32. WHO WILL HELP YOU?

THE FOLLOWING afternoon, the sky outside the Omeragics’ living room window was slate gray. Hajrudin picked up his story: He was 25—and had been fighting in central Bosnia for three years—when he accidentally stumbled into hell.

“I was still in survival mode,” Hajrudin said, sitting across from Mersiha, who had been up all night baking. “Some of my friends had been killed or captured. You feel it’s just a question of time before you’re killed.”

On August 30, 1995, there was a stunning turnaround: After years of sitting on the sidelines, the United States and its allies were finally galvanized by the massacre of over 8,000 mainly Muslim men and boys in the small town of Srebrenica, near the eastern border with Serbia. It was the worst mass killing in Europe since the end of World War II.

NATO launched Operation Deliberate Force, bombing hundreds of Serbian targets.

“I was told about Clinton,” Hajrudin said, referring to the allied forces’ intervention. But he had little information about what was going on.

He was sent back to free his hometown; he was now part of the military police, authorized to protect all residents and town property. It impressed him that his commander had given orders to protect the Serbian Orthodox church.

Walking around Donji Vakuf, he was heartbroken. All the stores and restaurants had changed their signs from the Latin alphabet, primarily used by Bosnians, to the Cyrillic, primarily used by Serbs.

Three Bosnian mosques had been leveled to the ground. He was told the Muslim cemetery had been destroyed.

By the time he got to his own house, it was dark. The grass had not been cut in years. “The place was a jungle,” he said. His mother had never come back; she had stayed at his aunt’s house in Croatia.

He saw his brother—who served in another unit—sitting on the ground, smoking.

“Look at it,” his brother said, indicating the house. They had not seen each other in three years.

“I can’t see it in the dark. Let’s come back in the day,” Hajrudin said. Their father had built that house; it meant everything.

“Look at it!” His brother started crying. Sitting down, Hajrudin cried, too.

Together, they went over to the Muslim cemetery.

Most of the headstones were toppled, broken, or defaced. But they walked to the far end, searching in a corner.

“Thank God, my father’s stone was still there,” Hajrudin said. It had his father’s name on it: Mustafa Omeragic.

What happened next still haunts Hajrudin.

His brother returned to his military unit, and Hajrudin was sent to help take back Ključ, a small town still held by Serbs. He and five others—all Croats—were told to wait for a brigade; they were replacing soldiers who had gotten drunk. “You could hear shelling far away,” he said.

Suddenly, soldiers appeared. “I saw the Bosnian flag,” Hajrudin said, and his commander moved toward it. “I followed.”

They were immediately surrounded by Serbian soldiers. “Throw me your guns!” somebody said. Then somebody hit Hajrudin on the head, and his gun flew out of his hand.

“Who’s the commander?” they asked. “Not me,” said all the men except the commander, who was standing next to Hajrudin. A soldier shot him point-blank. Another soldier, loading his gun, pointed it at Hajrudin.

“I started saying my prayers,” Hajrudin recalled.

But then somebody said to the soldier, “What are you doing? Do you know how many people from our unit they’ve caught? We need to keep him alive.”

This terrified Hajrudin. He had heard what the Serbs did to prisoners: “They’re asking you questions as a tank is going back and forth over you.” He had seen soldiers who had escaped; some died afterward from internal injuries.

They asked where his unit was. “I lied to them,” Hajrudin said. But he quickly realized they already knew. “They always had better intelligence than us.”

They bound the captives’ hands and forced them to march toward Mrkonjic Grad, an interrogation center, about 20 miles away. On the way they passed through a Serbian village. “Old guys, 90 years old, they’re taking sticks and hitting us,” Hajrudin said. They screamed, “Turks!”

The Serbian soldiers just stood by and watched. “I remembered when we captured their people,” Hajrudin said, slowly. “We didn’t allow anyone to touch those guys.”

For three days, he was interrogated in a basement covered with water. There were wooden pallets on the floor, where he could sometimes lie down.

Beatings were constant; they especially targeted his knees. As they kicked, they asked, “What is your mission?”

“I don’t know,” he kept saying. “I’ve just been sent here.”

Now sitting on his couch, Hajrudin gingerly touched his right knee. “It still hurts him,” Mersiha said.

But the actual pain was not as bad as his fear: What would happen next? Would they cut off parts of his body?

He knew two of his interrogators. One was a Serb from his hometown. They had gone to the same university and played basketball together. “He was an architectural technologist. I was an engineering technologist,” Hajrudin said. He recognized another by his mustache—they used to hang out at the same bar in Travnik. He had worked for the Yugoslav People’s Army in intelligence.

