Trusted Mole: a Soldier's Journey into Bosnia's Heart of Darkness
Milos Stankovic
HarperCollins £19.99, pp476
Buy it at BOL

Going to the Wars
Max Hastings
Macmillan £30, pp400
Buy it at BOL

The otherness of war. If there is one theme that unites these two compelling books, by two wildly different characters, it is the surreal and separate world of battle. Milos Stankovic was a British soldier from old royalist Yugoslav stock who left Tito's communism. He grew up in Zimbabwe, joined the Parachute Regiment, did heroic service in Bosnia and ended up being arrested for spying for the Serbs. His arrest and long agony spent swinging in the wind was an appalling betrayal by the British Army of a good soldier dreadfully wronged. Max Hastings is a warrior manqué.

Stankovic was the victim of a double jeopardy. His Serb language made him as gold dust to the British Army. He worked as an interpreter and, more importantly, as a fixer to Generals Sir Mike Rose and then Sir Rupert Smith. Anticipating trouble, the British Army gave him a cover name and called him 'Mike Stanley'. Two other Brit-Serb soldiers were called 'Abbott' and 'Costello'. 'Stanley' came from Stan Laurel. Very droll, very British Army. But once the Bosnian Muslims had worked out his origins, Stankovic-Stanley was under a perpetual cloud of suspicion. One of their newspapers called him a 'trusted mole' of the Bosnian Serb authorities.

The charge is grotesquely untrue once you read his vivid description of the twilight zone of the Bosnian Serb leadership in Pale. The butcher of Sarajevo, General Ratko Mladic, comes across as a fascinating monster, a force of nature with bewitching eyes. Mladic tricked US three-star General Wesley Clark into swapping hats and the moment was forever caught by Serb TV. (Mladic was later to play exactly the same trick with the poor, doomed commander of the Dutch battalion in Srebrenica. After the Dutch allowed the Serbs to overrun the enclave, condemning 5,000 Muslims to their deaths, Mladic arranged a toast of champagne. As the Dutch commander raised his glass, in walked Serb TV.)

Stankovic's book is far more than the outcry of an innocent man foully accused. He has a wonderful eye for detail and a natural storyteller's gift, and passion, to get across the bizarre and terrible cruelty of what the people of Bosnia went through. At times, I laughed out loud; at times, horrible moments of my spells there came swimming back, brilliantly evoked in Stankovic's fresh prose.

Here is his description of crash first-aid to a sniper victim : 'She's gone a grey-white and is no longer moaning. There's a medic outside the vehicle with a stretcher so I give him the drip-set as he's the expert. But he mucks it up and tries to stick the canula into a vein in her hand, à la classroom. But there's no vein because it's collapsed, as veins do in the extremities when someone's in shock. Anyway, this needle goes in and produces nothing more than a bloody great bubble of saline solution under her skin. There's nothing going into her system. Then the medic faints.'

This description had me roaring my head off in a Tube train. She lived. Trusted Mole is rich in comic scenes, the best of which is the arrival of two baby incubators, one to the Serbs, one to the Muslims. The first didn't work; the second was used to grow marijuana. And then there's finding fly-fishing spots for the general in the middle of a war.

But the comedy switchbacks with the tragedy. The muddle of the UN's failed peacekeeping mission is nailed to the wall in a way - strangely, because Stankovic worked incredibly hard for General Rose to deliver a kind of peace. But the forces of hatred were stronger, and 'peacekeeping' collapsed in favour of peacemaking, which meant bombing the Serbs. This man was a hero, caught in the middle and discarded by a military bureaucracy that should be shot at dawn for its betrayal. No doubt a film is in the offing.

Hastings's book has its own surprises. As a rookie reporter in Northern Ireland in 1969, he saw the RUC act with grotesque violence, machine-gunning Catholic homes: 'Anyone who was there that August night in Belfast... understood how the revival of the IRA became possible, and why the Royal Ulster Constabulary forfeited for ever the trust of Catholic Ireland.' Perhaps Hastings's successor as editor of the Daily Telegraph should take note.

In Vietnam, we read that his own personal store of courage had run out. Having determined to stay on in Saigon, he swayed at the last moment and rushed to the American embassy to hitch a ride on one of the last choppers out. He went on to cover yet more wars - a Fleet Street hack who ended up beating the British Army to Port Stanley and liberating the Upland Goose.