This was not Sarajevo, this was Dubrovnik, Croatia. I was born in Dubrovnik and lived there until I was 27. I moved to Bosnia when I married a girl from Sarajevo.
I was 14 when war started so I wasn't in army but my brother was a commander of all forces in that particular side of city defense (just before war he finished serving in military school of Yugoslavian Army) and 80% of all soldiers in that area were my neighbours, so I was spending days on their reserve positions most of the time in first year until we pushed Serbs back from the city and our forces moved to the suburbs and further to the border with Bosnia and Montenegro.
The war over there was bit more relaxed than what you were seeing from Bosnia. In first few days they pushed us very easily (we barely had anyone under arms) to the very outskirts of city center and then it was few months of stationary war with occasional shelling. Dubrovnik was always well known in the World, so they never went full dippers against us, because whenever they started to shell and attack bit harder, Unesco who had Old City under it's flag or someone else from Europe would intervene and save our arses. There were only few very dangerous situations early in the war when there was a real threat our defense could fall apart and maybe 10-15 days of heavy, heavy shelling when you couldn't move your nose out, but out of that there were periods when it was pretty calm or you would get few mortars on the city here and there.
It lasted a lot though, it was almost 4 years between first shelling of the city to the last one. But at times, specially in last year or two, there would be periods of months when city itself wouldn't get any fire, the fights were going on 20-30 kilometers away and even there it was a low intensity unless some big operation was going on. Dubrovnik battlefield was pretty much done back in 1992-93, but it was still there until 1995. as there were fights in other parts of the country. I was going to school for all period of war except the first few months.
The interesting part is that first day of the war was the day that should be my very first day of high school. I was very proud of finally being a big boy and when I woke up that morning and saw it's 2 hours late of when I should be in school, I got mad at my mom why she didn't wake me up, she just said go out, you'll see. I went to the backyard and you could heard a noise of heavy shelling from somewhere far. That same night first mortars felt in my neighbourhood, few houses just around mine were hit. Fucking hell, the war started at worst time possible in my life. Lost the best years of it.
Sarajevo, though, was the hell on the Earth for 4 years. What people here survived during that time is monumental stuff. They were hungry, thirsty, frozen. When the war ended, there was no piece of furniture in any house, they used it all to get some heat in winters that were the colder than any since the war finished. It was tough here.
