My War Memoirs: Night of Unintended Awakening (Chapter 1.)

 

War Memoirs: Night of Unintended Awakening

In Autumn 1990, at sixsteen, my life was a fractured thing. Home was with my grandparents, my mother’s parents, in a quiet Croatian town in Slavonia. This arrangement wasn't by choice, but a necessity, born from my mother and stepfather’s struggles with alcoholism. Yet, sometimes, I’d visit them, just twenty kilometers away, in a village that was a simmering pot of tension, nestled uncomfortably close to Serbian communities. The air there was thick with an unspoken dread, a precursor to the brutal war that hadn't yet officially begun, but whose shadow already loomed large.

Night of Unintended Awakening 

The rebel Serbians, steadily armed by the Yugoslav Army, were a constant threat. Local Croats, armed only with hunting rifles, took turns patrolling their village at night, guarding against an attack that felt inevitable. My stepfather was one of them. He. was a different man then, sober and resolute. It was during one of these tense visits that I expressed my naive desire to be a Croatian soldier, a warrior. All my life, I'd devoured superhero comics, dreaming of standing tall, cape fluttering, against the forces of evil. My grandfather, a military man and a hunter, had taught me how to use a rifle from a young age, and I'd even spent time with real soldiers. So, when I asked, my stepfather didn't hesitate. He handed me a hunting rifle.

The cold metal of the shotgun against my palm was an electric shock, a surge of something powerful and surprisingly good. This wasn't a toy. This was real. At that moment, a part of me, the part that still believed in the black-and-white morality of comic books, felt a thrilling sense of purpose. This was my chance to be that hero, to stand guard, to protect. It was a potent, almost intoxicating feeling for a boy who had only ever imagined such power.

That night was a shroud, a suffocating blanket of blackness. I have never known a darker, more profound void, nor a silence so sickly, so absolute, it felt like the very spirit of death hovered just above our heads, breathing down our necks. My eyes strained, trying to pierce the ink, but there was nothing, only the vague, shifting shapes of the men beside me on patrol. No one spoke. The only sounds were the soft crunch of our boots on the dirt path and the frantic thumping of my own heart, a drumbeat against the silence. We moved in hushed footsteps, not on the main road, but along the shadowed, unseen edge of the street, from one end of the village to the other.

The tension was a living, breathing monster, a coil tightening in my chest with every silent step. My mind, young and unseasoned, yet fueled by the fear of the unseen, raced. With every rustle of leaves, every imagined shadow, my childhood hero fantasies twisted into dark, terrifying scenarios of attack. The enemy, unseen, unheard, became a grotesque amalgam of nightmares – a slavering werewolf, a monstrous shadow, something born of the deepest, darkest corners of my imagination. I died and was wounded countless

times in my head, the pain of fictional bullets searing, the fear chilling me to the bone. And just as often, we, the defenders, precise and merciless, cut down these spectral enemies, my finger twitching on the trigger of the hunting rifle that suddenly felt less like a superhero's tool and more like a grim, heavy reality. For over eight agonizing hours, we were on patrol, on guard. Each minute stretched into an eternity. It was, without a doubt, the longest, most terrifying night of my life.

In that oppressive silence, under that starless sky, I saw my stepfather not as the man who had struggled with his demons, but as someone brave, resolute, ready to sacrifice everything for Croatia. There was a quiet strength in him that night that resonated deeply. I, however, was not. I was a boy still seeking adventure, utterly blind to the grim, irreversible consequences that war brought. When the first hint of dawn finally pierced the darkness, painting the world in exhausted hues of gray, I felt an overwhelming wave of relief, a physical lightness, that nothing had happened, nothing but that profound, psyche-scarring silence.  

That night, something in me snapped into place with a brutal finality. Holding that rifle, pointed into the impenetrable blackness, I understood: I was ready to kill. But I was not ready to die. At that moment, without truly realizing it, the boy who dreamed of capes transformed. I became a warrior, a man forged not in the glorious battles of comics, but in the crucible of real fear and readiness. Just a year later, at eighteen, I would stand on the first line of defense. That long, dark night, filled with unspoken dread and the chilling silence of anticipation, set the course for the rest of my life.