by Selco Begovic
Selco survived the Balkan war of the 90s in a city under siege, without electricity, running water, or food distribution.
Editor’s note: One of the most important lessons you can take from Selco’s stories is the value of realizing what’s going on early in the situation. When the rules seem to be changing right before your eyes (does this sound familiar?) believe what you’re seeing. Not allowing cognitive dissonance to take over could save your life. This lesson is especially appropriate right now. How many people have you heard blithely talking about when things go right back to normal? Recognize that the disruption may not be temporary.
When SHTF started, the great majority of us thought that what was going on around us was something like temporary rioting that got a bit out of control. The city services still worked in some areas and everybody was waiting for the madness to stop.
In that short period before it hit the fan with full force, people usually lost their lives because they did not recognize the situation.
People were out rioting, stealing, fighting. But all that was still “moderate” in comparison to what was coming.
At that moment, people still were “inside” the system, so we all were trying to hide more or less when looting was going on in the neighborhood. The police were still arresting people and trying to control things. People were shooting each other yes, but it was not yet like full-scale shooting and violence. Most people were simply scaring each other with shootings.
One of my friends was involved in a shooting in those early days. After looting some stores, he got wounded. The wound was not too dangerous – he was shot in the foot.
As I said, most of the city services were still working and trying to bring order to that chaos. City ambulances came and picked him up and they rushed to the hospital with him.
About one kilometer from the place where he got picked up, the group of people that actually shot him stopped the ambulance with an improvised barricade. First, they shot the driver and then they killed my friend in the back of the ambulance. They killed him a little bit slower than the driver, and more painfully – they used knives. We got there a bit later, but it was too late for my friend.
Now this story may sound confusing to you. You may say “it happens in war.” But for 95% of folks at that time it was not war – it was just violent rioting. And 95% of folks still trusted the system. They had trust in police and government that they were going to restore law and order. People still trusted that ambulances were “protected” and nobody would stop them, not to mention shooting at one.
In this story here, the wounded guy and the ambulance driver simply did not recognize the situation. He was a nice guy. Why would this happen to him? Back then, I probably would have gone with the ambulance as well if I was shot. It felt very wrong that this happened, but it was one of the first wakeup calls that fair and unfair were concepts of the past.
But in those times, we all still called things by old names, police, trust, government, law, system, penalty…
If that happened maybe a day or two later my friend would have crawled off and treated his wounds alone, or the driver would have refused to drive, or…
A few days after that event, the it hit the fan with real force, and nobody had illusions anymore that something temporary was going on or that things would quickly get back to normal.
The point is that lots of people died in that short period before realizing that things weren’t the same. You should not still believe in the good of people around you, but most people did. This ambulance event was one of many that ended with similar deaths.
When you realize the random and brutal nature of violence, then you realize you do not prepare to be a hero. You prepare to survive. That ambulance guy could have helped many more people in later months when we were fighting for survival if he would not have died. But back then, we did not understand the situation.
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