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I'd been a full-time photojournalist since 1985, joining the 'Toronto Sun' and it's small group of freelance shooters. During the late 1980's, the 'Sun' was a morning daily with circulation hovering around 300,000. I had been lucky to pick up a few awards and I loved working with the photo desk editors - Barry Gray, Len Fortune and Bob Carroll. The 'police beat' reporters were stars too, especially Rob Lamberti and Lee Lamothe. On top of the awards, 'Time' magazine had used a picture of mine.

The photographers didn't exactly enjoy having a new, keen shooter around. Some simply ignored me. But some were great. Jack Cusano, Mike Peake, Mike Cassese, Warren Toda, Mark O'Neill, Greig Reekie and Paul Henry were great guys.

My first opportunity to do an overseas assignment, a war assignment, didn't come through the newspaper directly. I was approached by a senior writer on the editorial staff. He said he was part of a group of politically-motivated people who would like to see a feature from the ongoing Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and the fighting with the mujahideen. Was I interested in going?

The basic idea was for me to fly to Pakistan, hike over the border into Afghanistan and shoot some 'bang bang' then fly back. I would get a 'plane ticket, some 'in-country' expenses money and a strict timetable - the group wanted the article and pictures in print before a set date. I said that I was interested but I needed to do some research first.

I hit the magazines in the newspapers library. There were three problems with the project. Firstly, it was strongly rumoured that the Soviet forces were deploying special forces soldiers [Spetznaz] to hunt down western photojournalists, reporters and TV crews. Secondly, the timetable didn't work. The time allowed me a couple of days over six weeks to get back with the story and pictures. From what I read, it would take three weeks to walk from Pakistan into an ongoing area of conflict so I would only have a couple of days actually alongside the muj. And lastly, the mujahideen had a habit of taking any media to the same old blown-up Soviet tank that everyone gets led to, then they shipping you back to Pakistan. For them, job done!

As long as I kept the Spetznaz story from reaching my then-girlfriends ears, that wasn't a problem. But the other two were huge problems. I asked for a later deadline but it wasn't moved. So, unfortunately, I had to turn this job down.

At the start of the war in the former Yugoslavia, Peter Brysky visited the Toronto Sun. He had just graduated from photojournalism college and was looking to expand the content of 'spot news' in his portfolio. One of the many 'part-time' jobs I'd taken on at the newspaper to fund chasing spot-news myself was to work on the night shift of the 'police beat,' listening to a couple of dozen radio scanners and dispatching other photographers to chase calls. So Peter dropped by a few times. His dream, to kick start his career, was to cover the ongoing conflict in Croatia. His 'leg up' was - he figured - his native Polish language skills as Polish is very similar to Serb-Croat.

Peter was dead just eleven days after arriving in Croatia. Whilst in Karlovac, a mortar fragment hit him in the neck and he 'bled out' en route to a hospital. The Toronto Sun sent three more photographers in the next few years, Greig Reekie, Alex Urosevic and Norm Betts.

By 1995 I'd been working back in England for a couple of years, freelancing and doing a contract for a string of local newspapers. By that summer, the war in Croatia was back on the front pages. It didn't take me long to figure it was my turn, although I'd not done much for the Toronto Sun in a while.

At the time, I was driving a small 'hot hatchback' which would be completely unsuitable to use in Croatia. I sold it and bought an eleven year old Volvo 240 estate. It had a huge roof-rack and a four speed gearbox with electric overdrive. I put four new Goodyear heavy duty van tyres on it, then strapped the best of the 'old' rubber to the roof-rack. I tinted the rear glass and put an air mattress, sleeping bag, twelve volt cooler and a single-burner stove in the back. I had the word PRESS printed on the side windows and taped the Canadian flag on both sides. I guessed it would be easier to peel the signage off if it was a liability than to try and get it done in Croatia if it made life there easier.

