SOLDIERS MISSING; 3 U.S. MEN UNDER FIRE POSSIBLY ABDUCTED BY SERBS.

Byline: Richard Parker John Donnelly and Barbara Demick Knight Ridder Newspapers

American troops in Macedonia searched with helicopters late Wednesday for three U.S. soldiers who had possibly been abducted by Serb troops. Their last radio communication was that ``they were being fired upon and surrounded,'' a Pentagon official said.

There was no immediate word on their whereabouts, said Col. Richard Bridges, a senior Pentagon spokesman.

The disappearance of the three men is certain to increase the political volatility of the NATO air war against the Serbs and could erode American public support for the effort to stop the army of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, even as President Clinton made additional efforts Wednesday night to state his case for fighting for Kosovo.

The missing soldiers were driving a Humvee on a reconnaissance patrol in Macedonia about three miles from the Kosovo border near the town of Kumanovo, Bridges said. They were last heard from at 2:30 to 3 p.m. Wednesday local time. The soldiers were traveling with possibly three other Humvees. The patrol was described as routine.

The Humvees were traveling off-road over rough terrain and had lost sight of each other, but were in radio contact, Bridges said. The troops in the other Humvees looked for the soldiers who were being shot at but couldn't find them. Participating in the search were 80 to 90 soldiers aboard U.S. Blackhawk helicopters and two British helicopters.

The soldiers were part of a 350-person U.S. contingent of the now-disbanded U.N. peacekeeper observers in Macedonia known as Operation Able Sentry. After the United Nations ended the observer mission, the 350 soldiers were assigned to help protect a NATO force of 10,000 soldiers who are on standby for peacekeeping in Kosovo.

The three are from the U.S. Army's 1st Infantry Division in Germany. Next of kin were being notified that the three were missing, the Pentagon said.

There have been no U.S. casualties in the first eight days of NATO's air war, which is aimed at stopping a Serb military offensive against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. On Saturday night, an air commando unit dramatically rescued an American pilot whose F-117A stealth fighter was downed about 30 miles northwest of Belgrade, the Yugoslavia capital.

Clinton strategy

Clinton said the NATO air campaign against Serb military targets in Yugoslavia had a ``reasonably good chance of succeeding - maybe even a better chance of succeeding as long as we have more and more steel and will and determination and unity from all our NATO allies.''

``And I want to pursue that strategy,'' Clinton told CBS television. ``The thing that bothers me about introducing ground troops into a hostile situation into Kosovo and into the Balkans is the prospect of never being able to get them out.''

He spoke as Serb troops ratcheted up their village-by-village campaign of sending ethnic Albanians out of Kosovo, which the Serbs see as the cradle of their civilization.

NATO's response was to widen the area of airstrikes. They hit several targets in Kosovo in daylight hours. Next, presumably, would be many government buildings in the Yugoslav capital of Belgrade.

But NATO's military commander, U.S. Gen. Wesley Clark, said even if he got the additional firepower he requested from NATO allies, it would not be enough to stop the attacks against civilians, which are reportedly spearheaded by irregular Serb militia units.

``We can't stop paramilitary actions from the air,'' Clark told reporters. ``We've slowed him (Milosevic) down and we've hurt him, but we never thought air power alone can stop this kind of paramilitary tragedy.''

Refugee account

Refugees reaching the Kosovo-Macedonia border said that Kosovo's provincial capital of Pristina was being systematically emptied of residents, and that tens of thousands of people had left their homes and were walking toward Macedonia. In Bonn, German Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping cited growing evidence of ``concentration camps like there were in Bosnia.''

The State Department also reported that as many as 20,000 ethnic Albanians were being force-marched from the town of Cirez, summary executions had taken place in at least 20 towns and villages and at least 13 villages had been burned to the ground.

On top of that came a NATO report that echoed the Holocaust, that Serb troops were on a campaign bent on erasing evidence that ethnic Albanians had ever lived in Kosovo.

``The Yugoslav forces, so we are learning, are destroying the archives of the Kosovar people,'' NATO spokesman Jamie Shea said. ``Property deeds, marriage licenses, birth certificates, financial and other records, public records, are being systematically destroyed.

``This is a kind of Orwellian scenario of attempting to deprive a people and a culture of the sense of past and the sense of community on which it depends,'' he said.

When a Serb offensive started 13 months ago against a secessionist Kosovar guerrilla force, the ethnic Albanians accounted for 90 percent of the 2 million people there. Now, about 600,000 of those Albanians have fled their homes, and at least one-fifth have left Kosovo.

Serb headquarters

In NATO's air campaign, the U.S. Defense Department announced that forces attacked the headquarters of an elite Serbian special force near Belgrade on Tuesday night. The attack was the closest bombing yet to the city of Belgrade, the Pentagon said. And preliminary reports indicate that NATO forces hit tanks and other heavy military vehicles in Kosovo, but cloudy skies prevented aerial verification by photograph.

Defense Department spokesman Kenneth Bacon said the number of Serbian targets is expanding ``almost daily'' in an attempt to choke off Milosevic's ``continued brutality on ethnic Albanians.''

But a visit to two NATO bombing targets Wednesday suggested that allied airstrikes may not be having the effect NATO planners desired.

In Cacha, a middle-sized provincial city in southern Serbia with heavy and light manufacturing facilities, strikes pulverized the Sloboda (``Liberation'') factory Tuesday night. Three Western journalists who toured the site, about 2-1/2 hours south of Belgrade, found every building in the complex reduced to rubble, almost all of it smaller than a person's hand. Yugoslav officials said the factory had manufactured vacuum cleaners, stoves, hair dryers and other appliances, and a large number of battered vacuums were strewn around the wreckage.

Several prominent former U.S. government officials Wednesday called for President Clinton to send in ground troops.

``We're in a war, and we need to recognize that it's a war and allow our military to do what is necessary to prevail in that conflict,'' said Frank Carlucci, a former U.S. secretary of defense, at a briefing held in Washington by the Balkan Action Council, a think tank that studies the region. ``If it means troops on the ground, then so be it, even recognizing that this is an extraordinarily difficult place to fight a land war and that it would take time to get troops in.''