boy now wants to join the U.S. Army.

Over time, the mission took shape. Base camps were built and living conditions for the troops improved. Soldiers who had lived for weeks in their Humvees or armored vehicles moved into tents. They were crowded, but dry and warm.

Still, the troops had no idea how long they might be there. And most who arrived in December 1995 did not leave Bosnia until November 1996.

"When we left, we were told it would be at least three months," says Tisdale. "We didn’t know it was going to be a year until we were into it about six months."

Making a difference

Now, five years later, the troops interviewed say those first few months of the Bosnia mission represent a high point in their military lives.

"That was the highlight of my career as a sergeant major," says Fowler.

Hodges took his camera, he says, because he knew he was part of something important.

"Everybody had a sense of history," he recalls.

And Larsen, who spent eight months in Sarajevo, adds: "I look back on it as probably the most rewarding — professionally and personally — experience I’ve had in the military.

"We could see that, at least a family at a time, we were making a distinct change."

Ron Jensen is a reporter in the Stars and Stripes U.K. bureau. His first assignment to Bosnia began Dec. 1, 1995, and he has spent more than 300 days in the country during the five-year peacekeeping mission there.

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