My camera gear was all Nikon F3HP's with motor drives and prime glass. There were incidents of camera gear being liberated from journalists so I bought two Nikon F601's and some inexpensive zoom lenses. My film stock was Fuji CZ135-36, an excellent colour-negative film. Through a contact at the Daily Express, I found a company that supplied UN/NATO spec 'body armour' so I bought a flak-jacket and ballistic helmet from RBR Armour. These cost almost as much as the Volvo had...

To say the war in the Balkans was dangerous for journalists was a bit of an understatement. It was insane. I'd heard stories of seasoned journalists who had covered conflicts all over the world quit or retire after a few weeks in the former Yugoslavia. During the Second World War sixty-three journalists were killed over seven years. Less than ten a year across the world. During Vietnam and Cambodia sixty-three to sixty-five journalists died over twenty-three years, or about three a year. In the Balkans, just under one hundred journalists died in five years. If you compared the danger you would face in the former Yugoslavia, every DAY you worked in the conflict area, you would be as likely to die as a North American police officer would in his or her entire career.

Nobody really knows how they will handle coming under fire. Would you freeze? Would you run? I'd been involved in two incidents involving guns being fired at me or close to me. While driving in Toronto, I'd unknowingly got between a bank robbery suspect fleeing the police. The speeding van almost hit me. As I jumped out of my car, a plainclothes police officer opened fire at the back of the van firing right past my shoulder. My reaction was anger. The shotgun-toting man was in 'plainclothes' and I turned towards him. He must've sensed I was going to go after him, even though he had a shotgun, and he identified himself as a police officer. Then, while covering a 'barricaded suspect' police call, a tear-gassed suspect opened the front door of his home. I was behind the closest police car. The police expected the suspect to come out on his hands and knees but some people are pretty impervious to tear gas. As I rose up to get my picture, the suspect raised the shotgun and fired. I dropped back behind the cop car as the store window behind me exploded. My reaction was mostly surprise. So on reflection, I thought I'd probably do okay.

Paperwork was optimistically simple. Passport, no Croat visa, no letter of assignment from the newspaper, no UN accreditation. Wing it. I did fill out a 'last will and testament.' I took the late afternoon cross-channel ferry from Dover to Calais and by late evening I was deep into Belgium. I slept in a lay-by and woke next morning in heavy rain. The Volvo wouldn't start. I had it towed to the closest garage and two junior mechanics messed around with it for a couple of hours. The senior man arrived and within minutes had the car running.

The rain continued through Belgium, Luxemburg and Germany. Stopping for fuel in Luxemburg, I bought a couple of cartons of Marlboro cigarettes and stashed them in the glove box. I'd heard that a cigarette or even a pack could pave the way through many road blocks in a conflict area. On one of the autobahn's I found myself in a small convoy of about five cars all travelling at 90-100mph. We were really eating up the miles. This went on for a couple of hours. Then, quite suddenly, all the other cars slowed down but, of course, I kept the speed up and, as the highway crossed a bridge over a river, a flash of light went off. I'd been caught doing around one-hundred-miles-per-hour in a much less liberal zone!

By late evening I'd crossed Germany and I was only a few miles from the Austrian border. The next morning I was looking forward to crossing the Alps. It would've been a memorable experience I'm sure, but that morning the mountains were shrouded in fog. I headed through Austria into Slovenia and past the capital, Ljubljana. This truly was the point on the trip where the old world met the new world. The highway, which for the past seven hundred miles had been at least two well paved lanes in each direction, became just a two lane road with dirt shoulders. The articulated trucks drove with one set of wheels in the centre of their lane and the other set in the middle of the shoulder forming a 'suicide' passing lane for cars down the centre of the road. I watched this, for a while, then joined in!

I reached the Slovenian-Croatian border post near Jesenice mid-morning. The border guard's brother lived in Canada so my visa didn't take long coming. Once I entered Zagreb, I was wondering how, exactly, I was going to locate the United Nations headquarters so I could get a media pass and plug into the UN's flow of information. As I bumbled along, I spotted a car with UN on the doors so I simply followed it. Luckily, it was heading to the UN HQ and not away from it.