The third night of his captivity, this man said, “Listen, this is what I can do for you because I know you and your family. We’re going to cover you with a blanket and get you out.” He told him not to ask where he was going. “I wish you the best.”

When Hajrudin pulled off the blanket, he was given a pair of old shoes and a jacket. It was October, extremely cold. Along with other prisoners, he began a brutal 60-mile march to the concentration camp known as Kotorsko.

“They are waiting for you,” he said about the camp’s commanders. “They know you are coming.” He and other new arrivals were lined up: Some were shot. Some were simply beaten.

They put them to work, forcing him and other Muslim prisoners to demolish a mosque in a nearby town, and to cut down trees and plant potatoes and corn.

The International Committee of the Red Cross sent food, toiletries, and cigarettes. “But since we hadn’t been registered, we got nothing,” Hajrudin said. When delegations from the Red Cross came to check on the camp’s conditions, the guards hid him and other prisoners in the woods.

One thing is seared in his memory: a game the guards played with a prisoner nicknamed Beret.

They thought it was funny to name the tall, half-starved, fragile-minded prisoner after the elite US Army special operations force.

Hajrudin knew this man—also a Muslim—from his town. “He had mental issues before the war,” he said. “But he didn’t do anybody any harm.” He had been a strapping 200-pound bartender at a local restaurant.

The Serbs would throw an imaginary soccer ball at Beret. He had to catch it—guessing where it would go, jumping from side to side, like a goalie. On his right were sharp-edged rocks; grass was on his left. “Usually he jumped to the left,” Hajrudin said. “Then they’d say, ‘No, we did it toward the stones!’ ”

For each “mistake,” they punched, kicked, and hit him with their guns.

Hajrudin was watching this out of the corner of his eye. Just yards away, he and other prisoners were being forced to cut down brush, then burn it. “Guards were waiting by the fire,” he said. “They’d beat you with sticks as you got close.”

Beret kept jumping onto the grass, his hands reaching for an imaginary ball.

After five beatings, the guards said, “You did it wrong!” and smashed him a couple of times. He stumbled, trying not to fall. He knew if he did, they would only kick him again.

Then the guards turned away. “What—you watching?” they called out to the prisoners cutting brush. “Go work—go work!”

Beret kept standing there.

“He didn’t know where to go,” Hajrudin said. “He didn’t know where to go.”

Some prisoners by the fire signaled him to join them.

“I’ll be right back,” Mersiha told her husband and me.

She returned with a video clip a Bosnian friend had sent. “She told me she saw Hajrudin on YouTube.” The couple had already viewed it.

Hajrudin was calm as the grainy black-and-white footage started playing. “This was taken November 7, 1995, when they liberated the camps,” Mersiha said.

A line of men were shuffling forward. Pale, gaunt, their dark eyes large, they looked barely alive. “That’s me,” Hajrudin said, pointing to a small man toward the back, with his sharp, even features and high cheekbones. “I was 108 pounds. My head was bigger than my body.”

The day he was released, Hajrudin had been waiting to eat lunch. “I didn’t know about the peace agreement,” he said, referring to the Dayton Accords negotiated on the outskirts of Dayton, Ohio, by President Bill Clinton; the Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian presidents; as well as representatives from Europe and Russia.

The agreement was signed on November 21, 1995, with all parties agreeing that Bosnia would be preserved as a state, made up of two parts: the Bosniak-Croat Federation and the Bosnian Serb Republic.

The guards pointed to different prisoners about to be exchanged for Serbian prisoners of war: “You, you, you—take your stuff. You have to leave!”

“You don’t know what’s going on,” Hajrudin recalled. “Will you be exchanged? Or killed?”

“Even when they read our names”—about a dozen soldiers were released—“you’re thinking something can go wrong.”

During the actual prisoner exchange, one Bosnian prisoner was beaten so badly, he was carried out in a blanket to a Red Cross van, Hajrudin said. “After three days, he died.”

Hajrudin was matter-of-fact about his own health when he got home. “I was so dehydrated two men had to carry me off the bus.”

Much later he realized that in the tumult of war, he had lost his mother’s cupboard key.

For months after he got home, his mother baked an extra loaf of bread and put it on his nightstand as he slept.

“Sometimes, I’d wake up and eat a little bit,” Hajrudin said. “Just one piece of bread—and you have peace of mind.”

Other nights, he would lie there holding the loaf against his chest.

“Like this,” he said, crossing his strong baker’s arms on his chest, and closing his eyes.

He had bad dreams—guards hitting him but he could not feel any pain.

