Milena Malobabic was not a soldier. She did not work for the Yugoslav government. If the soiled blue notebook we found outside the destroyed sanatorium where she was a patient is an indication, the 19-year-old woman suffered from a broken heart as well as tuberculosis.
But yesterday, Milena Malobabic became a statistic - one of the hundreds of Serb and Albanian civilians killed in NATO's bombardment of Yugoslavia. Her body was one of 19 found in the aftermath of the midnight bombing of the sanatorium and an old people's home, set in a forest on the outskirts of this town of Surdulica, in south-eastern Serbia, near the Bulgarian border. Staff fear more bodies will be found in a collapsed wing of the hospital.
The blue notebook lay on the ground about 20 metres from the row of bodies in the sun-dappled shade of the trees.
Milena's body was the last in the row, and she was a sadly pretty girl, with black hair and silver hoop earrings, whose blue-green eyes seemed to stare out in pain, even in death. She was one of a family of four treated for tuberculosis at the sanatorium.
"This notebook is dedicated to Dejan," she had written inside the front cover, entwining her beloved's 1972 birth date with her own. "If you only knew how much I suffer now," she began a poem in Serbian, the first letters of which formed an acrostic of his name. "Maybe it's wrong, but I want to go back to you. Your Milena still loves you, but I feel the wound . . ."
The other men and women who lay on bloodstained white sheets must also have had their personal dramas, joys and tragedies, like Milena, totally and perhaps deliberately buried in the ascetic casualty figures that come out of war, in the cold language of military briefers.
The face of the old woman lying next to Milena was horribly disfigured - as if melted - by the bomb blast.
Another old woman in a flowered nightgown wore lavender fingernail polish. Her arms were peppered with shrapnel and although her eyes were closed peacefully, blood glistened bright red on a wound that looked as if someone had driven a spike into the centre of her forehead.
A civil defence worker wearing a surgical mask lifted the sheet covering another old woman's shredded body; it was swarming with flies.
Blue-uniformed rescue squads kept emerging from the ruins carrying white sheets in which they had wrapped viscera and body parts.
"I am beginning to think that Surdulica is doomed," Dusan Petkovic, the town's English teacher, said. "We have been bombed four times, and this is the second time they killed more than 20 civilians."
On April 27th, NATO bombed residential areas of Surdulica, missing an already destroyed army barracks 500 metres away.
One old man, Vojislav Milic, is a living martyr here because his wife, son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren were all killed when a bomb exploded in his basement shelter.
I asked for news of the old man I had seen weeping in the street outside his destroyed home on April 28th. Townspeople told me that he posts photographs of his lost loved ones everywhere, has twice attempted suicide and is kept under permanent sedation by the cousins who look after him.
Yesterday's bombing occurred just after midnight, and there were four detonations. "When I got here, there was smoke everywhere and people were screaming for help," said Branislav Ristic, the local civil defence commander.
Blankets, mattresses, splintered wood and chunks of concrete were scattered for hundreds of metres around the sanatorium. Patients' clothing hung high in the dusty branches of pine and birch trees like scarecrows.
One wing of the building was pancaked by the explosions; in the corridors of the other wing, broken glass crunched under our feet as we peered into rooms with twin beds, brightly painted chairs and tables, bookshelves and family photos: the little world of the tuberculosis patients.
The granite sign outside the gate at the bottom of the sanatorium's tree-lined driveway clearly identifies it as a hospital for tuberculosis and lung disease.
It has been in the same place for the past 75 years, and, doctors said, "was well known - like Davos in Switzerland".
So why did NATO violate the Geneva Convention by bombing a hospital for the second time in 11 days? (Four civilians were killed when NATO struck a hospital in Belgrade on May 20th.)
The NATO spokesman, Jamie Shea, knew nothing about the sanatorium in Surdulica; NATO had targeted only a barracks and munitions dump, he claimed.
True, the newly bombed sanatorium and old folks' home I saw were rectangular, two-storey constructions - like many barracks in Yugoslavia. But if that is justification for bombing, we could see many thousands more civilian casualties before this war is over.
NATO dropped four bombs precisely on the two buildings, which are surrounded by forest and have no other buildings nearby.
Mr Ristic was equally adamant when he insisted that there were no military targets in the area. "This is not collateral damage," he said. "If there is anything military, it is far away."
But there was something about the way policemen stood every 10 metres along the drive that made us wonder.
We accepted Mr Ristic's offer to "have a look around", and, in a brief walk through a small part of the sanatorium's forest, found 16 slit trenches, each wide and deep enough for a soldier or two to shelter from bombardment. We found two campfires, their ashes still warm.
An official from Belgrade suggested that these indications of military presence had to do with protecting a radio relay station a kilometre away.
Serb forces hide behind civilians, and civilians get killed when NATO tries to get at the Serb military. If the destruction of Surdulica sanatorium proves anything, it is just how dirty this war has become.