A Shared Wish Hundreds Of Thousands In Bosnia Were Displaced By War, And U.S. Troops Were Sent There To Keep The Peace. Both Long For One Thing: Home

The bridge between the living and the dead is narrow, strung with barbed wire and patrolled by armed guards.

It lays over the Sava River at Slavonski Brod like the shattered spine of a giant, connecting Croatia to Bosnia. Winter fog obscures the far side and swallows travelers who cross.

In early October, members of the 396th Combat Support Hospital crossed this bridge on their way to Tuzla, a city 40 miles away in the northeast shoulder of Bosnia.

The 69-member unit includes 12 Army reservists from Spokane, Walla Walla and North Idaho. It was the beginning of a nine-month stay for them, part of the United States’ commitment to help bring order to Bosnia.

They were entering a country that had seen the most brutal conflict in Europe since World War II. More than 200,000 people were killed and another 2 million left homeless between 1992 and late 1995.

There has been peace since then, a peace maintained by the presence of 60,000 NATO troops, including 8,500 Americans.

For many of the 12 reservists, Bosnia was a place that buzzed on the margins of their attention. They knew little about the land or the war.

For them, crossing the bridge was more than crossing a political boundary. It transformed the war from an item in the news to a sight that took their words away.

On the Croatian side, signs of war are evident. On the Bosnian side, the signs are overwhelming: mile after mile of bombed out buildings, shelter only to weeds, the wind and shadows.

In the military buses that day, the chatter among the reservists fell off. Everyone stared out the windows. A few took photos. A few said “Oh my God” and nothing more.

They had passed from the land of the living to the land of the dead.

LEAVING FAMILY BEHIND

The Inland Northwest soldiers include nurses, medics, a doctor, a supply sergeant, and a chaplain’s assistant.

The highest rank among them is a Lt. Col. James Johnson, a doctor from Walla Walla. The rest are non-commissioned officers and enlisted, staff sergeants and specialists.

Their reasons for going to Bosnia are as different as their jobs and ranks. Most volunteered, some did not. They are in the Army Reserve, which means they have civilian lives waiting at home.

They left behind wives, children, girlfriends and grandparents.

For Staff Sgt. Al Velarde, Bosnia will be the end of a military career that started 40 years ago. He was 17 and living in Denver when he talked his dad into letting him join the Marines, the fifth son of the family to serve in the military.

As a teenager, Velarde ran with a rough crowd. Most of his friends went to jail. He went to Lebanon and then Vietnam in 1960. He was deployed for Desert Storm and now Bosnia, for which he volunteered. At 58, he is the oldest of the group.

In Spokane, Velarde drives a bus for the Spokane Transit Authority.

Spec. Andrew Finley also joined the Army when he was 17. But for him Bosnia is the beginning. Now 20, Finley is tall, muscular and quiet. He is the youngest of the group. He wants to be a respiratory therapist and figured the military could help him achieve that goal.

In Spokane, he works at a nursing home where his 80-year-old grandfather, Cecil, lives. He went to Bosnia to sharpen his medical skills. He misses his family, especially his grandma, Betty, and grandpa, who has Parkinson’s disease.

“I’m about the only one who understands him when he speaks,” Finley says.

Sgt. Juan Griffin seems a bit embarrassed to tell one of the reasons he wanted to go to Bosnia. “To be honest, I wanted a combat patch.”

That would require Griffin to experience gunfire or grenades. But he also wanted to see this part of Europe. The Army took him to Korea and to the Middle East for Desert Storm. He’s an adventurer with a camera.

A computer in the tent office where he works as a supply officer displays a picture he took at a Gonzaga women’s basketball game. It’s a welcome vision of home in a place where everyone wears green, and winter has meant mostly rain and mud.

Spec. Jeanna Martin, a chaplain’s assistant, didn’t volunteer for this assignment. She’s a single mother with two sons in Post Falls: 5-year-old Kevin and 7-year-old Aaron.

“As much as I love being in the Army, I would never purposely put it before my children,” she says.

Her oldest son was angry at her for leaving. At first he wouldn’t talk to her on the telephone. “I explained to him that by mommy being here a lot of little boys and girls can be with their moms and dads. Otherwise there’d be fighting and they would be dead.”

Staff Sgt. Patrick “P.J.” Anderson has been trying to get to a tough spot of the world since he was 17. He enlisted in Navy in 1973, but never made it to Vietnam.

He has trouble explaining his desire, but it has something to do with not taking his life in Walla Walla for granted.

