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“It’s not the time to cry for deaths,” her friend said. “We live too fast. Everything is forgotten. Not forgotten—you remember somebody who was shot—but you don’t have time to think about it.”

“What do you think about?” I asked.

“How to survive. You can’t dream about tomorrow,” she said. “No, just live now. You think, ‘Now I am talking.’ You can’t say, ‘Tomorrow I will visit my grandmother’s.’ It’s not possible to say.”

“All the people in Sarajevo have a bullet for them,” Slema said, taking a drag on her cigarette. “All of them have their turn. They are just waiting for it. Wondering, ‘when is my turn?’”

WHEN I LEFT Sarajevo the first time, driving to the airport, I had to slow down as I passed a crowd of worn men and boys gathered in a small clearing. Silhouetted against the high beam of a truck’s headlights were two pit bulls locked in an embrace. One dog clamped its jaws on the other’s neck. A few men yelled instructions, smoke pouring from their mouths in the cool night air. Most just watched. The fight didn’t last long. The smaller dog was soon on its side, unable to breathe. The larger one’s mouth was wrapped around its neck, waiting for it to suffocate. When the end was in sight, the victor clear, the dogs were pulled apart. One man clamped his hands around the nearly dead loser. Blood glistened between the man’s fingers as he tried to hold the dog’s throat together. Money was exchanged; the crowd moved to disperse. A convoy of Bosnian army trucks rumbled past, filled with young men on their way to the front. No one in the crowd even looked up.

THE FIRST TIME I came to Iraq for CNN, I spent two days traveling with Ambassador J. Paul Bremer, then America’s top diplomat there. It was June 2004. Bremer was about to hand over power to the first interim Iraqi government, and was visiting northern Iraq, pressing the flesh one last time with Kurdish leaders.

Bremer was surrounded at all times by gun-toting guards, former Special Forces soldiers, now contracted to Blackwater, a private security firm. We had permission to be with Bremer, go everywhere he went, talk with him along the way, but the Blackwater guys didn’t care. They kept elbowing away my cameraman, Neil Hallsworth, every chance they got. They seemed to take great pleasure in it.

“Just give me a reason,” the head of the security detail told Neil repeatedly under his breath.

“A reason to what, shoot you?” I asked Neil when he told me what was going on.

“I think so,” he said, laughing.

“Well, if he does shoot you,” I said, “make sure you tape it, because it’ll be the most exciting video we get today.”

Bremer was always dressed in a business suit, with a starched shirt and French cuffs. His only concession to the dirt and dust of Iraq: the desert combat boots he seemed to wear at all times. He was constantly moving, surrounded by a gaggle of guards, young Ivy League aides, and old-school advance men. On one leg of the trip, I rode in a bus with his advance team. The head guy told me he used to work for the Bushes back in Texas, and now kept Bremer running on time. We were in a convoy of Kurdish police cars and buses that snaked along for what seemed like a mile.

“This is great. Really cutting a low profile with this one,” the advance man said, laughing and staring out the window of the bus. On both sides of the highway, angry Kurdish motorists sat waiting for our caravan to pass.

“It’s okay,” the advance man jokingly yelled out the window. “It’s John Kerry. Vote for Kerry!”

Nothing Bremer ever said was particularly newsworthy. He was, after all, a diplomat, and the dance he was required to perform didn’t allow for dramatic moves. Once he was out, he’d write a book—saying that there hadn’t been enough troops on the ground in Iraq—but while he was still there, he never said anything nearly so strong.

In the air, Bremer traveled in an armada of Black Hawks. The heavy rotors sliced the air, shaking the sky with the power of American might. Riding in a chopper, your body shakes so much that