His aunt, a doctor, quickly recognized he needed to be treated for trauma, and had him admitted to a hospital. There, he was seen by a psychologist, a friend of hers. “He said the best treatment was to talk,” Hajrudin said. “That when anyone asks you about the war—talk, talk, talk!”

“Another prisoner released with me didn’t talk,” he added. “He drank a lot, got into fights, and ended up in jail.”

During his hospital stay, he questioned himself: Was he mentally ill? He hoped that his ability to ask the question meant he was not.

And he tested himself: What did he believe in? It comforted him that he had said the Shahadah prayer as the Serbian soldier was about to kill him. He realized that throughout the war, he had not lost his faith. “Believers have a better chance,” he said.

His love for his mother helped him get through: “In the concentration camp, I would say to God, ‘Let me live, so I can have coffee with my mom one more time.’ ”

His healing accelerated when he met Mersiha in July 1996 in Utica, through a first cousin. They immediately became close. “We helped each other,” she said. “We talked—always for hours. That’s when I heard these stories.”

“But he was still not good,” she said about Hajrudin’s state of mind. “He could explode quickly,” especially if other Bosnians in Utica—who had not fought—gave their opinions about the war.

But after they got married in 1998, “all that went,” Hajrudin said, referring to his trauma. His recurring dream of being beaten stopped.

He rediscovered the sense of balance he had before the war. “My grandfather always told me, ‘Balance is everything.’ ”

“He’s a puppy,” Mersiha put in about Hajrudin, laughing. “Since we got married, he hasn’t raised his voice.”

When Hajrudin, on a family vacation, drives through western Bosnia—where he was captured—he is tense. There is no stopping for gas or snacks. No bathroom stops. He wants to avoid being pulled over by the police.

And crossing the border into Croatia, he worries about being detained. When he was in the military police, he had captured and guarded Croats. He is afraid he will run into one of his former prisoners.

“The border makes him numb,” Mersiha said, drawing her chair closer.

“Not numb, but uncomfortable,” he said.

It has already happened: In 2006, he was walking along a beach in Baska Voda—a beautiful seaside town—with his two older boys, when he saw a powerfully built Croat in a T-shirt and shorts coming toward him.

Growing up, they had been neighbors: The Croat was one of three brothers, all athletes. “They were huge, built up, handsome,” Hajrudin said. When the war started, they had joined the Croatian Army.

Seeing him, Hajrudin’s mind raced: He had guarded the Croat in a prisoner-of-war camp—and years later had overseen his release during a prisoner exchange.

“I thought, ‘If he attacks me, I have to defend myself.’ ” He worried about his boys—that they could get hurt.

But the Croat came up and gave him an enormous hug. “How are you?” he asked. He had heard bits and pieces about him; news about those in the diaspora travels fast. “How is life in America? These are your kids!”

“Look—my house!” the Croat said, pointing to a beautiful villa on a cliff. It had a large banner flying outside: We are all NORAC.

Hajrudin knew what that meant: support for Mirko Norac, a former general in the Croatian Army, who had overseen the murders of scores of Serbian civilians in what was called the Gospić Massacre. He was serving a 12-year sentence. Looking at the villa, Hajrudin remembered the Croat had been in a special unit. The rumor was they had taken loot during the war.

“Would you come in for a beer?” the Croat asked.

Hajrudin’s face burned. His words tumbled out—he had to get back to Mersiha, who was waiting at the hotel. In his mind, he replayed every contact he had had with the Croat in the camp.

He was trying to remember if he had ever mistreated him.

I know . . . I know I never touched him, he said to himself.

When they said goodbye, the Croat said, “Remember, if there’s anything you need—money, food—let me know.”

When Hajrudin got back to Mersiha, he could not speak. He quickly downed four beers.

When he finally caught his breath, he told her the story. Mersiha said, “Why didn’t you go for a beer with him?”

“I saw the general. No thank you.”

“You’re an American citizen. You don’t have to be afraid of anyone!”

“I don’t want to gamble,” he said, reminding her of veterans suffering from PTSD who have committed acts of violence. “It could happen—you never know.”

Mersiha nodded, recalling that conversation. It was getting late; she could hear her two older boys in the kitchen.

“They tolerate the peace,” she said about the Bosnians, Croats, and Serbs. “But it’s the Balkans. Throw a match—it could blow up.”

Hajrudin shook his head. Despite everything he has been through, he cannot accept that.

He leaned forward, close to Mersiha and me.

“My grandmother said, ‘Your neighbors are more important than your brother and sister. If you need help, who will help you? Your neighbor.’ ”