“We’re all pretty snug back home,” says Anderson, who is 41. “But here, I try to imagine what it would be like to have tanks come in and someone try to kill you, to grab what you can and run like hell. And that’s what it boiled down to for these folks - staying alive.”

Whatever their reasons for being here, all of them believe the NATO forces are making a difference.

“I’ve seen a lot of building going on. You wonder if it would be if we weren’t here,” says Staff Sgt. Paul Child.

A week before Thanksgiving, Anderson visited Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia where 10,000 people died as shells rained on apartment buildings, markets and city streets.

An old woman came up to him. She raised her hands above her head and gestured in a way that Anderson understood as shells falling on the city. The old woman clasped her hands in prayer, and then pointed to him and his uniform.

A HOME IN TUZLA

Tuzla is the headquarters for all U.S. operations in the northeast sector and it is where President Clinton visited the troops on Monday. It is a gritty city of about 150,000 people.

On a good winter day, buildings at the far end of town are blocky industrial shapes through the haze. On a bad day, the pollution is so thick it could be used for construction material. The air is bitter with the smell of burning coal.

Communist-era high-rise apartments are everywhere. There are cars and horse-drawn carts. The city is largely Muslim, and mosques broadcast the call to prayer throughout the day.

Adnan Ahmedbegovic was born in Tuzla and spent part of the war in the Bosnian Army. He was given a rifle and 10 shells. It’s all the ammunition he had for six months to defend against Serbs who pounded downtown with artillery.

Ahmedbegovic, who is 35, was never in combat, the Serbs never marched on the city, but the stress of war still wounded him.

“You wait in the mountains and listen to the shells go overhead and wonder if that will hit your family,” he says.

He stops, frozen in a memory, then wipes his eyes.

Ethnically he is a Muslim, but he has never been inside a mosque or a church of any kind. In the cities, Muslims - or Bosniaks as they prefer to be called - were largely secular professionals.

“When my father was alive he was a communist. To be in the Communist Party you must be an atheist,” he says.

Now, after the war, he is not sure what to believe.

THE BLUE FACTORY

U.S. troops in Bosnia aren’t allowed to wander the countryside or cities. They go off base only in heavily armed convoys on patrol, to another base, or for an occasional visit to a local hospital, school or orphanage.

The reason is simple: Bosnia is a dangerous place and Americans are targets.

There are two U.S. military bases at Tuzla. The first is Task Force Eagle Base, headquarters of the U.S. command in Bosnia and home of 49-year-old Col. Dennis Hardy, a Spokane native who oversees about 4,000 groops as commander of the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment.

The second base is Guardian, where the 396th runs its hospital. Guardian is on the outskirts of Tuzla. The base is ringed in a garland of concertina wire and watch towers. Farmers cultivate corn next to the wire and shepherds bring their flocks to bed under the floodlights.

The guards carry rifles and wear helmets and flak jackets. Inside, everyone carries their rifle everywhere - to work, to dinner, to the base PX.

The hospital is housed in a two-story concrete building painted a pale blue. It is known as the Blue Factory. This is where the members of the 396th work. The unit, based in Vancouver, Wash., is under the command of Col. Kristine Campbell, the first woman and the first nurse to command a hospital unit in a combat area.

Large tents and portable labs have been grafted onto the main building. The whole structure is surrounded by metal shipping containers. To one side of the hospital is the “House of Blues,” a long row of dark blue shipping containers stacked two high and fashioned with doors and windows. These are the quarters for the 396th.

Each 8-by-20-foot container is shared by two or three people. There are posters of swimsuit-clad models, Christmas cards from home and photos of family and friends on the paneled walls. People have caches of snacks, games and music. Some have televisions and VCRs.

Christmas decorations are everywhere.

Other soldiers in Bosnia refer to the House of Blues as the Hilton. They are exceptional quarters in a place where most people sleep in tents.

ONE QUESTION

It is 10 days until Christmas and Sgt. Ken Nettleton sits under a strand of colored lights and a pair of bright red holiday stockings hanging from the wall of his room.

Nettleton has 11 children back home in Dayton, Wash. The oldest is 15, the youngest, Nicholas, was born in March. Nettleton will miss the boy’s first steps, first birthday and first Christmas. Most of the children are doing well, but his 7-year-old daughter has nightmares and wants to know when daddy is coming home.

“I hate not being there when someone needs me,” says the 37-year-old X-ray technician. “I’d go home tomorrow if they said go.”

He’s taped photos of his family on the wall of his quarters. There is Jack and Mary and Georgia. There is a newspaper clipping photo of his 5-year-old daughter Jasmine wearing a camouflage shirt and smiling.

