Helge Meyer and the Ghost Camaro
When the bloodiest and most brutal conflict of the 1990s was raging across Eastern Europe, scarring the historic cities and beautiful vistas of the Yugoslavian countryside with crippling fields of tracer fire, surface-to-air missiles, artillery craters, and brutal racial and ethnically-charged street warfare so over-the-top brutal that the United Nations declared the entire thing a war crime, ex-Danish Special Forces Jagercorps operative Helge Meyer did the only reasonable thing any complete and utter stone-cold bonkers hardass could have done in such a bleak and brutal situation:
He bolted enough reinforced armor plating to his badass American muscle car that it looked like a Post-Apocalyptic Mad Max / Knight Rider fanfic crossover and then hauled ass through the landmine-riddled streets of downtown Sarajevo at 90 miles an hour delivering food to starving children while bandits and guerillas pinged AK rounds off his rear window and tried to blow his ass up with RPGs. And he did it without the explicit approval of any government agency, military, or NGO, and without ever carrying a weapon larger than a pocketknife and his own radioactive ballsack.
How I'd never heard this story before it came through my Patreon a couple weeks ago (thanks Jonathan) is beyond me, especially considering that I literally own a Third-Gen Camaro named Black Ice that I love more than any other worldly possession and at least a handful of my family members. But here's the tale of Helge Meyer and the Ghost Camaro.
The 1990s Yugoslavia War is one of the darkest periods of post-WWII European history, as ethnic cleansing, brutal urban combat, and massive civilian casualties turned the cities of Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia in to raging war zones of death and destruction – and, having met several who lived through this vicious war, I can tell you that it does not sound like anything you would wish on anyone you cared about. Even worse, in the midst of the fighting between regular army and irregular militia forces, pockets of Mad Max-style bandits, rebels, and outlaws took the opportunity to create more chaos – attacking United Nations aid trucks, plundering Red Cross relief vehicles, and intercepting any humanitarian aid before it ever reached the starving, terrified, and terrified civilians trapped in the middle of the chaos.
Much of the world heard these stories on the news, but did nothing, not wanting to interfere in a complicated political situation that had already spiraled into a complete humanitarian crisis. Troops and aid workers weren't given clearance or permission to interfere, for fear of drawing other countries into the conflict. Despite all the horror, nothing could be done.
Helge Meyer was like, yeah, forget that. I'm going in.
Meyer had been following the war on the news from his home in Denmark, and when he saw a story about the starving children of Yugoslavia he decided he was going to take shit into his own hands. A former Jagercorp operative in the Danish Army, Meyer had trained with Green Berets and served in the elite special forces arm of the Danish military, and as a deeply religious man Meyer felt compelled by God to intervene and do something to help these starving kids. Of course, while most people would have just, I don't know, written a check or penned a sternly-worded letter to their congressperson, Helge Meyer pulled his 1979 Camaro out of the garage and drove it into the middle of a damn warzone determined to help those kids or be brutally murdered in the process.
He offered his services to the United Nations (who understandably thought this guy had a screw loose somewhere), and when that went nowhere this one-man army just drove his Camaro onto the tarmac at Rhein-Main Air Field in Frankfurt, Germany, and told the American Air Force dudes there that he was planning haul ass around Bosnia with a car full of aid gear like a post-apocalyptic Santa Clause, and asked if they could do anything to help pimp his ride.
The USAF guys took one look at Meyer's badass Chevy and were like, yeah. We can do something with this.
So they turned his jet-black muscle car into the most badass humanitarian aid vehicle this side of Boaty McBoatface.
First the Air Force techs stripped Meyer's Camaro down to just the essential components. They welded armor to the Second Gen General Motors F-Type body, fitted Kevlar inserts in the doors, and upgraded the 5.7-liter V8 350 (I'm guessing the Chevy small-block LM1 engine) from 220 to 440 horsepower, popped some Nitrous Oxide canisters in there, and attached a hood blower, an iron reinforced iron landmine-clearing blade, run-flat tires, and a huge armor plate to cover that rear window (which is great because those windows are so expensive these days that your Camaro is basically totaled if it breaks). They kitted the interior with a military-grade GPS, a thermal imaging system, a high-tech fire extinguishing system, and a high-frequency ground-to-air radio. They pulled all the interior lights out, so the car could run in complete darkness using only Meyer's thermal and night-vision goggles for navigation, and they painted the entire thing with matte black stealth paint that wouldn't pop on enemy thermal or radar.
The only part of the car that wasn't black-on-black was the bright yellow rubber duckie they tied in behind the front grill.
The Fast and the Furious: Kosovo Drift.
The USAF guys then managed to raise or requisition about $12,000 of gear, and they jammed the Camaro to the brim with food, medical equipment, clothes, blankets, water, and toys. They gave Meyer a pair of fatigues, a Kevlar helmet, and a one-way ticket to Sarajevo, but when they offered him a gun, Meyer was like, nah, who needs that. He held up his Bible, said that was the only protection he needed, and the Air Force guys dubbed him "God's Rambo" and sent him on his way.
So then Helge Meyer spent the next three years hauling ass in pitch-darkness through minefields and demolished city streets of Bosnia, getting into car chases with AK-toting maniacs, dodging gangsters, outlaws, and IEDs, avoiding tanks and aircraft, and delivering food to starving people of all kinds – Christians, Muslims, Croats, Serbs, Bosnians, and anyone else who needed it. Weaving and handbrake-turning through the mean streets of Herzogovena in the cockpit of his stealth Camaro, Meyer survived multiple explosions and gunfights, used his NOS tanks to supercharge his 440hp engine and roar away from ambushes on more than one occasion, and basically spent the years 1992 to 1995 like some kind of nutbar Mad Max Amazon Prime delivery dude in a car that looked like a cross between KITT from Knight Rider and the Killdozer. Keep in mind, please, that he did this without a weapon, and without anyone ever actually hiring him or ordering him to do anything.
Meyer and the Ghost Camaro completed over a hundred runs over a decade of work delivering humanitarian aid to the starving and beleaguered victims of the Yugoslavian War, delivering nearly 1,000 pounds of food and supplies in the process. He took a bullet off the helmet, and many more off the armor plating of his car, but emerged from the war otherwise unscathed – a local hero to those he provided aid to, and a total badass who voluntarily went into the dangerous place on Earth because he felt he could do some good.
Helge Meyer currently lives in Germany. He still has the Camaro.
