dail get down!” Muhamed Zimic screams. “Get down!”

But it’s too late.

The six or seven of them riddle Adail’s chest with bullets – each one bursting through the flesh of his back, throwing meat and blood and finally Adail on the sun-scorched yellow mountain grass.

Enraged, Zimic clears the lip of the bunker wildly shooting his own gun.

He kills three of the approaching soldiers.

A fourth man – a man with burning blue-green eyes, dark furrowed brows, gritted teeth and an AK-47 – is still coming, still shooting rounds.

A bullet pierces Zimic’s thigh. He doesn’t feel the wound yet, but his knee buckles.

It’s the newest version of a recurring nightmare for 22-year-old Zimic, a Western sophomore, and it paid him another visit two months ago.

“I cried for at least an hour and a half because I couldn’t tell if it was real,” Zimic said. “It’s amazing how real it is, it’s like you are there. You can feel the ground, you can smell the powder, you can feel the gun shaking in your hands … I could feel the pain in my leg where I was shot, and I had to keep checking to see if anything was there.”

Zimic said in his dreams, his bullets often never reach their targets – they go toward the uniformed men shooting at him and his friends but slow down until eventually, they fall. Short.

And normally, he is the one killed in his dream – not Adail.

Normally, within seconds he is shot – landing on his back, his arms spread toward the tops of the white pines and a sliver of sky. And amid the continued spray of enemy fire he sees the mud-stained faces of his companions standing over him; he feels them grab his helmet and pull his face toward theirs to check if he’s alive; he hears their desperate conversation about whether they should bring his body back. He wants to reach up, grab their legs, tell them he is alive.

But he can do nothing.

“It’s just like somebody nailed my body to the floor,” he said. “They say ‘He’s dead, let’s go! Let’s go!’ And they go. And I’m there alone.”

* * *

Zimic’s nightmares should seem real – 13 years ago, he and thousands of other children in Bosnia were living a similar one.

Their unique stories are uniformly horrifying, each infused with the tragic details that define war, or in their case, ethnic cleansing.

They were witnesses, at 9 or 10 years old, to lifeless bodies piled in city centers or floating down river, executed neighbors lying in front yards, clockwork sirens announcing incoming bombs and mass starvation – all breeding mass graves forensics experts are still working to identify.

Those children are today young adults, and many are living in America after fleeing with their families shortly after the war that consumed their country in the 1990s subsided.

The city’s International Center and its willingness to assist refugees is the reason many of them opted for a new life in Bowling Green.

“We have a large Bosnian population in this town,” said Nancy Baird, history specialist at the Kentucky Museum. “The reason they’re here is because Bowling Green is one of only a handful of places that has an International Center which helps people who come here find homes and jobs and so on.”

The Bosnian population has not merely been increasing in the city; according to Sharon Hunter, database analyst for Western’s Institutional Research Department the number of Bosnian students at Western is increasing. Dramatically.

Based on student applications for admission, between 1999 and 2003, three Bosnians were enrolled at Western. This year, there are 21.

From a table in the lobby of Western’s Helm-Cravens Library, Zimic – dressed in jeans and a berry-colored polo with a dime-sized American flag embroidered on its chest – recalls the war that devoured his youth as if it happened yesterday.

As if it was still happening.

Serbian troops spilled onto the streets of Bosnia in 1991, initiating an event that would wash away the lives of an estimated 200,000 people – mostly Muslims – and wound about as many.

That year Zimic turned 10. He was 10 when he watched a man’s face stripped from its skeleton by one of the bombs that sometimes stormed down at a rate of 150 per half hour; 10 when he heard anguish, stripped of any filter, storm up from the depths of a freshly-widowed woman’s chest.

“It’s not how women usually cry,” he said of the sound. “It’s deep. It’s painful. From the bottom of your guts, that’s where it came from.”

Zimic’s mouth is a movie projector, throwing imagery against the psyche of its audience so tragically alluring it feels like art. Each scene, propelled by sound effects accurate enough to result in 3D effects, reveals the horror eyes like Zimic’s absorbed but cannot possibly reflect.

“It was four years of hell,” Zimic said. “Hard to forget.”

Too hard; he still has the nightmares to prove it.

* * *

Less than two miles away from where Zimic sits, just across the railroad tracks, several Bosnian establishments line a small stretch of Old Morgantown Road.

The European restaurant and food store You and Me is followed by the Europe Bakery, the Snip N’ Kurl beauty salon and finally, the Bowling Green Islamic Center, where the local Muslim community worships. A new mosque, scheduled for completion at the beginning of next year, is being built on Morgantown Road – prompted by the increase in Bosnians to the city.

Several other Bosnian enterprises have cropped up along Russellville Road offering Bosnian immigrants more of the comforts of home – at least, home before the war.

