What is it like to live under the NATO bombs and missiles, especially if you are an American? PNS correspondent Terence Sheridan, who has lived in Belgrade since 1992, shares some pages from his diary recorded at the end of April. Sheridan is a former reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- I want to know what they think about the war but they keep asking, What do you think?

I keep it light, I dance, I say I would hate to a Serb in some Chicago bars I know if the role was reversed and Serbs were bombing America.

I carry heavy baggage -- I've been here since 1992 without visible means of support and now Yugoslavia is at war with my country. What do you do, exactly? Not for a minute do they buy the idea that I had a dream: a fly-fishing camp in the mountains of Montenegro, but their wars kept getting in the way of my dream.

Some Belgraders are convinced that I'm a spy -- and if I'm not, it's only because I'm too lazy or too dumb.

Nevertheless, in this fight, I think the Serbs are more right than wrong. When the war started, Kosovo was part of their country, the southern province of a sovereign nation, which in its entire history had never attacked another nation.

A big thing was made of the Serbs not signing the Rambouillet peace agreement. Read it and -- if you can stay awake -- you might come to the conclusion that there's a remarkable resemblance to the nonnegotiable "agreement" Hitler presented to Czechoslovakia in 1938.

Moreover, the day before Operation Allied Force made its move, the Serbian Parliament voted in favor of a two-part decision that said no foreign troops on Serbian soil but allowed for an "international presence" to implement a peace agreement. NATO jumped on the first part, ignored the second, and attacked.

Yes, in Serbia's southern province ethnic Albanians made up an estimated 90 percent of an estimated population of 2 million (no one has taken a census in a long time.) But the ethnic Albanians -- or at least the Kosovo Liberation Army fighting in their name for independence -- started the shooting war by killing four Serbian policemen early in 1998. And every time there was a cease-fire the rebels -- financed in part by drug money provided by an Albanian mafia based in Italy and by the USA, a dirty little secret -- broke it by killing another policeman or kidnapping another Serbian civilian, which caused Serbian security forces, who never needed much encouragement, to pulverize Albanian villages in a disproportionate firestorm.

This was the cycle for a year in Kosovo -- poverty stricken but full of religious and historical sites sacred to Serbs -- until the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a "defensive" organization operating well beyond its charter, colluded with the rebels and massively attacked all of Yugoslavia.

NATO's fundamental motive seems to be: Punish the Serbs -- punish them for their role in civil wars in Croatia, in Bosnia, in Kosovo; punish them for their defiance and for their arrogance.

Above all, punish them for choosing Slobodan Milosevic as their leader -- an authoritarian career Communist who has made Western politicians, diplomats and globe-trotting ego-trippers look like schmucks for over 10 years.

There was no Western intervention on behalf of Africans, Kurds or Chechens -- indeed, no intervention in the 30 or so wars going on in the world at any given time.

As the United Nations grows weaker, a U.S.-led NATO grows stronger, meaning that NATO will decide who is right and who is wrong, reducing "sovereignty" among the have-nots to a once-upon-a-time concept. Those may be the "hoofbeats of approaching history" Secretary of Defense William Cohen talked about during NATO's 50th-year anniversary celebration. Clearly, get in the way of the horses and a small, troublesome country is history, so to speak.

There is, however, enough pity to go around for all. Pity the average ethnic Albanian caught between the KLA and Serbian security forces with NATO ordnance raining on his head. Pity the average Serb who is no more responsible for Serbian atrocities in Kosovo than the average American was for My Lai or Son Thang in Vietnam. Pity the U.S. grunt who may have to fight a nasty ground war against people he doesn't know in a country he has never visited for a cause he doesn't understand -- against people who had a fair to middling culture 300 years before Columbus sighted an island in the Bahamas and called it Asia.

Pity the Serbian minority in Kosovo which will be leaving ancestral homes when the smoke clears and Albanian refugees return to a NATO-imposed protectorate run by Albanians for Albanians. And pity a dream that died a wartime crib death; to lay out a fly line on a tributary of the Tara River in the stunning mountains of Montenegro, followed perhaps by a shore lunch of pan-fried trout with a cold beer or a bottle of the good local wine.