Gendarme in Bileća
by Momo Kapor

Obrad Milićević, a native of the village of Zvjerine in Herzegovina, where nothing but Herzegovinians grows, decided to apply as a gendarme in Bileća in 1922. He passed all the exams. He was healthy as a dogwood, smart, honest and brave, he hit the target, ran faster than the others, wielded a saber and a bayonet, threw the furthest stone from his shoulder, did not smoke or drink, and was, as is known, from a good family … In the end, after he was proven worthy to be a gendarme, he was supposed to sign the decision, but he refused to do so.

– Why won’t you sign? – they asked him.

– I can’t – he answered. – I am not literate.

– Why, poor thing, are you not… literate? So, how are you going to write reports and reports when something happens?

And so, in spite of everything, he was not accepted by the gendarmes, so he moved to America, where he traveled on the Italian ship ‘San Giovanni di Messina’ from the port of Kotor, where a man from Dubrovnik, named Baltazar Grady, collected Herzegovinians for work in the mines of Bute Montana.

As the old proverb says: “Herzegovina settles the whole World, but still does not displace itself.”

After many struggles, Obrad, who was given the new name O’Brien in New York, looking for a place similar to his native Zvjerina, settled in the northwest of the state of Arizona, towards the border of California, under Mount Crossman. He lived in poverty doing what he also did at Zvjerina – raising sheep whose meat he sold in the nearby town of Hawassa City. The state of Arizona gave him one hundred acres of completely barren land for the symbolic price of five dollars.

One day, while he was digging a big hole to make a well, the same one he had in Herzegovina, because there was no other water in that area except rainwater, oil suddenly flowed out. He became so rich overnight.

He built a spacious house in the colonial style, and for his soul he built a very small, stone one, like the one in which he was born, with a hearth, beams and ramskins on which he slept dreaming of his native Zvjerina. And so, the day came for his company to merge with the Standard Oil Company, which sent a famous lawyer from Phoenix to sign the contracts. But he refused to put his signature!

– Why won’t you sign the contract? – asked the astonished lawyer.

– I am not literate – he answered.

– Mr. O'Brien - said the lawyer – you are one of the richest men in Arizona. What would you have become if you knew how to write?

– I would become a gendarme in Bileća – answered Obrad.

The famous Serbian writer and painter, Momčilo Momo Kapor (1937–2010), always emphasized that he was originally from Herzegovina, from the Bileća village of Mirilovići, where numerous Kapor families still live today, although he spent most of his life in Belgrade. He often told stories from that region, about the people there and their specific mentality and way of life, in a very humorous way. This story about an illiterate policeman from Bileća who got rich in America gained special popularity on the Internet, and Momo used it to artistically edit, and thus preserve for eternity, the original story of Nikola Milićević, a native of Herzegovina, recorded by Šćepan Aleksić.