At the last Bosnian check point I stop my Walkman and change tapes. I always have one tape primed for this part of the journey. I push my headphones down around the back of my neck, pick my dark blue helmet - a gift from Newsweek - off the passenger seat next to me and put it on. I tighten the chin strap and put the ear pieces on the headphones up against my ears, under the straps. I let the seat back a little, just to have a little more of me behind the false protection of the door. I turn on the tape, tap my finger to two or three beats on the hard ceramic plate on the chest of my bullet proof jacket, and give a thumbs up to the always friendly Bosnian police. They sit in an old newspaper stand which has had huge slabs of concrete leaned up against it to stop shrapnel. We are at the end of a Sarajevo no-where industrial zone.
I let out a breath and note that once again I am sweating. Always at this point I decide that it is not worth it and I should turn back if I have any sense at all. "What am I doing here?" I think to myself. It is difficult to imagine a place more deserving of this kind of thought. "What happened to Santa Barbara, lectures three days a week, ex-girlfriends, surfing, the smelly office of my college newspaper?" But those thoughts are fleeting - recollections of a world too far away to be real. I drop the clutch, pass the tank traps made from steel girders, and make a left on to The Road.
COPYRIGHT JOEL BRAND 1993