Twenty-two years after I almost died in a Croatian hospital, I stood on a Sarajevo hillside and looked down at the dust, a lifetime's worth of destruction. It was 2002, the tenth anniversary of the Siege of Sarajevo, and I couldn't shake the knowledge that I, a Serbian American woman, was standing where the Yugoslav National Army had once stood, staring down at the hunted.

I snapped a picture and surveyed the wreckage. Everywhere I looked, I saw remains: mortar wounds; yellow, do-not-cross tape that marked areas still waiting to be de-mined; bushes and trees growing in the middle of houses. After a decade's worth of wars, I'd come back to my parents' country to understand how this had happened‹how a cosmopolitan and multicultural people had turned on each other at the close of the 20th century.

But I'd also come for something else. Nine years after my father's death, I was determined to unearth his ghost and lay him to rest. To do so, I knew, would send me on a scavenger hunt stretching from Belgrade, where my long-lost half-brother lived, to the Croatian coast, where my mother's family had been set free the night before they were to be killed in WWII.

To conserve energy, I was moving slowly, living in neighboring Slovenia for nine months, getting acclimated. So far I'd taken a quick trip to Belgrade, another to visit friends in Zagreb, and now this, a long weekend in Bosnia.

Nada clapped her hands and piled us back into our rented Citroen Jumper. "Come along," she sang in her Australian accent. "Sniper's Alley before lunch; the Dobrinja-Butmir tunnel before cocktails!"

We piled back into the van, nine women between the ages of 30 and 65, all of us currently living in Ljubljana, Slovenia, the first country to declare independence and break away from the former Yugoslavia. It was an easy life, a comfortable outpost on the international circuit where most of us had been living.

But Nada was the real thing. The daughter of Croatians who'd immigrated to Australia, she'd been living in the former Yugoslavia since her twenties, when she'd married a Serbian man and stayed to raise her daughters. She was a wild card, a sharp, handsome woman in her late fifties who whipped us through border crossings, talked us out of speeding tickets and flirted with guards whose sole goal was to keep the Bosnians and Serbs from killing each other.

"So they hire me as a translator," she said. "Fine for them; bloody inconvenient for me. Taking reporters across checkpoints and into areas where everyone's getting killed."

I listened intently, as always. Nada was my hero, someone who had done what I'd always flirted with‹come back, crossed the divide.

"But then they wanted me to work as a reporter." She laughed, then readjusted her glasses. "Me, a reporter."

Around me, women gazed silently out the window. We were on the outskirts of the city, deep in a block of graying Socialist flats, about to pass Oslobodanje, the melted newspaper building that had continued to publish during the siege.

"Then came the day we went looking for bodies," she said, laughing so hard she could barely speak. "Find a body floating down the river, the editor told us, so that's what we set out to do. Bodies everywhere in this war‹you think we'd find at least one."

She shook her head. "Nothing. Up and down that river we went, for hours. But not one body."

"So what did you do," someone finally asked.

She leaned back, uproariously. "Tried to find one! My God, that was a day. Up and down the shore we went, looking for a corpse we could push into the river!"