All of this went on until 23 January, when we were told: “Either we take Vukovar, or we have to retreat all the way to Sremska Mitrovica,” which was more than fifty kilometres away. We went into battle once, then pulled back with losses, then attacked a second time. It was already sometime after midnight, between three and four in the morning, when we went into the attack for the third time.
I was bandaging a wounded man. He was calling out: “Comrade, comrade!” I came over with the stretcher and my medical bag and started dressing his wounds. Suddenly there was the whistling sound of a grenade launcher, and a flash. Everything around me lit up. It landed not far from us. I don’t know what happened to the wounded man, but since we were in a vineyard, I think some kind of stake or other hard object struck me on the head. It wasn’t shrapnel, because there was no wound on my head, but I suffered a head injury. A piece of shrapnel hit me in the leg, though. The bone was completely shattered and I was bleeding. I couldn’t stand on that leg. I was unconscious for a while from the blow and remained there when the troops withdrew.
Just before dawn I regained consciousness. I could see daylight beginning to break. There was no one around me, and I didn’t dare call out in case someone heard me. Then suddenly I saw several of my comrades, camouflaged under white sheets, coming towards me. They were rescuers searching the battlefield after the fighting, looking for survivors. They pulled me out on a sledge. We weren’t far away, because our forces had taken up a fighting position only a short distance away, perhaps four or five hundred metres.
I was immediately transported as a lightly wounded casualty to the First Hospital in Sremska Mitrovica. I was taken care of there and given my medical card. My card was yellow, not red, because I was classified among the less seriously wounded. While I lay there waiting to be transported farther away, since this was a place close to the front, a medical delegation arrived. Among them was the head of the First Army Medical Service, whom I had met in Belgrade, at the Railway Hospital in Dedinje, where the wounded were being brought. The entire First Army hospital was based there. The head of the medical service was Voja Đukanović.
He was astonished to see me and asked what I was doing there. I didn’t know what to say, I got confused, and finally said: “I went off to join the fighters.” And he said: “When you finish your treatment, report to me.” I was surprised. I thought I would be reprimanded or punished because I had deserted from the hospital in the liberated city — and there I was, among the lightly wounded rather than the seriously wounded.
But when I was discharged from the hospital, I reported to the head of the medical service, and he assigned me to the Hygiene and Epidemiology Unit attached to the army hospital. I never saw the front again. Instead, I worked in that unit in microbiology, researching epidemic typhus, which was very widespread on the Srem Front. Enemy units — German, Bulgarian and others — had previously been stationed there, and there was a great deal of infection. There were enormous numbers of lice, which transmitted typhus, so we all suffered from them and were all potential candidates for contracting the disease.