Shooting War : Combat: A Westside photographer traveled to Bosnia-Herzegovina to capture the fighting. What he saw was genocide.

He’d always been a fan of war photography, always wondered, deep down, if his artistic eye would perform under the duress of combat.

So, at age 45, Marty Sugarman--painter, surfer, fine arts photographer, sociologist, Ernest Hemingway buff and magazine publisher--went off this summer in search of a war to shoot.

He flew to Italy and rented a Fiat from Hertz in Milan, neglecting to tell the rental agent that his travel plans included an extended excursion into Bosnia-Herzegovina. Then he drove into the heart of Europe’s bloodiest conflict since World War II.

“Every great photographer, in his life or her life, has been in a war situation,” the Pacific Palisades native said.

Ansel Adams or Annie Leibovitz might disagree, but there’s no disputing the power of the black-and-white images Sugarman brought back.

Soldiers trudging off to battle. A shod foot protruding from a mass grave. Bullet-riddled bridges. Refugees. Emaciated POWs. The dying. The dead.

“I don’t think the American public has a full understanding of the conflict,” Sugarman, now living in Santa Monica, said. “This is genocide.”

Sugarman’s trip to the dark side of humanity actually began earlier this year in Cuba, where, he says, he was arrested as a suspected spy for taking unauthorized pictures of oil tankers. His arrest and subsequent interrogation by Cuban officials introduced him firsthand to the danger--and excitement--of shooting photos in a heavily militarized environment.

When he returned home, he applied to the Yugoslav embassy for a visa and got it--a rather moot accomplishment in light of the country’s disintegration.

He arrived in Milan, drove his rented car to the Italian town of Trieste on the Slovenian border, obtained a visa for that independent country, then continued on into Croatia, where he hooked up with a United Nations convoy headed for Sarajevo, largest city in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

He rode with a Red Cross truck driver from Austria. En route, a sniper’s bullet smashed the truck’s windshield.

One of the six republics that once made up the Yugoslav federation, Bosnia-Herzegovina is now a battleground for Serbs, Croats and Muslims, its largest ethnic groups. About two-thirds of the territory has been occupied or captured by Serbs, and about 1.3 million people, most of them Muslims, have fled their homes because of Serbian “ethnic cleansing” operations.

In Sarajevo, Sugarman found himself holed up in a Holiday Inn with foreign journalists as Serbian shells exploded in the nearby Muslim section. He soon grew itchy and got a ride back to the Croatian city of Split, where he picked up his rental car and made a five-hour drive to Mostar, a bombed-out Bosnian city about the size of Santa Monica.

En route, he spent more than an hour haggling with a Croatian border guard, who did not want to let him pass into the war zone.

“The last words he spoke to me as I was crossing the border was, ‘God be with you,’ ” Sugarman said.

Understandably, the Muslim and Croat soldiers he encountered were incredulous that a photographer from California had come calling, in a rental car no less.

“I was the first American they’d set eyes on since the beginning of the war,” Sugarman said. “Immediately I became their best friend.”

He spent four days living on the front lines with the soldiers, sleeping in his car.

His most vivid memories include a rocket attack that prompted a soldier to throw the stocky Sugarman into a foxhole, where the two spent the next four hours “passing a bottle of Yugoslavian brandy, smoking cigarettes and stuttering in French.”

At another point, a friendly commander escorted him up a switchback road high above Sarajevo to the Olympic Village built for the 1984 winter games, now serving as a Bosnian military headquarters.

“The ski jump, everything was there,” Sugarman said. “The Serbians had bombed the soccer fields and the basketball court. They were totally pockmarked with shells, but it was like being in an alpine village. It was beautiful.”

After a few days days, he moved on to the town of Travnik, where he met a young medical student who served as his interpreter. With her as his guide, he toured a refugee camp and heard grisly accounts of mass murders, including stories of elderly women forced to bury their husbands after seeing them decapitated.

While in Travnik, he watched as three MiGs from the Serb-controlled Yugoslav federal army attacked a munitions plant, killing 100 and injuring 200. As Sugarman captured the chaos on film, a fleeing woman tried to grab Sugarman’s camera, admonishing him, “How dare you take pictures of dying people.”

Once again, Sugarman was back in his Fiat--this time using it as an ambulance.

The war followed him as he made his way back toward the relative safety of Croatia. A guard at a checkpoint near Mostar recognized him and asked if he wanted to see a mass grave. He and his camera wound up documenting Serb POWs exhuming dozens of corpses. The Muslim captors said they were civilian victims of a massacre by the Serbs that claimed 92 lives. An Italian film crew and a British journalist showed up days later and also documented the site.

Finally, nearly desperate for a shower and a decent meal, Sugarman made a run for Metkovic, back in Croatia.

But his adventure wasn’t over yet. He was driving along at night when he got a flat tire. It was too dark to change it--and shells were falling again--so he kept going, causing the tire to wrap around the axle. When he finally reached a checkpoint, a stunned guard exclaimed “Americano!” and changed the tire for him.

Three days later, he was in Venice, drinking martinis at Hemingway’s legendary hangout, Harry’s Bar.

Now, Sugarman, publisher of H2O an eclectic quarterly magazine on waterfront culture, is planning to returning to Bosnia in the next few weeks, before winter hits.

He said he finds life back on the Westside a little incongruous after his foray to the front. Shortly after his return, he recalled, he witnessed a heated argument at a local Italian restaurant between a maitre d’ and a customer who felt his pasta had been overcooked.

“For him, this was life and death in Santa Monica--a soggy pasta noodle,” Sugarman said.