AUTHOR’S NOTE

During the siege of Sarajevo, Serbian and Bosnian forces deployed snipers to shoot down into their separate halves of the divided city. Occasionally, these snipers were agile teenage women. It was considered desirable to recruit young women for such service, because this freed up young boys to go into frontline fighting units. Besides, the girls were good. They tended to be slender, lighter, and easier to conceal as they prowled around mountains and the skeletons of bombed-out buildings, looking for positions from which to fire. They were conscientious, careful, and meticulous in ways in which boys of a similar age do not always excel.

I once interviewed a young woman who was a Serbian army sniper. She had blue eyes, and said she preferred to shoot first at people with brown eyes. While I have borrowed a few features of the sniper’s work from her, this is not her story. I have also given the names of a few old friends in Sarajevo to some characters in this story. I do this to honor those people who opened their lives to us. But this is a work of fiction, and they should not be confused with the characters who bear similar names.