A Front-Row Seat in the Balkan Tinderbox

Dog bites and blisters are about the worst hazards Jeffrey Corella faces in his regular job delivering mail in Santa Barbara, a far cry from the risks he now takes on a hilltop overlooking the most dangerous patch of land in the Balkans.

The postal worker is a first lieutenant here, commanding 13 California National Guardsmen in a Kosovo radar installation on the front lines of a border war between ethnic Albanian rebels and Serbian police.

With an average age of 30-plus, several members of the peacekeeping unit are veterans of other foreign deployments. But they haven’t been anywhere quite like this perch of converted shipping containers surrounded by razor wire that serves as a lookout for daily clashes in a tense buffer zone on Kosovo’s border with Serbia proper.

“It is hot here and has the potential to get explosive, from what we hear every day,” said Corella, 38. “At night, you can hear explosions and machine-gun fire. Even during the day you can hear it.”

U.S. commanders estimate that about 500 ethnic Albanian rebels are dug in among the wooded hills and valleys around Outpost Gunner. Serbian authorities insist that the number is at least double that.

In more than a year of fighting to win control of a large swath of southern Serbia, the rebels have advanced deep into the 3-mile-deep buffer zone. They’ve even established a foothold on the edge of Bujanovac, a Serbian town outside the zone. Nominally, at least, Kosovo is a province of Serbia, the dominant Yugoslav republic.

The continuing clashes are embarrassing, undermining Yugoslavia’s newly democratic government and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s efforts to bring a lasting peace to Kosovo, and both insist that they have contained the conflict.

Guerrillas Remain a Potent Force

But the U.S. military’s own reports suggest that the guerrillas--who call themselves the Presevo, Bujanovac and Medvedja Liberation Army--are still a potent force and are regrouping, despite more aggressive NATO patrols to cut off supplies of arms and ammunition and arrest suspected rebels.

U.S. commanders praise Serbian police units for exercising restraint in the conflict, but Serbian leaders have repeatedly said they will use force to drive out the rebels if negotiations fail.

Corella’s unit uses radar to track mortar bombs as they arc across the hills surrounding Outpost Gunner, and it counted 47 apparent firings in just 24 hours Sunday, a fairly typical day lately in the low-level battle.

The firings aren’t officially confirmed as real until specialists at the U.S. Army’s main base in Kosovo say they are. But Corella and his men insist that some of the attacks in the valleys below are too close to miss. They have even heard the metallic thunk as mortar bombs left their steel tubes.

One firing about 8:30 Sunday morning was less than a mile in front of the U.S. camp. The mortar bomb’s trajectory carried it just over a mile into Serbia, Corella said.

Most nights, Corella and Sgt. Rick Plumlee, 37, of Santa Maria walk down the hillside a ways to escape the noise of their camp’s diesel generator and listen in bone-chilling wind for the explosions of bombs or gunfire in the distance.

On Sunday night, they scanned the pitch-black horizon through night-vision goggles as a series of flares illuminated rebel bunkers and a vehicle driving along a dirt track near Serbian police positions less than two miles away.

“This is my little theater,” Corella said.

Wounds From U.S. Job as a Mail Carrier

Corella was also on the front lines during the 1992 Los Angeles riots, when he guarded shops against looters, and he did a six-month tour with U.S. peacekeepers in Bosnia-Herzegovina three years ago. But the closest thing he has to a war wound is two dog bites he suffered on his mail route in Santa Barbara.

Staff Sgt. Jose Mosqueda, 28, a Persian Gulf War veteran and, like Corella, a postal worker, says that he’s been bitten three times while delivering mail in Monrovia and that he once narrowly missed being clobbered in the head with a baseball bat by a drunk who was angry that his check had arrived a day late.

The weapons are a lot more menacing here in Kosovo, where peacekeepers have gotten increasingly involved in the border conflict in recent months.

Before Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic was ousted in October, the peacekeeping force in Kosovo did little to stop the infiltration of guerrillas into southern Serbia. Rebel leaders based in the Serbian village of Dobrosin would openly drive back and forth across the provincial border through a U.S. Army checkpoint.

After Milosevic left office, and the ethnic Albanian rebels launched attacks that killed four Serbian police in late November, peacekeepers in Kosovo were ordered to get tougher.

They stepped up arrests of suspected rebels and launched more aggressive patrols to deter weapons smuggling along dirt tracks in the mountainous border area. U.S. troops also closed the border crossing near Dobrosin to all traffic in November as the violence escalated.

By the end of last week, 62 ethnic Albanians were locked up in the detention center at the main U.S. base in Kosovo, called Camp Bondsteel, on suspicion of being members of the rebel army fighting in the buffer zone.

The U.N. Security Council resolution that established the peacekeeping mission reaffirms Yugoslav law in Kosovo, which treats separatist groups as “terrorists.” But Col. Thomas Gross, the U.S. force’s chief of staff, said the ethnic Albanian rebel army “is not an illegal organization” under the U.N. resolution.

The military is very conscious of human rights, and “right now we’re detaining some people based on intelligence and not necessarily evidence that would be supported in a court of law,” Gross added.

American troops have had at least one firefight in recent weeks with ethnic Albanian rebels, who shot at U.S. Army engineers when they blew up a dirt track to close off one of the guerrillas’ supply routes. None of the Americans was injured.

The California National Guardsmen are protected by a contingent of U.S. Army troops, and the security detail gets bigger if commanders believe that the threat is increasing.

A Russian quick-reaction force in the nearby village of Domorovce was scrambled Monday morning when two men ran into the bushes near the radar camp after they were spotted with “hand-held devices,” perhaps walkie-talkies.

The National Guardsmen, whose tour of duty in Kosovo lasts for just over four more months, get an extra $157 a month in combined bonuses for doing hazardous duty and risking “hostile fire” in Outpost Gunner.

But they also risk losing their jobs back home because employers can easily skirt federal rules requiring them to hold a Guardsman’s position for him until he returns from overseas, Plumlee said.

“There were guys who lost their jobs after coming back from Bosnia, and there will be guys losing their jobs after here--no doubt about it,” said Plumlee, who normally sells diesel engines for a living.

At least monitoring Serbia’s border has proven safer than delivering Santa Barbara’s mail--so far. The only dog Corella comes close to here is a friendly mutt that wandered into camp one day and adopted the troops. They named him Radar.