Lets Read
speaker
7,275 appearances
8 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 15 Sep
Lets Read’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 4.
Appearances
But then, not even a year after the USSR went tits up, another Eastern European country decided to crap the bed.
And this time, it was Yugoslavia.
Now, long story short, Yugoslavia was a country made up of people who hated each other's guts, and the only thing keeping a lid on it all was a dictatorship.
But then when that fell apart, everything kicked off.
There were massacres, sieges, bombings, you name it.
And then the UN decided a peacekeeping force should go in to stop it, and that's how we ended up in a place called Sarajevo.
Being the biggest city in all of Bosnia, it had the highest concentration of people in the whole country living there, and when the war kicked off, it was immediately surrounded by Serbian forces.
They tried to take the city, but the Serb assault force was massively outnumbered by the Bosnian defenders, so the assault failed.
And that's when the siege started, and it didn't let up for almost four years.
By the time we arrived, Sarajevo was one of the most dangerous places on planet Earth.
There were rocket and mortar barrages, both incoming and outgoing, sniper duels between Serbs and Bosnians, and sometimes both water and power would be shut off for weeks at a time, which made the city smell like an unwashed arse in the summer.
It was hell on earth, and it was impossible for your heart not to break for the civilians forced to live there.
People lost family every single day, like when the Serbs sent a single 120mm mortar shell into a crowded marketplace one day.
More than 200 people were either hurt or killed just from that one little shell, and the Serbs did it on purpose.
Their snipers had the same strategy and didn't restrict themselves to uniformed soldiers or even armed civilians.
If they could see you, you were fair game, and I'll never ever forget watching a Serb sniper gun down this lone elderly woman as she tried to cross the street one day.
The shelling was horrendously scary, but the Serbs were using old Soviet kits, so for the most part, it wasn't very accurate.
But the thing we really worried about were the snipers, especially the good ones.
They could get much closer than the mortar or rocket crews, and I'd say about 50% of the time, if they had you in their sights, you were done for.
And it's a story about a sniper that I've got for you today.
Showing 1361–1380 of 7,275 · page 69 of 364
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