Inside the Mediterranean Food Store is a dine-in restaurant and bar, crowded shelves of food, soda and spices, and in a far corner addition, three short walls stuffed floor to ceiling with movies in Serbo-Croatian.

Senad Zlatovic, a Western junior triple majoring in political science, economics and German, walks up and scans the selection of films.

He is looking for a new title called “Remake,” a historic film about how World War II influenced the war in Bosnia, for his father but is told by a clerk the store has no new or recent releases. Still, the Mediterranean Food Store has the biggest selection of Serbo-Croatian movies in the city, and his father’s English is not good, so eventually he chooses two movies, another historic film and a comedy, to take back to him.

Zlatovic said his father and mother are homesick.

“Like most other Bosnians here, they work in factories,” he explained. “That’s a big reason they don’t like it here. It’s hard work, and there’s a big language barrier they have trouble understanding. Because there’s so many Bosnians here they’re not forced to use English much.”

But for kids, it’s different.

Few young Bosnians attend Mosque regularly here. Sulejman Hasanovic, a junior nursing major at Western’s South Campus, estimates “maybe 12″ come to the highlight prayer sessions on Fridays and even fewer show up during the rest of the week.

Zlatovic said the children have assimilated quickly – listening to American popular music and often speaking English, even with Bosnian friends.

* * *

On a cool November afternoon, on one end of his family’s brown leather couch, Zimic energetically narrates six of about 26 hours of video he shot when he spent a month revisiting Bosnia last summer. Despite the fact he’s seen the movies dozens of times before.

His mother and father, fresh from work at Emerson Electric in Russellville, occasionally point to a scene and speak in Bosnian to Zimic for him to translate.

His father, a thin, balding, fiercely friendly man with sad, sweet eyes and a thick moustache is gesturing to a half-eaten cement block building on the screen.

“He is saying that is an old school,” Zimic explains. “And he says that is where the teachers lived.”

But everything has changed.

In his movies, the rivers rush their banks like chilled liquid glass – no longer the assembly lines that lulled and cradled the casualties of war to a final place of rest.

The once-bloody fields of this country, slightly smaller than West Virginia, are sprinkled with dazzling wildflowers.

And the slender, sloping mountain passes that once engaged neighbors now lead to an intermittent handful of isolate, struggling houses. Most of those Zimic remembers as a child were burned or bombed, and there is no sign of them in the lush green foliage that overtook the land when the villagers that tended to it were driven out.

Part of his grandparents’ house – the house he grew up in – was still standing when Zimic returned last year to see and record what was left of what he remembered. Its crumbling rooms were covered in dirt and fallen plaster and trash left by the Serbs who had seized it. Outside, in a chunk of tall grass, are some pieces of broken color.

“That is where I used to keep my toys,” Zimic said. “You see? There are still some there.”

From across the room Zimic’s mother, a round-faced woman with short, dark curls, picks up a framed photo of her young family standing in front of the same brick structure on the screen, back when it was a home. She wipes from its face dust that isn’t there and half-smiles before placing it back on an end table.

For the rest of the evening, as her husband smokes a train of cigarettes and eyes the television intently, she busies herself in the kitchen and with carrying out serving after serving of hospitality.

There are rounds of coffee, a box of chocolate covered cherries, a bowl of square cookies. Then fried tilapia and fresh bread. Then peanut butter layer cake. Then fruit.

She seems less interested in watching what’s left. Again.

Zimic’s parents still have nightmares too; his father says their psychological scars help prevent them from speaking English well. He is apologetic for not being able to communicate with locals after five years.

* * *

On a mild Saturday night in November, little English is spoken in one of the city’s biggest Bosnian clubs.

From the car-flooded parking lot outside the Palm, loopy, jovial melodies mounted on driving beats reach well beyond the building’s perimeter. Inside, there are flashing lights, rows of tables leading to a bar and pool table and the band of up-and-coming Bosnian singer Suzana Delic.

A few hundred Bosnians – mostly teens and 20-somethings – have come to see Delic, an attractive bronzed woman with a low, rich voice. Many of them dance to the traditional music with small groups of friends.

A sweaty and blissfully-inebriated Zimic is somewhere in the middle dancing with no one in particular.

To onlookers it would seem the days his body moved in necessity rather than expression are farther away.

But soon enough Zimic will remember those days, the days when grenades rained for hours on end. Their memory does not whisper, it shouts.

“The pressure hits you so hard it feels like someone picks you up and just throws you. You’re disoriented – you don’t know where the grenade hit and where it is safe to run,” Zimic recalls. “It’s like you’re in the center and the world is circling around you and there is no sound, no sound whatsoever, for three or four seconds.”

Once he was sitting on a front porch when one of the missiles hit. It chucked shrapnel against his chest at such a force, Zimic is convinced it fractured his sternum.

