For almost a year, Dr. Hasim Resic performed surgery in an underground hospital. Actually, his surgical ward was a maze of interconnected truck containers, eighteen-wheelers, buried underground. Since they were underground, Resic and his staff were able to work through mortar attacks, although they could hear the shelling above them in East Mostar. The electricity generally lasted only an hour or two. Resic often resorted to meatball surgery which saved time, conserved supplies. Once, he did a hernia operation in ten minutes, using only a local anesthetic so he could save the general anesthetics for more serious injuries. He treated too many young people with bleeding ulcers, removed far too many limbs. This is life for a surgeon in Bosnia.

"You can't believe what I've seen," he said in an interview during a recent trip to the United States. "In Prijedor before the war, I operated on every people--Bosnians, Serbs, Muslims, Croats. I have been a doctor thirty-five years--saw everything--but nothing like this. Many times I dream I am in Prijedor during the massacres. Seven thousand young men killed. They are idiots. Many of my friends were killed. Seven good doctors."

After the Serbs overran his hospital in Prijedor, Resic worked twenty straight days with a gun literally held to his head. "If you made a mistake, you were done," he said. He survived largely because he had treated many Serbs before the war. But he was never sure how long his grace period would last. "I saved many of my friends' sons and daughters. But when the war came, they said to my wife, 'Don't ask us for help. The Serb soldiers will know and kill us.'"

Resic came to the U.S. last summer, accompanying a fourteen-year-old boy named Aldin, who had a congenital abnormality of the blood vessels in his left leg. Resic feared that without sophisticated treatment, Aldin would lose his leg. Resic knew the boy's best friend had lost both of his legs and now spends all his time sitting in his basement. He couldn't let that happen to Aldin, too. So, with funding from a New England-based, children's relief group called Nobody's Children, Resic brought Aldin to Massachusetts General Hospital, where he was treated successfully.