June 1999

Maybe it was because so many before me had arrived there, but I always imagined New York. Walking the streets like in Sting’s song. I would be an alien, a legal alien—not an Englishman, but still walking in New York.
But someone, somewhere stared at a map of the U.S. and thought: Texas has space. Jobs. She’ll do fine there.
So, I landed at DFW Airport—on a one-way ticket from Serbia.

The heat hit first.
I thought it must be from the jet engines—that once we left the airport, it would cool off.
It didn’t.
I felt like we’d ascended into another layer of the sky—and landed without ever coming back down.
The heat bent the air—everything was real and unreal at once.
Close enough to seem solid—but not quite.
I didn’t know it then, but distortions would dominate a good chunk of my life in America.
The heat was just the beginning.

Then the scale hit.
Airport, cars, highways, houses—everything was oversized.
Even the sounds—layered, endless, too many kinds at once.
Nothing moved the way I expected.
Luggage had wheels.
Airport cleaners didn’t use brooms and buckets—they steered machines.

A man picked me up in an old red convertible—someone sent by the agency that arranged my relocation. He’d arrived from Bosnia a year earlier.
He dropped the top, cranked the A/C, and blasted ex-YU music—Bijelo Dugme, a song about a guy who lost a girl’s number and now calls random strangers, hoping one of them is her.
“It’s to help you transition gradually,” he said, smiling.
“I’ll close the roof once we hit the highway. For now, feel the wind in your hair.”
It’s like he knew I’d remember this day. Like he’d planned it—the car, the music, the wind in my hair. But the music didn’t soften the strangeness. It sharpened it. Maybe that was his intention all along.
We drove off.

He dropped me off at the $400-a-month apartment, prepaid for three months.
Wall-to-wall carpeting—soft enough to sleep on. In Bosnia, rugs got dragged outside and hosed down. How do I clean something I can’t drag?
My new home was in a quiet suburb on the west side of Fort Worth, in a place called White Settlement—a name that didn’t strike me as odd until much later.
Quiet—except for the air force jets tearing through the silence. Lockheed Martin was nearby. Every time they roared overhead, I stopped. Braced.

Days earlier, I was in a warzone.
NATO had been bombing Serbia for 78 days.
I arrived in America on the 69th.
I waited for years for my U.S. immigration application to be processed and approved. By the time my passport was finally stamped, Serbia was under attack.
It was my adopted country. Or maybe the one that adopted me.
After the war in Bosnia, it had become my second home.
And now my third home—the U.S.—was bombing my second.
NATO—a superpower in the sky—against Serbia, a small country on the ground, scrambling with aged weaponry, outmatched before the fight even began.
I was too desperate to say no to the stamp. Or maybe I wasn’t. Maybe I just didn’t have enough courage. Or principles. We were still living in a refugee camp in Serbia. And I was too afraid a bomb might find me.
So I packed. And left.
I flew straight into the arms of the war maker.
It wasn’t the first time.
Serbia had helped fan the flames of the Bosnian war years earlier—and I had flown into its arms, too.
Always into the arms of the troublemakers.
I’ve been luckier with men than with countries.

In Serbia, I lived on a mountain near the broadcast towers NATO often targeted, hoping to disrupt news and media. After the strikes, even though our parents warned us to avoid sites that might still carry traces of uranium, my friends and I snuck into the woods to find them.
Craters were massive—forty feet wide.
But the trees were more haunting than the craters.
Freshly felled, sliced mid-air as if an axe had passed through.
Still green. Still alive.
Interrupted in the middle of living.
I touched them. I don’t know why.
I was alive. They would dry out and die.
So random—
where they stood, and where I stood, in that moment in time.

I left Serbia, but my body still braced.
Jets passed, but the concussive strikes never came.
Here in America, there were no roars, no explosions.
Only sky—endless, harmless.
The jets weren’t dropping bombs here.
Just training.
Training to drop bombs elsewhere.