Nurdzihana: Serbs who left their flats just before the war gave us their keys and asked us to water their flowers and feed their fish. No one said anything about the horror to come.

Rada: We were like calves grazing by an active volcano.

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The story of vulnerable women has already been written. The untold tale is women's extraordinary ability to survive the eruption, transform suffering into savvy, and challenge assumptions about why their worlds were torn apart. From these accounts emerges a wisdom that will startle those who believe Balkan people will always be fighting.

I didn't want to compile a book of war stories. But even though the bulk of our interviews took place after the war, and my interviewees knew my focus was on how they are rebuilding their country, the women talking with me couldn't describe their current activities without recounting memories that spilled messily across whatever else was our topic at hand. The stories weren't told chronologically: a word from me or idea from them might uncork a sequence whose logic was only in the living. Nor was the telling optional. The women's post-conflict work was built on the foundation of their war experience: not just physical losses or emotional travails, but courage that emerged from the wounds of war and energy that was summoned as they responded to the violence.