A BALKAN ACCORD : U.S. Troops See a Troubled Role : Military: American soldiers stationed in Germany worry about the durability of the peace accord. They find the conflict nearly impossible to understand.

On Tuesday, the day the presidents of Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia initialed their breakthrough peace agreement in Dayton, Ohio, the front page of the military newspaper the Stars and Stripes was hinting at a breakdown in the talks. Members of the 1st Armored Division, headquartered here, were starting to look forward to a cozy German Christmas.

“They got the rug pulled out from under them,” says the division’s public affairs officer, Capt. John Suttle.

The sudden word that Bosnia duty may be imminent after all has left many lower-ranking members of the 13,000-strong division--the backbone of the United States’ contribution to a North Atlantic Treaty Organization operation in Bosnia-Herzegovina--feeling suspicious of the sincerity of the Balkan leaders whose peace they may be enforcing.

These young Americans say openly that they find the Bosnia nightmare all but impossible to understand. They know that the leaders in the conflict have called cease-fires before, only to break them, and they say they feel ambivalent about their own country’s role in what appears to be an ancient and insoluble conflict.

“I’ve got really mixed emotions, and there’s a lot of people here who are scared,” said Spec. David Nolan, a 30-year-old communications technician from Tujunga. “We really don’t know what we’re getting into.”

Nolan said he was troubled by the range of national, ethnic and religious interests in the Balkans and the lack of any single, clear enemy. Noting that involved parties include the Serbs and their allies in Moscow, the Bosnian Muslims and their supporters in the Islamic world, and the region’s assortment of militias and freelance police squads, Nolan said, “If someone causes havoc, how do you know who’s who?”

“There’s a lot of tension in the battalion,” agreed 21-year-old Spec. Catherine Wandzel of Saginaw, Mich., whose role in the deployment would be organizing supplies for infantry and artillery units.

“You always say, ‘It’s not going to happen to me,’ but now it looks as if the time has come when I’ll have to put my mind together.”

Grating on some of the soldiers tapped for likely Bosnia duty is the thought that a quarter of a century ago, President Clinton avoided service in the unpopular conflict of his generation, the Vietnam War. Some men and women stationed near Bad Kreuznach, in southwestern Germany, said it bothered them that the same man, today, would be sending them into another region in which the American interest is less than obvious.

“We have no stake in Bosnia, except that if we don’t go in there, NATO is going to break up,” Nolan said.

Wandzel said it worried her that she knew so little about the Bosnian conflict, but she added that she thought the Army preferred low-ranking soldiers not to study the situation too closely, for fear they might form opinions--and opinions, in Bosnia’s delicate political climate, might be misconstrued as favoritism toward one side or another, something potentially damaging to the fragile peace process.

Division spokesman Suttle said, however, that the U.S. Army plans to educate its soldiers destined for Bosnia by distributing, as soon as there is a clear mission order, thousands of green pamphlets titled “Bosnia-Herzegovina: A Soldier’s Guide.”

The pamphlet will outline Bosnia’s history and describe the various military organizations active there, as well as offering behavior tips--telling, for example, which common American gestures can give extreme offense in Bosnia.

Members of the 1st Armored Division have been training for a possible Bosnian deployment for about 18 months. Their exercises were stepped up after July, when Bosnian Serb forces overran the former United Nations “safe area” of Srebrenica.

The training has involved not just target practice and field maneuvers but also detailed role playing, in which mock Bosnian villages have been created here in Germany and actors brought in to play the roles of terrorists, thieves, refugees, uncooperative U.N. personnel, nosy journalists and other potential troublemakers.

The training is supposed to help Army personnel make the leap from being traditional soldiers to acting as modern “peace enforcers,” able to cope not only with conventional battle scenes but also with the many problems that could accompany a shaky peace.

Wandzel, who has not been in a live conflict, said she wasn’t sure the training had fully prepared her for the real thing. Other soldiers said, however, that mere training had become monotonous, and they were glad a clear mission order appeared to be coming.

“We’ve been training all the time to do this, and now we’re finally going to go and see if we can really do it,” said Sgt. Rick Billings, a 29-year-old intelligence specialist from Waterloo, Iowa.