Unlike most of the crew from the Inland Northwest, Nettleton and his wife, Betty, don’t have e-mail. He keeps in touch by putting pen to paper, and with an even older form of communication: prayer.

He tries to write her at least a page a night. Sometimes he doesn’t get very far. One night, his own worries started to find shape on the page, and so he stopped.

“She has enough to worry about,” he says.

His mind is full of thoughts of his family. But he is a soldier in Bosnia and visions of the barbarity of the war have elbowed their way into his head and compete for his attention.

Nettleton visited Sarajevo last month. He stood on the bridge where the Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated, igniting the World War I. He saw children going to school in a bullet-riddled building. As he talks about the trip, his mind races and transports him from Sarajevo to another place: Dachau, the Nazi concentration camp.

He was there in 1985 while on leave from the Navy.

“I remember seeing the incinerator and thinking of all the souls going up the chimney,’ he says. “Then I remember looking around and thinking that the camp was in a pretty nice neighborhood. When people finished their work they probably went home, visited their neighbors and had barbecues.”

All visitors to Dachau are confronted with a monument that says simply: “Never Again.”

Nettleton remembers the Sarajevo children at the war scarred school. He remembers the words at Dachau and he asks: “What does that mean?”

MARKING TIME

At the Blue Factory, everyone wears the same clothes. Everyone eats in the same cafeteria. Everyone works in the same place and is generally stuck on base every day. People miss privacy and silence. Everyone misses someone back home.

“You go to work at the hospital, go to eat, sleep and that’s pretty much our world,” says Staff Sgt. Bob Bruce, a medical lab technician from Walla Walla. “Every day is Groundhog Day.”

It’s a reference to the movie starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell, where the main character finds himself re-living the same day over and over. The movie was a romantic comedy with a happy ending. Here, groundhog day just is. Monday is no different from Friday; both have ceased to have meaning.

“We came in October, we leave in June and nothing in between counts,” says Dennis Frederick, a staff sergeant from Ford, north of Spokane.

Reminders of civilian life become very important. For Bruce, it was worth writing home when he got cotton sheets to soften sleeping in a bed made of an Army-issue wool blanket and sleeping bag.

The hospital sees 40 to 80 patients a day, mostly American soldiers, but any NATO personnel in the U.S. sector can use the hospital. So can any Bosnian in danger of losing sight, limb or life.

There are twisted ankles, broken bones, sinus infections, hernia operations, pretty much anything that would afflict 8,500 young to middle-aged soldiers.

In their free time, the soldiers take correspondence courses or lift weights in one of the camp’s innumerable tents. A video library has hundreds of titles, including a giant section of M.A.S.H. tapes. Soldiers play Risk and Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit. The hospital staff is fortunate because they have generous access to e-mail. They’re also fortunate because the Norwegians are nearby.

Before the Americans arrived, a Norwegian medical unit ran the Blue Factory. The Norwegians don’t consider themselves a target like the Americans do.

When weather permits, they go jogging and ride mountain bikes outside the gate. They built a swimming pool big enough to swallow a jeep next to the hospital. The pool is empty during winter; in summer it’s off limits to U.S. soldiers.

But the Norwegians are more than happy to share their clubhouse, known as The Barn. The interior is done entirely from scavenged supplies. With paneled wood floors, ceiling and walls, it looks like the warmest of alpine lodges.

The clubhouse has a fireplace in one corner, comfortable sofas everywhere, a great stereo and moody lighting. Alcohol is served, but not to Americans. For the U.S. soldiers, no drinking, gambling or sex is allowed.

But the Barn and the videos and the games are not enough of a distraction. On the night the first lasting snow fell in Tuzla, Bruce walked down a long boardwalk connecting the cafeteria to the hospital. He stopped and pointed to a group of houses on a hill beyond the fence.

“You know what I’d really like to do? Go to a Bosnia house and have dinner with a family,” he says.

In the opposite direction, past the helipads, is a small, white car that struck a land mine. It is bent in the middle, like an animal that arched its back in pain and then stiffened with death.

LONG DISTANCE

Last week, the base lit a 50-foot Christmas tree at a ceremony in front of the PX. A hundred or more soldiers gather in the square to sing carols into Bosnia’s dark, cold night. When the tree lights come on, they cheer and sing “Silent Night.”

P.J. Anderson came here with several friends from the hospital. Before the ceremony, they drank coffee and hot chocolate together, but now Anderson stands apart, staring at the tree, saying nothing, not even stamping his feet against the cold.