He never went to see a doctor.

The slight bulge just left of his ribs still occasionally hurts.

* * *

When the war began, Bijeljina – the city 22 year-old Western junior Nihada Zulcic called home – was one of the first to be attacked. She credits a bus ride to the country with saving her life.

“At that time I was 9 or 10 years old, and I was in a mosque because it was Ramadan,” she explained. “Everything was finished, and people were coming out into the streets and you could see soldiers and tanks everywhere. Nobody knew what was going on, but eventually we heard that Serbs were killing Muslims downtown.”

Zulcic and hundreds of other Muslims fled the city on busses that drove them to a field in the country. They stayed there for two days and two nights before the men and women among them were separated – the men sent to the military, the women sent home with the children.

“When we got back it was just horrible,” Zulcic said. “It was just empty. Nobody was out in the street, just some people out in front of their houses dead. The women were crying and screaming. Some of them were fainting.”

The following years brought with them more devastation. Serbian occupants flushed the Muslim population out of Bijeljina – sometimes by cutting the throats of Muslim homeowners hiding from guards in their basements, sometimes by forcing them to other towns via landmine-riddled roads – before taking their houses for themselves.

Zulcic, her younger brother and her mother spent the last months of the war in Tuzla.

“In 1993 it was really hard because people were starving to death,” she said. “They closed the (relief center) so no one could get food or nothing. We didn’t have any milk so we had to feed the babies creamer mixed with water. Some people had stores, but everything was so expensive the people who had houses in Tuzla would sell everything they had for just bread.”

As she says this, Zulcic pushes a wisp of hair behind her ear and props her arms on a collection of texts and notebooks stacked on a table outside Western’s Fine Arts Center – she is studying to become a social worker.

“I think you have to go through some stuff to understand people,” she said.

* * *

Zimic remembers 1993; he remembers the wooden box full of jewelry his mother used to buy food during the war.

“She had one ring, a 24-carat gold ring from Turkey that would be worth $3,000 or $4,000 today,” Zimic said. “And we got something like two kilograms – about four pounds – of wheat for it.”

So as to not be seen by Serbs scoping out the valleys, Zimic and the other villagers limited their activities to night; it was only then the wounded were carried to hospitals, and trips could be made to nearby villages when food was too scarce.

“My father went at least seven times in the winter of 1993, carrying up to 200 pounds on his back,” Zimic said. “Starvation makes you do impossible things.”

* * *

Jasna Kusturica’s mother still cries when she has to throw out uneaten food.

Kusturica, 22, and her brother moved with their Muslim father and Serbian mother to Bowling Green in November of 1999.

According to the 2000 Census, of the roughly 3,000 European-born Bowling Green residents, nearly 93 percent came to the city in the 1990s – compared to fewer than 1 percent who immigrated here in the 1980s and the 7 percent who arrived before 1980.

“My mom asked for a small peaceful town, and they sent us here,” Kusturica said smiling.

But the transition to life in Bowling Green has not been without incident; both Kusturica and Zimic say they’ve dealt with discrimination, mostly at work.

Kusturica said she’s been harassed by American customers who say she stole “their” jobs. She said some of them have told her to go back where she came from.

A few years ago Zimic worked as a server at a local dine-in restaurant where he said several of the customers would make rude or hateful comments about him being Muslim.

“It doesn’t make me mad when people say that,” he said. “Because when people don’t know what they’re saying they’re not worth it.”

Though it doesn’t happen “very much,” Zimic said there are some extreme cases that stand out.

Once, a woman he was serving asked Zimic where he was from and what he was studying at Western. When Zimic told her he was pre-med, he said the woman accused him of choosing that major so he could learn how to make a bomb that would kill Americans.

When he was in high school, Zimic was accused by neighbors of keying vehicles – including two belonging to his parents – parked around the complex where he and his family lived.

He’s been cornered and accosted by a local police officer over a missing mountain bike.

Why? With a wide-eyed shrug and matter-of-fact smile, Zimic – now a mechanical engineering major – said it’s because he’s foreign.

On a table just inside the International Center’s front door is a spread of information aimed at new immigrants. Among the English class schedules, lavendar-colored “Violence Domestica – No Hay Excusa” buttons and business cards for some area specialty food stores, is a stack of wallet-sized guides on how to appropriately handle being stopped by police. The guides list 15 rules including, “don’t resist even if you believe you are innocent; don’t complain on the scene or tell the police they’re wrong or that you’re going to file a complaint; and if you are injured, take photographs of the injuries as soon as possible, but make sure you seek medical attention first.”

Zimic filed a claim against the officer he says badgered him; he has never heard the outcome.

* * *

Even the Serbians, in the end, began speaking out against continuation of the war, according to Zulcic.

“The Serbs could see what was happening – before, they were blind,” she said. “They started saying they didn’t want their children sent off to die in the war for Milosovich’s dream.”

