Everyone Kept Quiet So I Did Too: Tales of a Reluctant Soldier

In May 2007, Zole, an artist and activist from Serbia, is reunited in London with his childhood friend Sasha, an unassuming, chain-smoking man who has been living there since the end of 1991. One evening, in a high-rise flat in South London, they are joined by Sasha's friend Michel, a taxi driver from Montenegro. Over a few glasses of cheap red wine, Sasha begins to tell his story. In the summer of 1991, he was conscripted and found himself on the battlefields of Eastern Slavonia in Croatia, wearing the uniform of the Yugoslav People's Army. He recounts the absurd and often surreal experience of war: how he was mobilised, transported to the warzone, and thrown into a world of bizarre new routines, and looming dread. This is a true story drawn from Sasha's recollections as an ordinary soldier who neither wanted war nor glorified it.