To escape the lunatic war on Serbia, an American reporter decides to drive to Kosovo where he talks with a 72 year old Serbian farmer about America, cigarettes and dancing bears. PNS corespondent Terence Sheridan, a former reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, has been living and writing in the former Yugoslavia for the last eight years.

BELGRADE -- The same day that Secretary of State Madeliene Albright announced that Serbs might someday be allowed to "visit" their holy sites in Kosovo, a group of government lackeys here proposed that Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic receive the People's Medal for Heroism.

That's equivalent to the Congressional Medal of Honor, and naturally Slobo will get the medal if he wants it.

So what's a man to do in a lunatic war like this? Get out of town! Visit Kosovo. Or try to.

In the old days -- last summer, before NATO -- there were less than 1,000 casualties in a low-grade conflict that began in February 1998 between Serbian cops and the ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army, the separatist rebels. Now Kosovo is broken and bleeding and there are thousands upon thousands of pathetic refugees.

Before NATO there were about 2 million people in the province -- some 90 percent of them ethnic Albanians, most of whom were Muslim. It's anyone's guess how many there are now. And the KLA barely has a pulse, with Christian Serbs eager to administer last rites.

Last summer, anyone with an American passport was golden in Serbia's southern province of Kosovo. The KLA treated you like royalty and the Serbs were courteous at checkpoints. Just let them know on the back roads, Indian Country, that you were coming. Plaster the car with PRESS stickers and turn up the music. Be conspicuous. If I could have pulled it off, I would have driven a big old Pontiac Bonneville with a boss paint job and the radio blasting The Righteous Brothers -- "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'." Instead I rolled down the window in a Ford Escort and whistled an Irish tune, "Finnegan's Wake."

Serbs love the Irish; they identify with them: The Irish against the Brits, the Serbs against the Turks, Austrians, Germans -- anyone who invades, although it took them 500 years to dump the Turks.

At checkpoints the Serbs would ask where I was from and I'd say I was an Irish-American from Cleveland, Ohio. When they looked puzzled, I'd say, "Cleveland Cavaliers -- the NBA?" and they would grin and say, "Oh, that Cleveland." Serbs know their basketball.

Now a few miles west of Nis, where NATO flattened a cigarette factory, a Serb peasant was surprised to see a foreigner so far from Belgrade, 165 miles away. He was standing among rows of cherry trees on the road to Pristina, the capital of Kosovo. He was wearing the basic peasant outfit: rubber boots, dirt-stained trousers, a handmade sweater, and three-day beard stubble. (The only way to tell an old Serbian peasant from an old Albanian peasant is by headgear. The Serbs wear the sajkaca, an oval-shaped wool cap while the older Albanians favor a plis, a conical-shaped felt skullcap.)

In addition to the sajkaca, he had a rifle, a classic, a Soviet-made Simonov with a 10-round magazine. The semiautomatic carbine was leaning against a cherry tree. But he also had rakija, homemade brandy, and I had cigarettes. He was 72 years old, it was a lovely day, and he had a friendly visitor -- time to take a break. I told him I was Irish and he joked, "Did you see what the Americans did to our cigarette factory? They brought their anti-smoking rules all the way to Yugoslavia. Or did they know we were already low in cigarettes and want to make it worse? But maybe they are worried about our health."

Nevertheless, he still hoped to sell this summer's cherry crop, but noted that his best customers were German wholesalers. "You could tell the Germans to stop helping NATO drop bombs," he said with a thin smile. "Might damage the cherries."

And the awful plight of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo?

"I had Albanian friends," the old man said. "They helped me in the harvest and I helped them. But they went with the KLA. Maybe they had to. Who knows? But the KLA started it and now it is us or them, and Kosovo is Serbian -- Kosovo is Serbia. Our monasteries, our churches, are there -- it is our holy place, and NATO won't make it otherwise."

Let me ask you," he continued, "was it better before or after NATO came? And whoever heard of a country that gave up part of its territory without a fight?"

What I have here is a peasant philosopher in a sour-cherry orchard. It's only a matter of time before I get folk wisdom. Sure enough: "There is an old Serbian saying: 'Wait until the bear dances at your door.' The bear is dancing at our door. What Americans need, don't you agree, is the bear dancing at their door? Maybe," he smiled again, broader this time, "you can tell your countrymen that when you go home... to America. Thank you for the cigarettes, and God take care of you."

Down the road, closer to NATO-battered Pristina, small farms looked abandoned. Serbian and Albanian peasants plowed in early March, before Operation Allied Force, hoping they would be around to sow and reap. And Serbs at checkpoints no longer grin and talk basketball. They come out from behind a sandbagged bunker, in a thistle of heavy machine guns and mortar tubes, and wave you off. They point in the direction you just came from -- back to Belgrade.