In 1995, a year after NATO launched its first air strike against the Serbians, then-U.S. President Bill Clinton announced the launch of peace talks between Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia. An accord was signed a month later, which issued 60,000 NATO troops to the country to ensure peace.

Milosovic remained in control of Bosnia until 2000, when he was driven out of office and replaced with lawyer Vojislav Kostunica.

Many of the younger generation Muslims, at least those who are now in America, hold no grudges, though resentment between ethnicities in Bosnia still exists.

“If you go over there now… whew,” Zimic said shaking his head. “Everybody hates each other. The minute the international troops move out of Bosnia, the war would start again.”

* * *

The beginning of the war is one of Zimic’s most memorable years.

Zimic said one day the children in his village stopped going to school, though none of them understood why. Then helicopters started surveying for boundaries of the land they intended to occupy, and within weeks Serbian troops began forcing their way into the city.

“I woke up one morning and ran outside and a man was there with an automatic rifle – an AK-47,” Zimic said. “All I remember was the gun, you know? It was my first time to see it. He told us to stay there – not move away from the house until he told us it was safe.”

Zimic said he ran to the edge of the woods behind his house that day to view a military convoy snaking its way toward the city. In anticipation of an invasion, locals had destroyed the bridge at the entrance to Zepa and put up the best defense they could – using primarily fire and trees to block narrow mountain passes.

“We didn’t have an organized defense,” he said. “Just people.”

The city was rendered literally powerless – its residents receiving heat and light by burning cooking oil in tiny Turkish coffee cups or igniting community bonfires in the nearby woods to which villagers fled.

Except in winter months, those woods were a permanent refuge for Zimic and his family.

“The snow would sometimes fall up to 7 feet so the tanks couldn’t move in winter,” he said. “That was the time when things were peaceful and we could stay in our homes. We couldn’t wait for winters.”

But the icy liberation only fell a few months each year, and when the flakes were exchanged for fire, villagers had only the milk and sour cream their cows could provide to keep them alive in the woods.

Zimic is allergic to milk. Consequently, he once had to survive for three days without anything to eat. He said he was too weak to walk that third day, so he curled up against a mossy stone and waited to die.

“But they wouldn’t let me die, they risked it and went to a house and brought me some bread,” he said of his family. “I remember I couldn’t swallow it at first. I had to drink water and force it down my throat, but I ate this big piece of bread by myself – it was like eating chocolate.”

In the winter of 1993, a day after the last of the group’s bread supply had been eaten, American military planes began dropping parachuted packages containing things like medication, bandages, soap and sugar, on the mountaintops in the village.

“I tasted sugar for the first time in two years,” he said. “We had been eating bread with no salt or sugar in it, just flour and water. Some people started losing their teeth because of it.”

Zimic said he would often accompany the older members of his group to the peaks to wait for nourishment to fall from the sky.

“We would sit in a circle around the oldest man and the fire and tell stories,” he said. “Stories about our life.”

* * *

As she tells her story, the story of a childhood snared in the sights of an ethnic cleansing, the caramel-colored flecks framing Enisa Bosnjakovic’s hazel eyes never waver.

They, like her, speak candidly about the war that sent a bullet through her father’s chest, taking with it two ribs and part of a lung; the war that sent military trucks to her village, taking with them the lives of 750 men, including her two uncles and two grandpas; the war that sent her in 1993 to an overcrowded school house to live for six months and in 1994 to a hospital for 14 days when the lack of clean water and proper nutrition took with it her natural resistance to viruses such as Hepatitis A.

“I’m just happy I’m alive because I never wanted to run and hide,” Bosnjakovic said. “I didn’t understand what was going on – when we heard the sirens my grandmother would have to drag me to the basement or one of the safe areas.”

Bosnjakovic was not alone.

“I was 10 years old,” Zimic said. “I had never seen a gun before. I had never seen a bomb before. I had never seen a real soldier before. Everything looked surreal to me. I didn’t understand.”

Children or not, their confusion makes sense.

Was it war that choked the Drina river with those bloated, mutilated bodies Zimic’s uncle helped pull ashore and bury?

The woman who came nailed to a large door, her breasts cut out, her arms pulled through their cavities; the young woman floating with a rotisserie shoved inside her vagina; the limbless, lifeless children – is war to be blamed for their deaths? Or are people?

Most blame former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and his desire to activate a “Great Serbian” plan of a purely-Serbian nation for the deaths of an estimated 200,000 people.

After leading Serbia for 13 years, Milosevic, 63, is currently on trial in the Netherlands facing life in prison if convicted of any one of the 66 counts of war crimes – including genocide – he allegedly committed during the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 90s.

Milosevic has pleaded innocent.

Reach Natasha Allen at features@wkuherald.com.