For a moment the distance home yawns wide and sucks Anderson into a place where he feels remote and alone. Not even the silver St. Christopher’s medal around his neck can protect him.

Later that night, he sits in the hospital’s administrative office doing paperwork. The office is painted an ill-looking pink color. The walls are covered with maps of Bosnia, one the size of a car hood.

The place is usually cramped with papers and desks and computers and people. But it’s quiet tonight. Anderson is the only solider here. His pen flicks across a form.

“Seeing that tree and hearing those Christmas carols… I feel like I’m hanging onto the edge,” he says.

Anderson misses sidewalks. On Guardian Base there is only asphalt, mud or wooden boardwalks. He misses getting a glass of water from the tap. Everyone drinks from bottles. He misses the big, black padded chair in his living room. A pile of laundry bags is the closest substitute.

Most of all, he misses his wife, Terri.

They have been married 10 years and live in Walla Walla. He is not buying her a present for Christmas and she is not buying him one. For years, they have exchanged nothing but cards.

During the Christmas season, they sit in a cafe together, drink coffee and watch everyone rush past in a mad dash to buy gifts. What Anderson and his wife give each other during the holidays can’t be bought in any store - time.

But the lines of communication in their marriage have gotten rusty. They’ve taken each other for granted, Anderson says.

Bosnia is changing that.

Soldiers at the hospital can make a 20-minute phone call home once a day. But work schedules make it more like once a week. It’s changed the way Anderson and his wife talk.

“You have to get down to important things,” he says. “We’re probably tighter than we’ve ever been.”

At the end of each day, Anderson goes back to his small room and crawls into his Army-issue sleeping bag. He calls it his time machine: He gets in and when he gets out, a day has passed. But first, he focuses his eyes on a picture of Terri. It’s the last thing he sees before he goes to sleep.

Some miracles, only two people share.

REBUILDING A LIFE

The scraping of their shovels and the murmur of their voices can be heard from the road. At the end of a narrow path through the weeds and broken bricks are the brothers, laboring over a ruin 25 miles north of Tuzla.

The pile of bricks, dirt and shattered walls had been Esef Kadric’s home. It has no roof. A foot of dirt covers what was his bedroom. His brother, Zufer, is helping him clear the rubble so he can rebuild the house.

Esef is 59, his brother 57. Their hands are chapped and scraped from picking up broken bricks and working a shovel. They have bristly, unshaven faces. They don’t smile. They wear coats that are dirty, but look as though someone beat them to keep them clean.

The brothers moved to his neighborhood with their father 44 years ago. They worked for a railroad. They retired. Then the war came.

They remember the exact day: May 1, 1992. It was a Friday, a national holiday and people were looking forward to a long weekend. But the rockets started to hit the houses, the fires started to burn, the dead fell, the living fled.

“We took nothing, only clothes,” Zufer says. Esef’s wife died later in a refugee camp.

In a pile of ash and burned boards at Zufer’s feet are two tiny white tea cups and saucers. They look like beads from a woman’s necklace on the dark ground. Next to them is a small-stemmed brandy glass, misshapen from the fire. He bumps it with his toe and begins to cry.

He looks into the sky. It is the only thing untouched by the war. His tears stop. He wipes his eyes and remembers something.

There is an plastic quart bottle a few feet away and he retrieves it. Inside is slivovitz, homemade plum brandy. For the first time Zufer smiles and offers a drink to his visitors.

Three days later one of the brothers will step on an anti-tank mine a few feet from where the bottle of slivovitz is kept.

The mine is the size of a small pizza, a couple of inches thick and painted a lethal, dark green. Its job is to destroy an armored vehicle. A person stepping on it would become a cloud of blood.

But this time the mine doesn’t explode.

Another miracle.

HELPING THE CHILDREN

Sunday is Spec. Michael Bell’s day off. He could have slept in; instead he and about 30 other members of the hospital unit are taking a Christmas party to an orphanage on the other side of Tuzla.

No one just hops in a bus and drives off for such a trip. At a security briefing, soldiers are told what to do if the convoy is shot at or if one of the vehicles hits a mine.

The soldiers wear kevlar helmets and flak jackets. They carry M-16 rifles and gas masks. They shuffle sideways down the isle of the bus with all their gear. It is a 40-minute ride through Tuzla to get to the children.

In some sense, children got Bell into the military. Every year, his father, Peter, dresses as Santa Claus and visits the children’s cancer ward at Deaconess Medical Center in Spokane. Once, Bell went along.

“Some couldn’t get out of bed, but they smiled because someone was there for them,” he remembers.

