1LT A. Parker Scott
HHOC, 629 MI BN
OJF, Eagle Base
SFOR7

Submission for D Company, 629th MI Battalion newsletter

We’ve only got a couple of months to go!  Bosnia will have left an impression on each of us. Those who went to Bosnia, and those of you whom we left at home will each carry something of this journey through the rest of our lives.  We will all have stories to share.  Here is one of mine.

Bosnia has proven to be very interesting.  To borrow a quote from Robert Kaplan in Balkan Ghosts, “These lands require a love for the obscure.” As my wife Joelle would tell you, I love the obscure.  As a history buff, especially military history, Bosnia has been just my cup of tea.  

The Croatian and the Serbian people were once one people.  Their race and their language were essentially the same, and they were only called Croats or Serbs so as to distinguish geographically where they lived, much like someone in contemporary America saying they are from Maryland, or California.  It was religion that became the great divide.  Orthodoxy was eastern (Serb), and Catholicism was western (Croat).  “Western religions emphasize ideas and deeds, Eastern religions emphasize beauty and magic.”  Over the centuries these differences magnified and were too much to overcome peacefully, so exploded into battle on numerous occasions.  Each of the different peoples, using religion as the crutch (add Muslim to the list thanks to 600 years of Turkish influence and rule), wants something that may now be impossible to give them.  They want the borders to, “revert to where they were at the exact time when it’s own empire had reached its zenith … of expansion.”    That Bosnia is too populated, too complex, too interconnected and would only result in a benefit to one faction is lost on many.  We meet people today who seriously desire and are deeply committed to this impossibility though.

In my opinion, it was World War I that gave us the reasons why we are here today.  The roots of the First World War run deep, back to Bulgaria’s claim on Macedonia, but specifically, it ignited here after Bosnia was transferred from Turkish Ottoman rule to Austrian Habsburg rule.  More specifically, it was when the tyrannical Habsburg Empire sent its eventual heir, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, to Sarajevo.   Even more specifically, it was when young Gravilo Princip, a Serb tired of being treated badly, fired fatal pistol shots into Ferdinand and his wife. 

Little could young Princip or anyone else imagine that his specific action on that fateful day would lead to the battle deaths of countless millions of soldiers and civilians, and the starvation and diseased deaths of many millions more throughout Europe, Asia, Africa and the Pacific in two World Wars and a Cold War capable of destroying the planet. 

And it was little realized that his singular action would involve all the powers of the twentieth century, alter the course of world politics, hasten the development of flight, medicine and mechanization, alter languages, influence religions, and redraw the borders of Europe.  Today, nearly ninety years separate us from those chaotic times when it ostensibly began , but each of us, in Maryland or Bosnia lives today because of that precise moment of time.