Jennings (left) and McMahon, with Blackhawk. Photograph: Mark R. Turney

Over a crackling phone connection, U.S. Army officers Phil Jennings and Jim McMahon describe the weather on an October evening at Camp Bondsteel, Kosovo: blustery and cool, like fall in New England, only the air is thickened with soot from the region’s Communist-era, coal-fired electric plants. Since November 2006, the men have been among 1,500 U.S. soldiers and 1,000 multinational personnel assigned to the sprawling 900-acre military base that Jennings describes as a “fortified city” (complete with movie theater and fast-food restaurants). The two met at an intramural softball game last August: Jennings was conversing with a chaplain who happened to be wearing a Notre Dame cap; McMahon, a fellow spectator, noted the headgear and told the priest, “You know, Father, I’m all about BC.”

For nearly 10 years, NATO-led multinational task forces (including the U.S.-led troops at Camp Bondsteel) have maintained an uneasy peace in Kosovo, a small region in the south of Serbia under territorial dispute between ethnic Albanians (mostly Muslim) and Serbs (mostly Christian). As the senior pilot for the commanding general of the U.S. forces in Kosovo, Jennings, a senior warrant officer with the Wisconsin National Guard, spends up to four hours a day, six days a week, in a UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter. McMahon, a captain and company commander with the Massachusetts National Guard, leads ground missions “outside the wire” of the camp’s perimeter, in war-ravaged cities where ethnic tensions simmer. Seven days a week, he and his soldiers patrol the streets, sometimes brokering civic and humanitarian projects with local civilian leaders through their Serbian and Albanian translators, coordinating U.S. aid through funding mechanisms set up by the U.S. military’s European command: a new roof for a Soviet-era schoolhouse, for example, or medical assistance programs to treat both Serbs and Albanians. “Sometimes, it’s simply a pickup soccer game,” he says, “just to get kids from different [ethnic groups] on the same team.”

The soldiers were due to complete their tours in November, with McMahon to resume teaching middle school history, and Jennings, a lawyer, returning to his real estate–related businesses. It will be at least 17 months before either redeploys to another hostile-fire zone—as Kosovo, with its fragile peace, is termed. “This is peace enforcement, not peacekeeping,” says Jennings. “We’re always a nine-iron shot from a war zone.”

Read more by Cara Feinberg