FROM WAR VIRGIN TO WAR WEARY 193and forced to bug out in the dead of night, my commo man John and I
had some free time with which to seek answers to some of the less sensitive
questions put to us by UN ambassador Madeleine Albright and by agency
analysts. One requirement was to provide an assessment of the availability
of consumer goods in Sarajevo. Interpreting this guidance as broadly as pos-
sible, John and I searched and found several pizza restaurants in the general
vicinity of our villa. With flour from relief agencies ingeniously combined
with homemade cheese and Slovenian ketchup, the wood-burning oven
pizzas tasted great. Keeping in mind “hunger is the best gravy.” One war
zone pizzeria even delivered. Their motto, loosely translated, was “Guaran-
teed delivery within fifteen minutes unless hit by sniper.”
We also found a tiny, private dive bar called Kućica (Little House), which
was frequented by Bosnian soldiers, as well as foreign spies and mercenaries.
I felt right at home. A car battery powered a small FM radio for music, tables
were candlelit by necessity, and Sarajevsko Pivo flowed freely if warmly. It
was inadvisable to use or get anywhere near the bar’s tiny Turkish hole-in-
the-floor toilet, since it had not experienced running water in years.
One night, we were down at the Kućica, drinking warm beer and lis-
tening to oldies on Bosnian Serb radio from nearby Pale. Pale, of course,
was the stronghold of sadistic war criminals Radovan Karadžić and Ratko
Mladić. That night, as the radio played “Imagine,” John Lennon’s plea for
world peace and understanding, we could barely hear the song over the
roar of nearby Serb tank fire against the city’s civilian targets. Who says
Bosnian Serbs have no sense of humor?
Later that same night, in a bit of a Sarajevsko Pivo–induced haze, John
and I discovered that we were both huge fans of Beavis and Butthead. During
times of great stress, comrades in arms tend to share some of their inner-
most secrets. Thus, with the sound of artillery shells landing in the distance,
John learned that I favored Butthead, while he considered Beavis to be the
bigger moron. As we made our way back to the station through the dark-
ened, cobblestone streets of Sarajevo, we also concluded that we should
probably not give up our day jobs in order to do voices for MTV cartoons.
Nonetheless, our spot-on renditions of “Snipers suck!” and “Serbs rule!”
did serve to amuse, at least until the next shell landed.
Another night, during an especially intense firefight between the Bosnian
Muslims and the Serbs right outside our villa, John was busy watching a