Into Hell’s Fire

Travel Guide

Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo, Croatia

Douglas Cavanaugh travelled many times to the Balkans in the 1990s. He arrived in Croatia in 1996, not long after the country’s Homeland War had ended, and just after the final shots in neighboring Bosnia and Herzegovina had been fired. It was his earliest memories of Croatia’s war-ravaged countryside that inspired the background for this novel.

Cavanaugh’s daily contact with many veterans and civilians demonstrated other ramifications of war that might have otherwise remained unrealized. “By the end of that decade,” he remarked in an interview, “post-traumatic stress syndrome was epidemic. Many people I met had immediate family members who had been killed. Countless others had been separated from their families and friends who had been relocated to other parts of the world. That sort of a forced separation can be brutal on an individual. And more than a few people told me how they had lost everything they owned, and how it all seemed to have happened overnight. Thankfully, a state of normalcy has returned to the region in recent years, though the local economies are still on the mend. Many other wounds will need more time to heal. I was quite naive as to how the world really works when I first arrived. Living abroad has been a fantastic, eye-opening experience for me that I would recommend to anyone who is contemplating it – though it’s not for everyone,” Cavanaugh noted.