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A free Croatia was emerging. Political parties sprouted like wildflowers. Zovko and his brother spent the summer hanging out in cafes with their cousins, dancing in discos and going to the beach.

Yet, as the teenagers partied, the Balkans began to implode. Serbian-controlled Yugoslavia sent tanks into Croatia.

Back in the States, Zovko left Ohio State University and dropped his plans to become a psychiatrist. He joined the Army.

And he grew. Once among the scrawny kids in his high school, always smaller than his athletic younger brother, he shot up six inches. His mother said it was drinking the water from his ancestral village that did it.

Army training added muscle. Soon he was an imposing sight: 6 feet 3 inches, 235 pounds.

'Mother' Zovko

Before going to Bosnia in 1995, Zovko would pile his platoon buddies at Fort Bragg into a battered orange VW van and go surfing at the beach, or to a bar in Southern Pines called Brook's, where the owner called Zovko "Mother" because he stood back and looked after his buddies like a mother hen.

Sending Zovko to Bosnia made sense. U.S. troops were there in late 1995 to keep the peace. Zovko's first language was Croatian, and he had spent summers in Croatia.

He went under an assumed name; the name tag on his camouflage fatigues said "Riley" to mask his Croatian heritage. He saw relatives on the street but couldn't wave or acknowledge them. None recognized the giant U.S. soldier as their small cousin who had visited just a few years earlier.

Jusip Bevanda, a childhood friend, thought Zovko was involved in covert operations. Ron Slusarsky, a friend from Euclid and an Army veteran, said Zovko witnessed the aftermath of several massacres.

"He saw some action, it was heavy, he was more reserved, probably matured a lot there, and was done playing games with us kids," said Hadfield, the friend from Zovko's military police platoon.

For the first time since third or fourth grade, Danica Zovko saw her son cry. A close friend -- Zovko called him Baker -- was killed. It should have been me, Zovko told his mother.

Zovko tried to move up to the Green Berets, his colleagues said. But an injury slowed his training, and his independent streak got in the way; Hadfield said he was voted out by others in his Special Forces unit for being too unconventional.

So in 1997, Zovko left the Army. He went to work in an industry unknown to most Americans: private military contracting.

Changing culture

For most of the 20th century, the U.S. military had been largely self-sufficient on the battlefield. In the 1990s, during the first Bush administration and under President Clinton, that began to change.

During the first gulf war, one of 50 people on the battlefield was a private contractor. In Bosnia, that ratio was one in 10. Contractors maintained complicated weapons systems, analyzed intelligence, delivered mail, delivered fuel and ran computers.

They also helped the United States put more troops in the field. Congress had capped the number of troops in Bosnia at 20,000; hiring more than 2,000 contractors allowed a bigger U.S. presence. Contracting allowed the military to put more "shooters" on the front lines without officially swelling the ranks.

Zovko's first post-Army job was in Qatar, where he worked with DynCorp, a military contractor. While he kept in close touch with family and friends, calling from Qatar or Dubai or Thailand, he told them little about his work.

Bevanda, the childhood friend who now works in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, says Zovko called him often. Bevanda would often come home and find a wordless message on his answering machine: Zovko barking like a dog, laughing and hanging up.

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