23 YEARS SINCE THE NATO AGGRESSION

HORRIFIC! VID ĆOSIĆ SLEPT WITH NATO BOMB UNDER HEAD FOR 5 YEARS! It got stuck under threshold, it was pure luck it didn't explode

A Kurir reporter pays a visit to Ponikve, near Užice, where 1999, when the village was bombed day and night, is not forgotten. No other place in Serbia had more bombs raining down on it

After the 1999 bombing, Vid Ćosić from the village of Ponikve near Užice slept for a full five years with an American 250-kilo bomb under his head, literally! It so happened that a NATO missile went straight into Vid's yard on 12 May 1999, burrowing a full 12 meters into the ground and going straight under the threshold. Lord only knows how and why it didn’t explode; if it had, Vid's house would have been blown to smithereens.

Targeting whatever they could

It is not known whether the bomb was meant to hit the runway of the Ponikve military airport, which Is a kilometre away from Vid's house as the crow flies, or the house was deliberately targeted because armed forces had been in the area surrounding it a couple of days before, with an anti-aircraft gun placed on the nearby hill. It is also possible that the bomb under Vid's house was one of those that were intentionally deactivated and then launched, and rather than exploding, they burrowed into the ground and stayed there, causing a lot of grief for the bomb disposal teams.

"That night, we were sheltering a couple of kilometres away, at our relatives', as we often did. The airplanes circled around Ponikve the whole night, targeting the airport, and the ground was shaking. At dawn, I went back to my house with my relative and saw that the glass panels on the door were shattered. I took a better look and noticed a hole right underneath the threshold, over half a meter across, and then it hit me – a missile had burrowed under my house," Vid recalled the days of the tragic spring of 1999.

Experts from the armed forces arrived at Vid's house soon after and established that the bomb had burrowed a full 12 metres under the threshold. The family stayed away from the house for one day, then they returned, and for the following five years, Vid and his children slept on a bomb, until the armed forces dug a huge hole, excavated hundreds of cubic meters of soil, got a grip on the bomb, and pulled it out to the surface.

Serbia likely has no village that had more bombs raining down on it than Ponikve did in 1999. Most of them hit the runway and the hangars, the PAS's of the military airport situated at the centre of the village, but many missiles hit the surrounding area, where the houses were, and it was a downright miracle that no one in the village got killed in those days. It is estimated that in 88 days and 37 bombing raids, approximately 800 bombs fell on Ponikve and the surrounding area, mostly the French Matras and the US MK-82's and MK-84's.

Kurir/Zoran Šaponjić

Lord only knows how Vitor Perišić, his wife, and their son survived the eve of Saint Jeremiah's Day too. An American missile, estimated at 905 kilograms, fell some 15 meters away from the run-down house in which the three were sleeping, destroying the stable and the shed made from a hard material, leaving a huge crater, and shaking the very foundations of the house, which remained standing, miraculously.

Waking up from sleep

"For days and weeks before that, the three of us would always shelter in that shed at night as bombs were dropped – we reckoned it was sturdier than the house. On that night, miraculously, it was raining when the bombing started, we didn't wake up and never went into the shed to shelter there. And we stayed alive," Vitor recounted.

Bomb falls into 2,000 tons of kerosene

In 2014, the Emergency Management Sector of the Serbian Ministry of Interior destroyed at the Ponikve airport a 900-kilo NATO missile which was found in the kerosene tank one kilometre away from the runway, having been fired during the 1999 bombing. The laser-guided BLU-109 bomb went through a meter and a half of soil and a half-meter-thick reinforced concrete slab, cut in half a reinforced concrete column over half a meter across, fell into 2,000 tons of kerosene – and didn't explode. What would have happened if a missile fired from a US F-117 airplane had exploded in two million litres of kerosene, and what sort of damage would have been inflicted on the environment and the entire surrounding area, is anybody's guess now.

That night, the first missile destroyed the guardhouse on the end of the airport runway, the second fell on the road 200 metres away from his house, blowing a big crater, and the third fell straight on his shed, Vitor added.

"The first explosion woke me up. Then came the second, I opened the door, and my son started hollering, 'Get back in here, if we're gonna die, it better be in the house.' There was a bright light and a fireball, then a loud blast, and I was thrown inside… Then I went out into the dark, my son following me, and fell into some kind of clay, which turned out to be a crater. My son Mijo was hollering: Dad, look, the shed and the stable are gone… We went there and saw a big concrete block that had fallen over the cow and the oxen. The poor things' eyes were popping out, they were looking at me, but I couldn't help them," Vitor recalled the night.

On the following day, he was mostly sorry to have lost the livestock, and burst out into tears only when he pulled his folk costume from under the rubble, intact.

"One of the first bombs that were dropped on Serbia that year fell a couple of hundred meters away from our house, on a military hangar. That day, we listened to the news, and we weren't sure if there was gonna be a bombing. When the blast hit us, the house shook, and our four children were inside, my husband was there, my mother-in-law, and myself. We didn't know what to do… We stayed in that night, but we sure as heck got out the next couple of days – we went over to my uncle's in Stapari every night," Milica Janjić from Ponikve recalled the bombing.

Kurir/Zoran Šaponjić

Saint George's Day

On Saint George's Day, the part of the village behind the airport runway – the bare rocks area – was hit by cluster bombs for days. "It was getting worse and worse," Milica recalled.

"Some ten days before the bombing, my father-in-law died. We were commemorating the 40th Day in the middle of the bombing. We had just arrived at the cemetery when we heard a loud noise. Then the airplanes came. The people there started to run off and take shelter wherever they could. We reckoned there was a lot of us there together, and that they'd see us and target us. We ran off through the forest there as fast as we could," Milica recounted.

A bomb exploded only 200 meters away from her home. The crater it made is still there, in the meadow, overgrown with shrubbery, and no one goes near it.

"In late June 1999, we were planting potato seeds in the field. All of us were there, with some hired hands there too. All of a sudden, the planes came again. God almighty, when we heard the noise, we ran off from the field and into the forest, and stayed there until the planes were gone," Milica continued her story.

Those days resembled in many ways some earlier wars. "It was just terrible seeing old women running towards the forest or the gorge just below the village to take shelter and save their lives, bareheaded – they didn't even have time to put a head scarf on," Milica said. The toughest day of all, remembered well in Ponikve to this day, was 26 March 1999, when the Serbian MIG-29 was taken down near Ponikve. People felt sorrier for the Serbian pilots than for themselves.

Kurir.rs/Zoran Šaponjić