One of those kids was a good friend’s little sister, and cancer took her life. After that, Bell committed to working in medicine. He couldn’t afford medical school, but the Army offered a chance to get into the profession. In Bosnia, the 22-year-old assists doctors during surgery and makes sure the operating room has the supplies it needs.

From outside, the orphanage is a blocky white building. Some of the walls are still scarred by shrapnel. The main yard is a muddy mess.

Inside the main building, members of the 396th stage a puppet show. It is called “The Rainbow People” and nested in its songs and clap-alongs is a message of tolerance. It is for children who lived through a war where people were killed because of their ancestry.

The show is held in a large community room lined with books and stereo equipment. The children sit in padded chairs.

The orphanage has been here about 15 years and is run by the Tuzla Canton, a government unit similar to a county. As conditions go in Bosnia, this place is luxurious. The children’s rooms are clean and each has a small collection of well-used toys. There are three kids to a room, each with their own bed.

Kada Pandur is a math teacher at the orphanage. Today, she’s overseeing the Army’s visit for the director. She is a short, stout woman with white-blonde hair.

Of the 154 kids, about 80 percent are war orphans, Pandur says. Nearly all are Muslim.

Many are from Srebrenica, a city south of Tuzla and close to the border of Serbia. Declared a “safe-area” by the United Nations, Srebrenica was overrun by Serbs late in the war. Dutch peacekeepers hunkered down in their camps as the city fell.

An interpreter asks Pandur what would happen if the NATO troops left. She says only two words: “Nisam optimist” - not optimistic.

ON PATROL

Four Bradley Fighting Vehicles rumble into Brod, a village about 25 miles north of Tuzla. Inside, soldiers sit packed against boxes of ammunition and anti-tank missiles. It is cramped, dark and cold and the Bradleys shake like mining cars. When they enter Brod, they become some of the most livable structures around.

Destroyed buildings are everywhere. The roofs are gone, the walls are gone. There is nothing but piles of red brick and red tiles.

This is where 2nd Lt. Scott Allen leads his patrol. He calls Colville home because his parents, Ronald and Kathleen, live there. But as an officer of the U.S. Army, he is based out of Germany.

Allen and a small group of soldiers walk through Brod and check on families that have returned to rebuild their homes. Through an interpreter, Allen’s job is to find out the ethnicity of each house, determine the head of the household and ask about their quality of life.

Brod is a suburb of Brcko, one of the most controversial spots in Bosnia.

To the Bosniaks, Brcko is a gateway for trading with the rest of Europe. For the Bosnian Serbs, the city is a narrow link between two parts of the Republic of Serbka. Both sides consider Brcko worth fighting for. Currently, the city is administered by U.S. Ambassador William Ferran.

Brcko was multi-ethnic. Now it is 98 percent Serbian, but Muslim refugees are coming back.

There is a simple truth in Bosnia: Everyone wants to go home.

Allen is 23 years old. His young American face looks like bread dough compared to the Muslims he interviews. Their faces are deeply wrinkled. When they frown or smile, the emotions seem exaggerated.

The streets are muddy lanes fringed with piles of garbage and debris. Chickens and small, barking dogs roam in the yards. An old woman or an old man comes to the door of nearly every house Allen stops at. They move slowly, like sleep walkers. The men are unshaven, their hair mussed. The women wear scarves. Carpets lead to the front door and muddy shoes are parked on the porch. Mud is everywhere. The air smells of earth and woodsmoke.

Today, the quality of life amounts to three questions: Do you have drinkable water? Do you have electricity? Is anyone giving you problems? The answer to all three questions is an almost uniform no. Life is good compared to two years ago.

Then, there was no life at all.

When Staff Sgt. Donald Holdridge first patrolled this neighborhood, the street was filled with rubble and nearly impassable.

Peace in Bosnia had just been brokered. Muslim refugees were returning by day to clear the mess and put up roofs. They would leave at dusk only to have Serbs blow up their work in the middle of the night.

No one is blowing up the houses now, but someone is stealing pallets of new roof tile and stacks of fresh lumber.

On Christmas Day, Allen and Holdridge will probably be patrolling Brod again, watching over homes so far away from their own.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 20 Color photos Map of Bosnia 2 Graphics: 1. What time is it in Bosnia? 2. How big is Bosnia?

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: INFORMATION ON THE INTERNET The 396th Combat Support Hospital has its own web page on the Internet. More information about the unit and e-mail addresses for the soldiers can be found at www.geocities.com/pentagon/6057. Information about the military mission in Bosnia also can be found on BosniaLINK, the U.S. Department of Defense’s web page, at www.dtic.mil/bosnia.