News of the U.S.-NATO action in Serbia reaches us through television and computer networks -- and is, to a great extent, fought with the same technology. This makes a personal response more difficult, especially for young people who rarely respond on any other terms. PNS commentator Katherine Cowy Kim, a 27 year old writer in San Francisco, is an editor of YO! (Youth Outlook), a monthly newspaper by and about young people published by Pacific News Service.

SAN FRANCISCO-- The war in Kosovo is unlike other wars. It is a cyber war -- we are now in a world where all military action, communication and media are transmitted through television and computers.

This distance -- this other-dimensional quality (is there really a war going on?) -- has kept younger people from moving against the war in any way and also from forming opinions about the need to be at war.

I first learned about the war on the Internet, clicking on CNN.com: "NATO forces ready for air attacks on Serb forces." A link that showed electronic maps of the region gave me the location of the three GIs taken from the Kosovo-Albanian border. To learn more about European sentiment concerning the war, I went to Le Monde.com. I could hear Yugoslav Radio B-92 in my own home, through RealAudio, bounced from distant satellites.

It's hard to feel strongly about a war that I found out about online -- I usually finish one story and move on to read the other top headlines: the Nikkei, NASA, The Matrix. It wasn't until I heard from an old friend -- a sergeant in the Army -- that I felt any emotional relationship to the war, that I started to care.

To: gogocowy@pacificnews.org

Date: Thursday, April 08, 1999 09:32
From: marvingaye@aol.com
Subject: Re: Where r u?

> hi?
>sorry, i can't stay long on the computer.
>i'm going to albania for the kosovo mission. we're those helicopters
>that cnn has been talking about.
>anyway don't worry, if one person gonna come back to germany, it'd be
>moi. gotta go. looooove you. hi to everyone. write me.
> marvin.

It was strange to read an e-mail from a friend who referred me to a cable channel to know more about his future. Even my most personal interaction with the war was in Cyberspace -- terse, businesslike and unemotional.

The bombing in Serbia and Kosovo has been defined as a humanitarian effort, war waged in the name of peace. After hearing of our gross misjudgment in Rwanda, and viewing plenty of flashback images of the Holocaust -- throngs of refugees crammed into trains -- the U.S. public has expressed positive reactions to the NATO attacks, and increasingly favors sending in ground troops.

But though pundits may talk of Vietnam, this war does not pull on the heartstrings of those born during the last years of that conflict -- and now old enough to serve in the military. There is no draft. Our brothers and the boys next door are for the most part still here. There are no U.S. ground troops on Serbian soil, and after nearly two weeks of attacks, only three U.S. soldiers have been taken, not even killed. For those of us who don't have loved ones in the military, this war doesn't really matter.

For the most part, our generation is against war. We are well-versed in its horrors, more familiar with Gulf War Syndrome and pharmaceutical factories bombed by mistake than with the ambiguities of "strategic" wars and terrorism. We have so much information and access to more, from Russian news broadcasts to the Serbian Orthodox Church's reactions. But we are skeptical, after the inundations of infotainment during the last attacks in Iraq, the so-called "Showdown in the Gulf." We are wary of demonizations, even of dictators like Hussein and Milosevic, because we are more concerned with the liars at home, the spin doctors and bipartisan wranglers, who affect us more directly.

Sure, it is partly true we would rather sip martinis and watch our mutual funds grow. But even the most politically active have to pick and choose. After all, there's Mumia and Amadou Diallo, racism and police brutality in our neighborhoods. There are pro-choicers and pro-lifers, protests for safer bike lanes, picket lines in front of clothing stores to protest all those garments stitched in sweatshops. Our wars are personal.

The war became personal for me when I saw that two out of three GIs were of color. It hit home when my friend was sent out in a "low-flying, all-weather Apache attack helicopter."

What is interesting about a war in a remote part of Europe, that evokes a time when our grandparents were children, a conflict that has that flared off and on for centuries? How does this affect us?

We have no way to put this war in perspective. And to top it all off, it's coming at us through televisions that we can just mute and through computers that we can just shut down.