COLUMN ONE : Childhood a Casualty in Bosnia : Educated in a world of war, the young have become experts in tracking incoming fire. Many are racked by nightmares, but some try to hide fear or save food to ease their parents’ worries.

Ten-year-old Edin Dizdarevic shares a hospital room with three wounded soldiers, breathing in their cigarette smoke through damaged nasal passages and listening to their stories of front-line horror.

A dirty gauze patch covering an empty eye socket gives the sandy-haired boy a roguish look. It is accentuated by his emulation of the nonchalant poses of the men around him. They sit on, rather than under, their bedclothes and eschew pajamas in favor of jackets and sweats.

When he relates the harrowing experiences that have brought him to adulthood a decade too soon, Edin employs the black-and-white terminology he has learned from his elders, whose shock over the 20-month siege waged against them by Bosnian Serb gunmen has evolved into a seething hate.

Edin talks graphically of the day last month when “Chetniks”--nationalist slang for the gunmen who surround this capital city--fired a mortar into his classroom, spraying shrapnel that killed his teacher and five students and ripped through his nasal cavity and left eye.

“It doesn’t hurt much,” the boy says with the shrug of one who has learned to take it, a tough-guy gesture he has seen repeatedly among Sarajevo’s ubiquitous wounded.

For Edin and hundreds of thousands of Balkan children who have lived through brutalities most Westerners know only from nightmares, a carefree childhood has been a casualty of war.

“Most of these children have already experienced more than the rest of us will in a lifetime,” says Rune Stuvland, a Norwegian psychologist specializing in the effects of war on children.

Stuvland, who has spent the last 18 months in the strife-torn Balkans, describes Bosnian children’s obsession with weaponry as a predictable consequence of a society that has been consumed by armed conflict through a significant portion of their formative years.

“Even at a very young age, both boys and girls can tell you whether fire is incoming or outgoing, whether it’s a tank shell or artillery, or what size bomb,” Stuvland says. “We should be concerned that so many children are growing up learning about (armament) millimeters instead of regular math, but this is an expression of their reality. These are lethal killing devices, but such are the surroundings they are exposed to.”

In Sarajevo alone, there are 70,000 children. Most have experienced the death or maiming of a close relative, and nearly all have watched fathers and older brothers go off to war. There are no reliable statistics on the age breakdown of the estimated 250,000 people killed or missing in Bosnia-Herzegovina. But because Bosnian civilians have suffered the brunt of casualties, the number of dead children is believed to run in the tens of thousands.

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Throughout the former Yugoslav federation, where Serbian nationalist rebellions against secession have thrown once-prosperous communities into chaos, children account for most of the 4 million homeless, many having endured the trauma of being forced from their homes at gunpoint in the war’s signature act of “ethnic cleansing.”

Education is on-again, off-again, as classes are canceled during days of heavy shelling or when it is too cold to expect underfed and poorly clothed students to trek to heatless schools.

In rural areas of Bosnia, where a 1,000-mile front line cuts through hundreds of towns and villages, children have not gone to school for nearly two years.

The influence of childhood exposure to war hazards has been the subject of extensive study. But researchers and mental health specialists warn that the protracted Bosnian conflict is compounding the risks and rendering traditional intervention strategy useless.

Many of the younger victims of the war have experienced multiple traumas, suffering displacement, loss of a parent, disruption of schooling, hunger, cold and physical injury.

The Dizdarevic family’s saga is replete with hardship, though no longer unusual in a country that has seen half its population uprooted and one in 10 residents killed or wounded.

Edin, his 3-year-old sister, Edina, and their parents, Fatima and Alija, were driven from their home in the largely Muslim suburb of Sokolje by Serbian gunmen in the first days of war in April, 1992.

They wandered for months among refugee shelters and have lately been squatting in a three-room apartment vacated by a Croatian family after the elderly owner was killed by sniper fire. The Croats abandoned their household goods and clothing, which Edin and his family use as they can.

Having lost his job as an auto worker when Serbian rebels seized the plant at Vogosca, the elder Dizdarevic joined other displaced suburbanites in the ragtag defense of what was left of Sarajevo.

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Four months ago, while on front-line patrol, an exploding shell blinded him in the right eye and ripped out the left, an eerie precursor to the injury his son was to suffer in mid-November.

Edina, pale and emaciated from a starvation diet of flour pellets, is solemn and sadly pragmatic beyond her years.

When given a chocolate bar by a visitor--her first treat in more than a year, according to her tearful mother--Edina solemnly nibbled a third of it, then earnestly contemplated the remainder.

“I have to save the big half for my brother. He’s very hurt,” she explains, carefully re-wrapping the chocolate in its foil and red paper.

Fatima Dizdarevic spends her days in a confused rage over the broken lives that make up her family.

“Look at this poor child. She’s a skeleton,” the mother laments, lifting one of Edina’s scrawny arms as evidence of their constant hunger. “We have nothing to eat but flour, and only then when the humanitarian aid is sufficient to go around.”

