Faces in the Village

War, someone once said, is not for the faint-hearted--but history teaches that it’s the faint-hearted who suffer most.

One sees it in the stricken faces of the Kosovar refugees, their images filling television screens, and in the number of bodies strewn like fallen trees in their shattered neighborhoods.

These are the victims of a madman’s vision of “ethnic cleansing,” a nightmare rising from the grave of Hitler’s past to embed itself in the twisted goals of Slobodan Milosevic.

The faces of the innocents change over the years, but the expressions of pain and stunned horror vary little. I saw them during the Korean War as we moved through villages devastated by air power. I see them today in televised scenes from the killing fields of Kosovo.

The circumstances of war, at their most noble, are created when tyrants march and good people set out to stop them. Hitler had to be stopped, there was no choice, and so must Milosevic.

But even when the intent is noble, the innocents on both sides pay terrible prices for the battles, if only because they get in the way of the war.

One in the way is Smiljana Ilijevic Gonzales. She’s Serbian, lives in Belgrade, doesn’t hate anyone, has spent a good part of her life helping others, and in the context of her present life, is a witness to hell.

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“I can’t tell you how bad it is,” she said to me the other day by phone, her voice trembling. “A little while ago, the alarm sounded for an air attack. It’s horrible. I don’t know what to do. . . .”

Her home is on the outskirts of Belgrade across from an army barracks and 200 meters from an air defense base that was bombed earlier. The blast roared through the neighborhood, sending shock waves down the narrow streets and smoke billowing up over the houses.

“I don’t know where to run,” she said. “People are afraid they’ll lose their homes, their families and their children. . . .” Then she cried.

The conversation was brief. Miki, as she is called, was on her way down to the bomb shelter to care for her elderly mother and aunt. They have food and money to last for a short while. After that, the future is uncertain. Before she hung up she said in a voice on the edge of tears, “We are powerless.” Earlier, I spoke with Miki’s daughter Maria. “All of the military bases are right in the middle of where people live,” she said. “They’re in the neighborhoods, not out somewhere far away.”

Maria Gonzales is 23 and lives in L.A., as does her aunt, Cynthia Gonzales Chase, who first e-mailed me about Miki’s plight: “I suppose this is just a story of common people,” her Easter night message said. “Just another story of a war that is ugly for all people.”

Miki was married to Cynthia’s brother, Michael Gonzales. They divorced after four years of marriage and the birth of Maria, now an aspiring film editor.

Cynthia spoke with Miki by telephone just before she contacted me and was told, in a voice of fear and panic, “Tell Maria I love her.”

It was as though Miki feared her life might end there and wanted a final message of love relayed to her daughter. She survived the bombs, but because of the close proximity of military targets, the anxiety continues.

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I write about this today because almost 50 years later I still see the faces of the villagers in Korea, some crying and cradling the bodies of dead babies, others staring vacantly as we marched past their burning homes, still others lying in the rice paddies they had once tended with loving care.

These are images that don’t go away, and I fear that the images being created today will be among those that will haunt the next millennium.

Walls and statues celebrate the heroics of war, but there are few monuments to its tragedies and almost none to honor the mere existence of the innocents who struggle to survive when war’s thunder rolls through their land.

We are awash in euphemisms that never evoke war’s true impact. Militarily, we disrupt, dislodge, intervene and interdict. The intent is rarely to kill or maim, but to . . . well . . . neutralize. But the truth is, war hurts.

“We are powerless,” Miki Ilijevic Gonzales said to me over the telephone in a voice filled with fear. “I don’t know where to run.”

It’s the reason I’m writing this today, to tell you that beyond the drums and bugles, beyond right or wrong, history bleeds with the stories of people, not soldiers, who don’t know where to run and who never will.

Al Martinez’s column appears on Sundays and Wednesdays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com.