"Re: Be Careful - Bosnia's Crazy."

And that was the extent of the email. Nothing in the body. Subject line only. Wes had made his point, and he didn't even have to take the time to erase the automatically-inserted reply moniker. Busy at his job back in the real world, in less than ten seconds he had highlighted, typed, and sent all that he wanted me to know: Billyparsley@gmail, consider yourself warned.

The brevity of Wes' message -- the fact that it ran full speed into the bush, rather than beating around it -- gives a great glimpse into the average American's image of Bosnia: When it comes to visiting this crazy country somewhere in the Balkans -- or is it the Baltics? -- wherever it is, when it comes to visiting this crazy country made famous by CNN, you'd better remember one thing: Be Careful - Bosnia's Crazy.

Exhibit A on the power of the media to shape perception.

After all, who the hell in our country knows anything about Bosnia? Besides the fact that there was a war there, and that it was a "problem from hell" that the phrase "ethnic cleansing" was coined as a way of describing what was going on in this place while I was playing Little League baseball and watching the OJ car chase from the upper middle-class, suburban comforts of Houston, Texas.

And isn't there another word that follows "Bosnia" in the country's official name? How do you spell it again? "H-E-R-C-E-G-O-V-I-N-A." You could probably get some face time on Sportscenter for nailing that one at the Scripps Howard National Bee.

It is precisely for these reasons that I came to BiH.

You see, I'm no different from Wes. My birth certificate says "Robert Bayless Parsley," but it could just as easily say "John Doe American." As recently as seven days ago, I, too, instinctively got tense at the thought of crossing over the border from Montenegro into chaos. I had been reading The Death of Yugoslavia, after all -- a heart-warming tale of penultimate irony: Organized religion serving as the moral justification for organized mass murder; patriotic nationalism leading to the de facto partition of a country recognized (sans partition) by the UN just before its descent into the inferno. Not exactly the literature the Bosnia and Hercegovina Ministry of Tourism gives out to travelers considering coming to its country.

When Communism's walls came crashing down, so did the ability of the Yugoslav system to squash the nationalist aspirations of its member republics, or "nationalities," as they were known under Tito. After centuries of domination -- whether it be under the boot of the Magyars, the Venetians, the Turks, the Austro-Hungarians, the Nazis or the Yugoslav partisans -- the cat was out of the bag for Croats, Serbs and Muslims alike.

This posed an especially large problem in Bosnia and Hercegovina.

I mentioned religion. I mentioned flag-wavers. But geography is what we should be blaming the most. To the west and north of BiH, Croatia. To the east and south, Serbia and its former kid brother, Montenegro. Quite simply put, many of Bosnia's own citizens had always viewed the very idea of a Bosnian state as a historical farce. The Muslims -- fellow Slavs -- were simply remnants of the stain of Ottoman occupation; people who "caved" by converting to Islam after the Serbian defeat at Kosovo in 1389 opened the floodgates of the Balkan Peninsula to the turbaned-invaders from the East. This fixation on righting centuries of wrongs became a dangerous problem in the early 1990s, when the terms "Greater Serbia" and "Greater Croatia" entered the lexicon of Balkan politics on a grand scale.

Had Bosnia and Hercegovina simply been a nation composed of Catholics (ethnic Croats) and Orthodox Christians (ethnic Serbs), it would have been a much simpler fight. Slobodan Milosevic, the leader of "rump Serbia," would have supported the Bosnian Serbs in a struggle for territory against Croatian president Franjo Tudjman's proxy warriors, the Bosnian Croats. They would've duked it out; to the victors would have gone the spoils. Each nation would have likely been enlarged. It would have been ugly, but it would have been easy to understand. The problem, however, was the equation's x-factor. An x-factor that made the most recent Balkan War an extra bloody affair.

The Bosnian Muslims, who happened to live among the ethnic Croat and Serb citizens of BiH. They were a nuisance. They were a roadblock. They would have to be "cleansed."

Sure, there were ethnic Serbs and ethnic Croats who fought to preserve the internationally-recognized borders of BiH -- I have met a few already, and they are as far removed from Islam as Jerry Falwell. But to simplify the problem -- something our mass media is so adept at doing -- it was a free-for-all in this country between three groups: Croats (Catholics), Serbs (Orthodox) and Bosniaks (Muslims).

Ethnic cleansing, double-dealing, alliances forged, broken and then re-forged, political infighting, acts of genocide, international complacency and "sympathy," UN negotiations, NATO threats and pin pricks, destruction of cities, destruction of tolerance, destruction of co-existence between people who are, for all intents and purposes, of the same Slavic family tree...

The story of the war in Bosnia and Hercegovina is as complicated as an organic chemistry textbook, read as a beachside novel.

But the war did end. The killing ended. As did the dream of a unified Bosnia and Hercegovina -- too many of its own citizens actively fought and died for its demise for it to have survived four years of bloodshed brought on by religious hypocrisy, fear, geography and historical score-settling. Today, over a decade after the Dayton Accords ended the slaughter, the nation known as "Bosnia and Hercegovina" is a political Rubik's Cube: Two semi-autonomous regions -- the Muslim-Croat Federation and the Republika Srpksa -- under one central government in Sarajevo. A rotating, three-member presidency that swaps a Serb, Croat and Muslim member on the seat of power every eight months. A looming storm cloud that threatens to erupt once more in a country that still has issues with the idea of loving thine enemy.

And I've been studying this for less than one month. There's no way I could possibly understand the intricacies of the deep-rooted problems in Bosnian and Hercegovinian society just from reading a book or two, even if I stayed for a year, and read a book or hundred. People who lived through the war don't even understand all the problems, of their own admission.

But there is hope. For every Croat nationalist I meet, I come across a member of the "human race" as well. For every icy-cold stare I received in the one day I spent in Republika Srpska, I received a warm smile from people I couldn't imagine hating someone who looked just like them, simply because they touch their forehead to the pavement five times a day. My mission in Bosnia and Hercegovina -- just as it was in Croatia, and will be in Serbia -- is to experience the hatred, and to experience the love between people as well. I want proof that a middle road does exist. That, though the ideal of a giant group hug between Croats, Serbs and Bosniaks may be impossible, a smaller group hug is within reach.

This is the stuff you can't learn in books. History in the making; an ongoing drama, performed in the flesh and blood. Maybe I'm not Hitting the Snooze Button On Life, after all. Because to me, right now, I am doing more living than I've ever done before.