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Gustimirovic has no home save the small couch he sleeps on and the coffeemaker he has scrounged and placed neatly in what must have been the chalet's laundry room. A mess tin near the bed is filled with red and yellow tulips. Nearby stands a pile of straight branches; these will become cigarette ) holders when the line is quiet.
"This war is needed by no one, but we are not clever enough to stop it," he admits. "But Serbs cannot be separated. History has told us we must be united for our survival. To be divided is to die. The world cannot deny that is the historical truth. We have the right to decide who lives with us. This is a very personal war. It will decide who I shall live with, and we can never live with the Muslims again. I do not mind spending the rest of my life in the trenches if it will finally settle the question of who owns the land. Then my children can live in peace."
There is a Serb soldier who cannot believe his own people have imprisoned him. He says he had been sent to the front lines to kill Muslims and had been very successful. When he came home he continued to kill them and, to his surprise, he was arrested. "If it is O.K. there, why not here?" he asks.
Colonel Slavko Lisica heads the Doboj Corps. He claims to have 45,000 men -- a gross exaggeration according to intelligence estimates that put the total Serb troops in Bosnia at no more than 90,000 -- under his command, and controls about 400 sq. mi. of territory substantially "cleansed" of Muslims. The situation map behind his desk shows his lines extending like a pointed finger into Muslim territory. All that would be needed to trap the corps would be for the Muslims to cut through the 10-mile-wide base of the finger with an assault on Doboj. It is an uncomfortable position.
To his men Lisica is a hero, a former Yugoslav Army officer who has battled his way across Bosnia. He thinks he may be tried as a war criminal if the Americans come but says he cannot worry about that. From his office, bare except for the desk, eight chairs and a cot, he can hear the NATO planes. They trouble him and often, as they roar overhead, he will stop in mid-conversation and begin a tirade against the forces that are arrayed against his men. But he is defiant about the possibility of foreign intervention. "I draw the maps around here," he says, "not Mr. Owen."
The Serbs of the Doboj bicycle path do not care if the whole world is poised against them. They share the determination of Colonel Lika to grab their destiny or die. "The time of living together is over," he says. "We may be able to live side by side but not together. Never again together."