By Elizabeth Valk Long

If you're going to be a journalist in Bosnia, having an armored car is helpful. In 1993 TIME equipped its team of reporters covering the conflict in the former Yugoslavia with a reinforced white Chevy pickup truck. This hard-shelled vehicle showed its mettle during the bombardment of Sarajevo two weeks ago. Christopher Morris, TIME's chief photographer in the region, drove it near the city's Jewish cemetery, an area that had come under heavy attack from Bosnian Serbs. He left the truck to take some pictures, and soon after, it was strafed by bullets and shrapnel -- none of which penetrated its protective layers. Morris, meanwhile, was pinned down for two hours by snipers before French troops came to his rescue. "I'd have been better off in the truck," says Morris. The vehicle was up and running again a day later, though bearing plenty of battle scars. "Now it's a beaten-up Sarajevo truck," Morris concedes. "But it gets a lot of respect."

As does TIME's whole brave Balkans team, which last week also included correspondents Ed Barnes in Belgrade and Massimo Calabresi in Zagreb and reporter Alexandra Stiglmayer in Sarajevo. Calabresi, our chief Central European correspondent, just took over the post from James L. Graff, who has moved to the Chicago bureau after three years of dangerous assignments in Bosnia. At times during his tour of duty, Graff drove through sniper fire in an unarmored "soft" car, and once he was held hostage overnight by mujahedin, foreign Islamic soldiers working with Bosnian Muslims. Says Graff: "The thing to do is make sure the risks you're undertaking are commensurate with the story you're getting. It's not a straightforward equation."

One of the most difficult jobs of assistant managing editor Joelle Attinger, who deploys our correspondents around the world, is to help war reporters make life-and-death decisions about when and how to cover the action. "You have to rely more than anything on the reporter's common sense on what risks are worth taking," she says. "Our team, to a person, has been incredibly courageous and enterprising." She's confident that our newest recruit in the Bosnian battle zone, Calabresi, will continue that tradition. Says Attinger: "There's a great curiosity and intensity in Massimo. There's always one more thing for him to find out."