ABSTRACT
A colleague of mine, new to the United States but familiar with former Yugoslavia, recently confessed that he had mistaken one of my Bosnia-Herzegovina maps as being of ‘somewhere in America because of all the [English] road names’. What he had seen was in fact an ‘international’ mapping of the road system in Bosnia-Herzegovina, an overlaid organizational system created and maintained by the Stabilization Force (SFOR) and used by the ‘international community’. For example, the main Sarajevo-Mostar road is labelled Route 17 on Bosnian road maps. However, it is also known and mapped as PacMan, its SFOR given name. PacMan, the name of a popular 1980s video game that had a ‘PacMan’ eating pellets and avoiding killer ghosts in order to survive, has become a major supply route for the NATO troops, providing nourishment and the means to avoid troublesome ‘ghosts’ in its own way. All major thoroughfares as well as some secondary and dirt roads have SFOR names, such as Sparrow, Corbieres, Gull, Aurore, Hornblower, and Arizona. The names of these roads, interesting in themselves, are linked to the nationality of the military division in charge of the area: routes in the French sector are more likely to be French in origin, many routes in the US sector are named after American states and bird and animal names are common in the British sector.
