Talking Myself out of the Situation

I mentioned earlier that I was always part of a multi-national staff and this meant that if I needed things like my inoculations brought up to date I had to go back to a Canadian camp where the Canadian medics would use me as a pin cushion and in Bosnia that meant that my first tour I would have to re-cross the front lines three times to get back to a Canadian camp. Now on each side of the front line is a checkpoint to make sure that you are not smuggling any weaponry or doing anything else which was not permitted by the status of forces agreement. So the guards at these locations weren’t really under tight control, they were pretty much free agents to do whatever they thought proper. They could hold you up for hours. They could take you prisoner. They could let you go with no problem whatsoever. And it was pretty much a Russian roulette to see what would happen at any particular time. In this one occasion I had transited to the Canadian camp without a problem but on my way back I was stopped at one of the checkpoints by a machine gun toting lady who told me it was too dangerous for me to continue and the reason it was too dangerous was because if I had tried she was going to shoot me. So I parked the car where she told me to and I spent the next two days talking to her about a Canadian pistol explaining how we cleaned it, how it worked, talking about their weaponry, talking about the country, how beautiful it had been, how terrible the civil war was, what the political situation was like, what the solutions were and at the end of two days they were so bored with me they couldn’t wait to get rid of me. It’s one of those occasions again where I found that being able to talk your way out of a situation was very, very useful.