For an American reporter in Belgrade, every day brings more than its quota of irony -- sometimes tinged with more than a little hostility. PNS commentator 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, Yugoslavia-- Western reporters frequently complain of a "hole in the conversation" whenever the subject of Kosovo comes up in Belgrade.

Not long ago an American reporter asked four Belgraders, "Is anything being done in Kosovo, in the name of the Serbian people, that Serbs should be ashamed of?" After an uncomfortable pause, a Belgrade woman asked, "Are you ashamed of what NATO is doing in your name?"

"I don't think that's the same thing," the reporter said.

"Really?" replied the Belgrader.

End of conversation. A definite hole.

A similar hole quickly developed when a BBC reporter in London called a woman in Belgrade. This woman comes from a family that for 100 years produced ministers and ambassadors serving Yugoslav royalist governments but fought with the communist Partisans during WW II. She lives in a neighborhood where a hospital was bombed, killing three patients, and where NATO weapons damaged the homes of the ambassadors from Sweden, Switzerland, India, and Slovakia.

When the BBC reporter called after a particularly bad night of bombing, the woman said she did not have time to talk, as she was caring for her two young, frightened daughters.

"I would think that you, of all people, would care not only for your own children, but Albanian refugees as well," persisted the London reporter. The Belgrader said: "Albanian refugees have you, and 18 other powerful nations, to care for them. My children, however, have only me."

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If Yugoslavs deplore Americans, they detest Britons, their close allies in two world wars -- in particular Prime Minister Tony Blair and Foreign Secretary Robin Cook. "I'd like to shoot them both in the head," says a diminutive 45-year-old Belgrade woman, who claims she has always abhorred violence in any form.

Nonetheless, when the British say what they want to hear, Belgraders pass it around the city like priceless jewels. Retired British general Sir Michael Rose, who held command positions in the Falklands War, Northern Ireland, and was commander of the U.N. Protection Force in Bosnia in 1994, advising NATO: "Head for the door marked EXIT." Or playwright Harold Pinter contending that NATO's attitude towards Serbs can be summed up as: "Kiss my ass or I'll kick your head in."

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All over Belgrade, in fields and recreational areas, older people who lived through WW II and the lean post-war years, are picking mayweed. Soon they will collect blossoms from lime trees. Both the blossoms and the Daisy-like mayweed, better known as chamomile, make good teas. An old man, wearing a jaunty tweed cap and carrying a cherrywood stick, said: "You Americans may know bombs but you don't know survival. I advise you to convert your electrical stove to wood and coal, and keep flour, cooking oil, onions and potatoes in the house at all times. It's going to be a cold winter and food will be scarce."

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There is a rumor in Belgrade that Gen. Wesley Clark, supreme commander of NATO's Operation Allied Force, has a personal beef with Serbs.

My research shows that if anyone has a reason to be ticked off at Serbs it has to be Clark.

In August 1994, during the Bosnian War, Gen. Clark, then Head of Operations at the Pentagon, met the Bosnian Serb general, Ratko Mladic, in the town of Banja Luka, Bosnia.

After berating Clark for several minutes, Mladic abruptly changed tactics and began admiring the U.S. general's uniform. Before the meeting was over the two generals exchanged caps. Mladic also presented Clark with a gift -- a pistol engraved "From General Mladic."

This was, to say the least, a public relations blunder. Mladic was later indicted for wars crimes by the Hague Tribunal and the Washington Post reported, somewhat unfairly, that the cap exchange incident was "like cavorting with Hermann Goering."

Gen. Sir Michael Rose of Great Britain, then commander of the U.N. Protection Force in Bosnia, who was present at the meeting, thought Mladic had made a fool of Clark. "It was horrible to watch," Rose wrote in "Fighting for Peace," his book on Bosnia.

But that wasn't the end of it. Clark's cap, adorned with the three silver stars of a lieutenant general, was later returned to him by none other than Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, NATO's arch enemy and President Clinton's designated "Hitler" of the Balkans.

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Two Western television crews, one Greek, the other American, visited a day-care center. The Greeks passed out pens reading "Books Not Bombs."

Two days later, while watching TV with his mother, my eight-year-old neighbor, Bogdan, realized that Americans had been in his center. He asked his mother, "Aren't those the people who are bombing us?"

"Well, not specifically those Americans," she said.

Bogdan, however, had already picked up his toy submachine gun and was rushing out of the apartment. She asked him where he was going.

"To shoot the American," he said happily. Meaning me.