Small Comforts, Satisfaction for Troops in Bosnia

The cozy, container-like soldiers’ digs that some U.S. troops in Bosnia recently got have not yet made it to this shot-up corner of the former Yugoslav federation.

The men here still live eight to a tent, with chilly mud sometimes seeping up through the plywood floor and kerosene heaters roaring night and day.

There is no telephone line here yet, and shower privileges still come but once a fortnight.

Mud is still everywhere--but spring is in the air, and, mercifully, the mud may soon change to the region’s fine, brown dust.

Lunch still comes each day in a plain brown plastic pouch, but at least breakfast is improving: It now arrives fresh each morning aboard an M106 mortar carrier vehicle that rumbles in from a camp where there is a proper mess.

The sporadic machine-gun fire that once punctuated the nights has mostly stopped. And best of all, relatives of one Memici-based sergeant shipped in the family VCR about a month ago. Hooked up to a gasoline generator, it means the 24 GIs in this chilly outpost can relax every night with a movie sent from home instead of just cleaning their weapons and falling exhausted onto their cots.

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Peace enforcement is still a hard life, and a lonely one, but a sense of momentum has taken hold at remote U.S. Army camps such as this one.

The soldiers say they would leave in a heartbeat if only they could--but since they can’t, they are trying to find satisfaction in the work they do.

And they are finding it. Yes, their socks are always damp; yes, the mud on their boots is as thick as fudge brownies; yes, they still spend whole days hauling gravel and moving sandbags. But the men and women of Task Force Eagle are confident now that in their own small ways, they are helping to fulfill the military goals spelled out in the peace accord brokered last year in Dayton, Ohio.

From the point of view of the Army, Operation Joint Endeavor is succeeding beyond the optimistic hopes of its planners.

In the first 100 days of the deployment, there have been two American deaths, but neither was caused by open hostility. (One man died when his fuel truck fell off a weakened bridge, the other when he tried to defuse a mine.)

Instead of dodging bullets, the soldiers have spent their days building infrastructure. Since arriving in December, they have erected 11 bridges, large and small, reopened the air hub at Tuzla, put a destroyed stretch of rail line back into working order and mapped more than 4,000 minefields.

Thirty-one camps have been created, most in Bosnia-Herzegovina but some in neighboring Hungary and Croatia too. And that does not count the innumerable small observation posts and checkpoints such as the one in Memici--generally staffed by about two dozen soldiers--trying to enforce freedom of movement along Bosnia’s winding, 600-mile former front line.

“There have been about 100 families that have moved back into Memici since we’ve been here,” said Lt. Randy Ellsworth, a 24-year-old from El Paso, Texas, who oversees the 13 enlisted troops and 10 noncommissioned officers at the camp.

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Out front, a steady stream of dump trucks rolls by, carrying gravel from a pit in the Serbian part of Bosnia to a U.S. Army post down the road, in land controlled by the Muslim-Croat federation.

“In the beginning, those trucks would stop at the checkpoint and say they wouldn’t come any further unless we went with them,” Ellsworth said. “Now, a lot of times they go by themselves.”

On a bigger scale, the heavy weapons of each formerly warring faction have been moved into secured sites, where they can be monitored. And officers of the former warring armies have coughed up volumes of data about where they laid minefields.

“It’s satisfying,” said Cpl. Jorge Chacon, a 24-year-old tank gunner from Los Angeles who has helped clear three minefields since he came to Memici. “When we first got here, it was completely bare. Now there’s people coming back. They’re fixing their houses. They invite us in for coffee.”

“The lady down there even painted her trees,” Ellsworth said, pointing in the direction of a house. “No one could have foreseen it would be this easy.”

The gritty but productive life in small military camps such as Memici stands in glaring contrast to the unsatisfying creep of the broader effort to implement the civilian requirements of the Dayton peace accord.

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In town after town, village after village, the big guns may be silent, but rebuilding is still being blocked by insufficient funds, a lack of political will or other difficulties.

Examples are everywhere. On Thursday, U.S. Army officers dedicated the first permanent bridge to span the Sava River since the end of the war. Their units built it with Hungarian army engineers.

“The bridge brings great promise for the normalization of the economy of Bosnia and Herzegovina,” said Maj. Gen. William L. Nash, commander of the U.S. forces in Bosnia.

But that promise will not be fulfilled any time soon. The new bridge spans the Sava at the strategically important town of Brcko, a potential hot spot whose fate was left out of the Dayton accord.

Until Brcko’s political future is decided, only military vehicles can use the bridge.

Similarly, in the former U.N. “safe area” of Gorazde, where the tap water was off throughout four years of fighting, the arrival of peace has not started the faucets dripping.

Gorazde lies in Muslim territory, and the pipeline that serves it comes from the Serbian town of Cajnice.

The U.S. Army tried sending out a civil affairs officer to Cajnice, hoping to learn whether the pipeline was mined and what could be done to persuade local officials to turn the water back on.

The officer came armed with letters from the prime minister of the Bosnian Serb political entity, the Republika Srpska, and even had a Serbian engineer in tow.

But the Cajnice politicos, unimpressed, sent the American packing, saying the letter lacked the proper official seals.

For now, the residents of Gorazde are still bathing, collecting drinking water and doing their laundry in the river.

In February, the Pentagon completed an overview of the Bosnian situation and concluded that while the 18,400 U.S. troops here are almost certainly safe from a large-scale renewal of the fighting, the war will likely resume once the peacekeepers leave unless the civilian goals laid out in the Dayton accord are fulfilled promptly.

The report, prepared for the Senate Intelligence Committee, emphasized what aid agencies and Defense Department officials have been saying all along: Peace in Bosnia will be short-lived unless the country is swiftly rebuilt, refugees are resettled, legitimate political institutions are nurtured and citizens have something to hope for.

Obvious though this message may have been, it has caused some consternation among officials charged with fulfilling the civilian elements of the accord.

Relief officials fear that the Pentagon may already be covering itself lest it be accused of pulling out too soon if fighting resumes next year.

“The military and the civilians have different timetables and different styles,” said Randolph Ryan, a spokesman for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. The Defense Department “obviously wants to be able to declare its mission a success and then leave Bosnia on schedule next December.”