She is unable to visit her son more than once a week. The five-mile walk to the hospital across the snowbound city is a dangerous, all-day venture. “I can’t leave the house. He’s blind, and she’s too small to leave alone,” she says. “Who knows what I would find when I got back to them?”

She has sought, unsuccessfully, to have her husband and son placed on a growing list for treatment abroad, and she is consumed with worry over how she will manage, even in peacetime, with an unemployable husband, a badly wounded son and a daughter who exudes the lethargy of a disillusioned old woman.

Parental distress at being unable to properly care for and protect children is one of the war’s emotional time bombs, Sarajevo psychologist Mirjana Mavrak says.

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Most Bosnians have been thoroughly impoverished by the war that has halted industry, trade and farming, leaving 2.7 million people--more than two-thirds of those left in this country--dependent for their survival on the irregular charity of foreigners whose concern about civilians in Bosnia has been flagging.

“Parents feel guilty and helpless, and the children sense this. A lot of children’s fears are picked up from the adults around them,” Mavrak explains, citing the case of a 6-year-old girl wounded in the leg who refused to talk about the injury for fear of adding to the burdens of her mother.

Children who have overheard their parents bemoan the persistent shortage of food sometimes claim not to be hungry, an act of self-sacrifice the psychologists say is usually considered beyond the empathetic capacities of the young.

They also worry that children will inherit the hostile attitudes they see in adults around them.

The media on all sides have succumbed to biased war coverage.

When rare flows of electricity allow Sarajevans to break the monotony of deprivation with a few hours of television, they are bombarded with hate-inspiring images of wounded civilians writhing in pain; the encircling Serbs attacking the city are portrayed as murderous sadists.

“None of us know the effects of living a year and a half or two years in a besieged city,” Stuvland says. “None of us have ever experienced or observed such an absurd situation, where the international community is present yet not able to do anything” to prevent the innocent from suffering. “It is reasonable to assume there will be a lot of people with problems coming out of this.”

International relief agencies, such as the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and the Red Cross, have sought from the outset to ease the plight of increasing millions whose lives are disrupted by the war. The agencies deliver food and medicine and provide other humanitarian assistance, such as compiling prisoner lists and relaying messages for divided families.

The U.N. Children’s Fund has been aiding young war victims in the former Yugoslav republics since the 1991 conflict in neighboring Croatia.

But UNICEF officials concede frustration with the insurmountable task of trying to mitigate children’s suffering while no serious efforts are made to stop the war that is inflicting the pain.

“These children are being marked for life, not just physically but psychologically,” says Danielle Maillefer, a UNICEF representative who recently visited Sarajevo to organize assistance for wounded children.

The agency has focused on training teachers and parents to deal with such reactions as sleep disorders, recurring nightmares, guilt feelings and fears.

But its health professionals, hampered by the lack of fuel, funds and transportation afflicting the rest of Bosnia, find they can do little more than identify the problems and hope that peace comes soon so families can begin to restore a normal environment.

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Minela Zajnilovic, a 9-year-old who managed to escape the Nov. 10 schoolhouse attack physically unscathed, relives the explosion in her dreams and has shown signs of regression to infantile behavior.

“She’s terrified of the dark and insists I go with her everywhere, even to the bathroom,” says her 33-year-old mother, Harifa.

Only a few weeks ago a gregarious tomboy who joined her classmates in playing at war, she stays indoors all day, clinging to her mother.

“I’m afraid it will happen again,” Minela says of the explosion, which comes back to her in nightmares as a choking rain of pulverized plaster, then the picture of her lacerated teacher slumped and bleeding over a toppled chair.

“I tell her that nothing like this will happen to her again, but I don’t know that,” says Harifa Zajnilovic, whose husband lost the lower part of his face when a friend stepped on a mine while they gathered wood. “I can only say it and hope it is true, because I couldn’t stand to lose her. She’s the only child I have.”

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Research into the effects of violence on children during World War II suggests that many overcome the fear of random injury soon after its cause, the armed conflict, ends. Even children who weathered months of air raids over London or survived depraved conditions in Nazi concentration camps usually managed to live a reasonably normal life once a secure environment was restored, Stuvland says.

But those monitoring the current war’s hazards for the young are concerned with its prospects for dragging on for years, even decades. And they note that the most traumatic event--separation from or loss of a parent--is one of the most frequent hardships endured by Bosnian children.

“The long-term impact of this war is not something any program can help. You cannot give children back their past,” Stuvland says. “There has been a tremendous amount of damage done to children and the future.”

Despite the odds against making a difference in an ongoing war, he says he is sure that the plight of the young would be immeasurably worse if those in the West turn their backs on Bosnia to avoid being horrified by what they see.

“There are always limits to what can be done, as well as ethical implications. But there have to be solutions, and the solution here is that war has to be stopped,” Stuvland says.

For young Bosnians already indoctrinated in the brutal methods of a civilization left to unravel, however, the joys of childhood are a nebulous concept they will someday have to read about.