“I don’t know if this thing is going work,” says Army Captain Kirk Sessin, looking out on a sun-drenched valley near Glamoc, 100 miles southwest of Tuzla, Bosnia. A self-described “troop guy” rather than staff officer, Captain Sessin has been asked to predict the success of the multinational peace-enforcement effort begun here last December and led by U.S. troops from the First Armored Division based in Germany.
With six months invested in this war-torn country and six more to go, soldiers like Captain Sessin take no comfort in their pessimism. But many feel they know Bosnia well enough now to worry about long-term prospects for peace.
Captain Sessin, 37, stands beside rubble of what once might have been a popular way station in the former Yugoslavia. “This land was held by the Serbs until last fall when the Croats pushed them across here,” he says, drawing his arm up the mountain. “They planted mines in their wake and settled across this ridge line there. That’s why there are all those bunkers up there now.”
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