In war, a flower found

"He held a gun to my head and threatened to rape me," Luljeta said, her lips quivering in the fading light.

I was listening, taking notes. But I was lost like the broken luggage and strewn clothing in the refugee camp I'd just stomped through. What was this 19-year-old, dark-eyed beauty trying to tell me? I read naked fear on her face, and I felt as scared and alone as she did.

"They demanded money. They said they would kill my father," she told me.

In the midst of war, our first war, Luljeta and I found one another. It was June 1999, just over the border of Macedonia in the Serbian province of Kosovo, part of a fractured Yugoslavia. The fighting started with a ruthless and systematic approach to beating down a pesky, sometimes violent, Albanian insistence on independence. Yugoslavia's Serbian minority met the resistance with greater violence.

Soon, tanks ran through mountain villages, trampling straw-roofed homes. Secret police struck under midnight cover, stealing away young men who were not seen again. Soldiers stuffed churches with women and children, then locked the doors and set the buildings ablaze.

Terror had a new name - Slobodan Milosevic.

Words like "genocide" and "ethnic cleansing" started popping up in newspaper stories. After what happened in the jungles of Rwanda, the United States couldn't stand idly by. So President Bill Clinton ordered waves of bat-like B-2 stealth bombers and tank-killing A-10 Warthogs to bombard Yugoslavia. He was determined to save the Luljetas of this war.

After years of the United States at peace, war had a new look. This time fought exclusively from the air, precision (and not so precision) American-made bombs blanketed Yugoslavia. Cluster bombs. Laser-guided bombs. Computer-driven bombs. Evil devices euphemistically nicknamed "daisy cutters," or called by bland acronyms.

They screamed into their targets, shouting down a dictator's nation.

I charted my course for war by traveling from my home in the Eiffel region of western Germany. Based in the small town of Spangdahlem, I wrote about the men and women of the U.S. Air Force based there amid rolling hills and farmland. I traveled Europe, writing for The Stars & Stripes military newspaper. And when they went to war, I followed.

Luljeta pegged me as a reporter as soon as I stumbled onto her campsite. Mud covered my Vasque boots. Rain flecked my forest green North Face jacket. My digital camera dangled from my shoulder. Luljeta and the 5,000 other Albanian refugees surrounding her in the squalid riverside camp knew an American when they saw one.

"Do you speak English?" I asked Luljeta, whose pale face came into focus through the smoke of burning trash.

"Yes," she said, eager for the connection. I explained who I was, who I worked for, trying to maintain a professional veneer. But I needed a connection, too. My gift was my ability to listen, to empathize. Luljeta needed to tell a story. I needed to listen.

Four days earlier, the men in black masks barged into Luljeta's village. The fighting was all but over. Still, the U.S. bombing continued. And despite the U.S. hand-wringing over sending in ground troops, it was clear that U.S. Army soldiers would soon be pushing into the country. But the Serbs weren't finished.

In Luljeta's village, the men brandished automatic weapons and ordered everyone into the street. Working down the lines of scared Albanians, the gangs extorted money and injected fear. Luljeta's hands fluttered nervously as she explained the humiliation to her family, her mother the teacher and her father the engineer and her brother the student. She knew others had been shot for a wrong word, raped for a stolen glance.

The shock of living a comfortable life one moment and having that stripped away the next seemed too much for Luljeta to comprehend. She never told me she was scared. She didn't have to. I could see the terror in her eyes, hear it in her strained tones.

She talked of guns. Threats. Luljeta's family emptied their pockets to the paramilitary thugs and crowded onto a train bound for the Macedonian border.

They didn't get far. The train stopped 10 miles from the border. So the refugees walked, following a desolate, two-lane road to Macedonia. The country, and it's clean capital of Skopje, spelled safe haven. After what Luljeta and her family had just been through, 10 miles was nothing.

On the trek, fear gave way to the survival instinct. People shed everything but what was absolutely necessary. Shoes, extra clothes and empty water bottles trailed behind them.

The Macedonians balked at the tide of refugees headed their way and ordered the border shut. So Luljeta and thousands of others camped alongside the road they'd followed. The length of about two football fields separated the road from a small river that ran parallel. So the war's lost settled there.

The refugees stripped the trees of branches for campfires and lean-tos. Their wanderings churned the field grass into ankle-deep mud. They bathed in the river, drank from it, used it as a toilet and let go of their still-born babies there.

Luljeta, humiliated, showed me home now. A sad-looking sheet of blue plastic provided by the International Red Cross hung over broken branches. A few pieces of stale bread. Some pots and pans. A tattered book. Sharp smoke from smoldering garbage blew between us.

It was getting dark, and I ended the interview. Luljeta couldn't leave, but I knew I had to get out of the camp, return to my hotel, file my story. I checked a few facts one more time - name, age, home village.

Luljeta seemed calmer now. Her hands rested at her side. Somehow, the telling had brought her back. Her eyes weren't so vacant. They began to fill with tears. This time, I read hope in that face.

"Luljeta," she said, spelling her name. "It means 'flower' in my language."

I felt empty, but knew there wasn't anything else I could do. Nothing but tell one young woman's story.