Braving War’s Flames to Nurse the Injured : Aid: An O.C. woman pushes past obstacles to bring surgeons and medicine to victims of Balkan violence.

Sonja Hagel hadn’t flown, driven by car and been shuttled by ambulance all the way from Orange County to this war-torn Bosnian town just to play delivery person.

After all, she was the one who organized this expedition to bring medical supplies to a hospital so devastated by the war between Croats and Muslims that operations are sometimes conducted without anesthesia and patients are kept in the hallways to protect them from shelling.

The doctors in Mostar wanted to thank her and have her be on her way.

But a war was going on, and Hagel was not going back to her Huntington Harbour condo in California without seeing it for herself.

“It’s my belief . . . that when you really experience what is going on here, when you have your pulse on this, you can’t but help come up with a different feeling than if you watched two minutes on CNN or read a page in the Los Angeles Times,” she said. “You can’t help but be touched by this.”

Dr. Tugomir Gveric, the surgeon in charge of her visit to the war hospital in Mostar, balked at the idea of letting anyone get closer to the battle zone. No reporters had been permitted on the front lines for months--in part because the Bosnian Croats felt they were unfairly portrayed in Western reports that described the roundup of Muslim civilians after fighting broke out between the two former allies.

And letting in Hagel--whose work with her organization, Operation Second Chance, had given her near-celebrity status in Croatia--seemed equally out of the question. Going to the front lines would be dangerous, not to mention the internal political fallout Gveric would face if a visitor was killed under his watch.

But Hagel was undeterred. She was the one, after all, who had arranged the trip to the Balkans in which she and a dozen doctors brought 60 boxes of equipment and supplies worth $300,000.

She was the one who organized the medical team that came to operate on the war wounded. She was the one who had 19 people recently airlifted from Sarajevo.

She wheedled. She cajoled. She insisted.

“There is no safe way,” she said, dismissing criticisms that she takes unnecessary risks, that she grabs the spotlight, that she manipulates. “There’s a psychology of war where people are not thinking clearly. So sometimes you have to be assertive. The end result is the patient gets the best care.”

Finally, Gveric relented.

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Hagel has been consumed by the breakup of the Yugoslav federation.

Her mother was from Slovenia, the first of the republics to declare independence from the federation forged by Josip Broz Tito after World War II. During her visit last month, Hagel made a special trip to that nation’s capital, Ljubljana, to see an ill relative.

But it was poverty in England, where she grew up, that made a lasting impression, that drove her to make something of herself and see the world beyond her childhood home.

In England, she studied nursing and used it as her passport abroad. She came to the United States where she worked as a critical care nurse in California.

“The doors would fly open and they would be laid out,” she said of shooting victims brought into emergency rooms. “It was just the joy of saving a life--and the adventure. Sometimes, there was just a thread between life and death. This sort of awakens that inside me.”

She studied at Chapman University in Orange and later earned an MBA at Pepperdine University by going to school at night. She then parlayed her medical background and business education into a post at Century City Hospital, where she handles negotiations and manages a budget.

Those skills can be particularly useful in Croatia, where the bureaucracy creates paperwork nightmares that complicate even the simplest transactions, to say nothing of the idea of airlifting a child to the United States.

During her recent visits to Croatia, Hagel has been able to rack up political capital in a nation where connections are power. That influence helps her to cut through the bureaucracy, and each visit has added to the list of lives saved.

Even the months between visits bring no peace. The airlift of 19 war casualties to hospitals in Los Angeles and Orange counties and elsewhere in the United States, for example, took time. She spent months drumming up support from doctors and hospitals willing to volunteer.

Hagel’s involvement in Croatia began before the war even started: She had helped a child disfigured in an explosion when a playmate threw a match into the gasoline tank of a car. When that boy, Mili Murasovic, now 16, learned Hagel was back in Croatia, he tried to contact her for days before he and his mother tracked her to the main hospital in the coastal city of Split. They smiled adoringly as reporters hovered about, and the boy’s mother, Katica Murasovic, said she took great pride in Hagel’s success.

“Maybe we were the first step,” she said. After helping Mili, “she realized she could solve those problems--that she could go further.”

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Zeljko Coric, a stocky, dark-haired military liaison officer, stepped forward and announced that Hagel, the two journalists accompanying her and a military photographer should follow him.

With a borrowed flak jacket strapped over her Ritz-Carlton polo shirt, Hagel piled into a tan Yugo with the others. The epicenter of fighting was only a few minutes away.

“This used to be a park, and now it is a graveyard,” Coric said as he drove past the freshly painted green wooden markers, a poignant reminder for those on the way to the battle zone. “Here are buried both Croats and Muslims, side by side.”

Two wars had occurred in Mostar in as many years. First, it was the Croats and the Muslims together fighting Bosnian Serbs bent on folding Bosnia-Herzegovina--the central republic in the former Yugoslav federation--into a greater Serbian nation.

But alliance in this town with a prewar population of about 125,000 frayed in late spring as the political leaders haggled over a controversial United Nations-backed peace plan that would have divided Bosnia-Herzegovina into 10 semiautonomous provinces.

The alliance deteriorated as the politicians sought to bring more territory under their control. And now the Bosnian Muslims and the Bosnian Croats were fighting it out for the land.

Fighting has continued in the last few weeks since peace talks in Geneva broke down. Recent U.N. reports alleged Muslim prisoners were tortured and executed in Croatian-run camps.

As Coric zoomed around what was left of his city in a car named for a country that is disintegrating, he would sometimes identify those responsible for reducing some of the buildings to ruins.

Hagel scrambled for fresh batteries for her hand-held videocassette camera as Coric stopped in front of one white apartment building marred by fire.

Just a few blocks away, Coric let Hagel and the reporters walk on the grounds of the psychiatric hospital. Grenades had fallen on the hospital grounds and snipers had picked off patients, he said.

“In this war, the value of life is nothing,” Hagel said. “So many lives have been lost, and mostly civilians.”

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Mostar, which means “Bridge Town,” was once known for medieval charm and its 400-year-old single-span Turkish bridge. But the Muslim-controlled bridge was not part of Coric’s tour. He drove instead to a back alley for a rendezvous with his younger brother, Fritz.

He then guided Hagel and her group onto streets barricaded by sandbags and into bunkers illuminated only by light from six-inch-square peepholes. The soldiers, rather than look through the holes at enemy positions, had hung mirrors from the 2-by-4s holding up the bunkers to see any movement outside. Trash, cigarette boxes and empty beer bottles were strewn about.

With the Coric brothers as bodyguards and her videocassette camera in hand, Hagel began documenting the front line. Back in California, she would use the footage to raise funds for another rescue mission here.

After a brief chat with some soldiers sitting in a sandbag bunker, she followed the Coric brothers through a maze of back yards, jogging down alleys and hugging walls along garden paths. Hagel scampered across an exposed courtyard in front of a Catholic church under construction until she reached the structure’s shaded stone arches.

Gunfire, like an annoying disco backbeat, echoed throughout the building, causing deafening pauses in conversation. But Hagel kept rounding up soldiers who spoke English.

“You see? They only want peace,” Hagel said after questioning Ivica Brkic, a former tour guide.

Later, when Hagel returned to the hospital, she held another in a series of impromptu press conferences. She declared to journalists that the Croatian soldiers only wanted to go back to their old lives.

But Gveric and other doctors had more specific goals for Hagel. They were hoping that she could use her political influence to get more help for the injured and to carry their message to the outside world.

They wanted patients airlifted from a makeshift hospital under siege in Nova Bila, a tiny village surrounded by Muslim forces in central Bosnia. The doctors also complained about the convergence of thousands of dollars in aid to airlift Irma Hadzimuratovic, a celebrated 5-year-old Muslim war victim from Sarajevo, while dozens of other badly injured people were left in the lurch by what they believe is political wrangling.

“America is our hope,” Gveric said. “To us that is the most important thing: that people know Croatians are suffering in central Bosnia.”

Although Hagel seemed concerned about the injured in Nova Bila, she refused to get into the political argument of whether Muslims were being helped at the expense of Croats, refusing to be dragged through the politics of aid.

“There is blood on all hands,” she said. “We don’t go about (pointing fingers) going, ‘He says, she says.’ ”

With the doctors around her on one side and cameramen from Reuters and Croatian television on the other, she began pressing the case of another injured Muslim girl whom she was trying to evacuate from the Croatian-controlled side of the city.

“The way we send our message is by taking out a wounded child,” Hagel said, noting that the rest of the world would interpret the evacuation of a Muslim child from a Croatian area to be a humanitarian gesture. “I will guarantee you that there will be a very big message subliminally.”

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Later, she got busy trying to help. Can the U.S. military apply some pressure? Where is that Pentagon telephone number? Is the U.N. protection force stalling on that chopper to evacuate the wounded? Would it help Operation Second Chance if the doctors were interviewed? Where were the network television crews when you needed them?

“She’s good at self-promotion,” said one doctor on the trip who refused to be named. “I think there’s a lot of altruism, but I think a lot of what is behind it is self-aggrandizement. She uses people. It’s so clear that if there were two projects, the one that would bring the publicity and the limelight is the one she wants.”

The doctors have no idea how hard it is to make a mission like hers successful, countered Hagel, who said she has not had a vacation, a social life or much sleep since becoming obsessed with aiding the Croats.

In fact, she is already planning a new trip in January. But first, there must be the endless promotions, interviews, appearances on television--all of which makes more fund-raising possible.

Yes, she said, she could spend more time living the good life, playing tennis in the California sunshine and helicopter skiing in the winter. She works, she said, “for the human rewards.”

“No one has paid me a penny. It’s the personal rewards of really one individual being able to make a difference,” she said. “The same thing is true in one’s own neighborhood. (Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina) is my neighborhood now.”

But some of those on the trip, like James L. McClendon, a Texas maxillofacial surgeon, wonder why she so craves the attention. While he believes Hagel is serving a beneficial purpose, McClendon said, he cannot understand why she endangers herself by getting so close to the action.

“Sonja Hagel? She’s got a death wish,” he said. “It’s like the moth playing with the candle, playing with the flame. . . .

“She’s a moth.”

TODAY: How Sonja Hagel uses clout, connections and personality to save lives.

MONDAY: Doctors repair torn bodies, face ego clashes with Croatian counterparts.

TUESDAY: Hagel confronts conflicting cultures in trying to evacuate Muslim girl.