SOLDIERS SETTLE IN QUIET ZONE\Details keeping Bosnian unit busy.

Byline: Ian Fisher The New York Times

Sgt. Stephen Kessler, 31, a calm-eyed veteran of the Persian Gulf War, considered the concrete building to his right: a warehouse stacked with crates of ammunition that Bosnian Serb soldiers have been carting away.

To his left was a loaded anti-aircraft gun on a school playground. He pointed out a ridge to the south, where the night before he saw 11 large-caliber rounds arc across the star-blotted sky.

"To tell you the truth, I feel pretty safe right here," he said, his head poking from the turret of the Bradley fighting vehicle he commands.

"As long as there is this much ammo all around me, I don't think they'd be dropping too many mortar rounds," he said, sounding certain that the Serbs would not risk destroying their ammunition to fire at the 22 U.S. soldiers on this lookout point.

It is almost too easy an image: The NATO-led forces sitting atop the powder keg of Bosnia, placing their own survival in the faith that all sides really do want peace.

But it is an apt description in this speck of a village a mile east of the former front line. Here 86 soldiers from Company C, 4th Battalion, 12th Infantry have erected a muddy encampment of 10 tents, the first U.S. base in this slice of Serbian-held territory south of Tuzla.

And here the hard work of peacekeeping begins. In the four days since they set up camp here, the soldiers have come to realize that their mission must start with a heavy dose of trust.

For the next few weeks the men will be patrolling a 2-1/2-mile-wide strip known as the zone of separation to make sure combatants have pulled back the required distance from the war's front lines.

The Americans watched old Russian-made Serbian tanks blow clouds of smoke as they rattled out of the former war zone, hoping the tanks were moving far out of the area in anticipation of the Friday deadline when they will have to enforce the removal of heavy arms.

Capt. Hugo Jackson, the commander of Company C, is waiting in quiet fury for the delivery of 400 rolls of concertina wire. Now, empty fence posts ring the camp, a breach in security he hopes the Serbs do not wish to take advantage of.

Near dusk Thursday, a shot rang out from over a hill, and the soldiers fixing a generator looked up but did not duck: They assumed it was simply another shot fired in the air, a sight as common here as men strolling the streets with loaded AK-47s.

"Don't worry, I caught it," yelled Sgt. Robert Chandler, the company's 1st sergeant.

Chandler, at 37 what the military calls an "old soldier," worries that the men have adjusted perhaps too well, given the visible dangers all around. Many soldiers in this rural pocket of grazing sheep and crowing roosters, which was spared the ravages of war, find it difficult to imagine any threat to their lives.

"I'm trying to get them scareder," Chandler said.

Pvt. Kenneth James Jr., 18, from Gainesville, Fla., chosen as the company's representative to meet President Clinton in Tuzla this weekend, said he could not understand exactly why the United States is in Bosnia.

"I didn't think we needed to be here," he said. "They really stopped fighting before we got over here." Nothing he has seen since then - the buildings here are still standing, free of the scars of mortar blasts and bullet holes - has convinced him otherwise.

Pfc. Christopher Gaines, 19, from Spartanburg, S.C., said, "The only thing that really freaks me out is that hill over there," referring to a rise to the east. I'm really afraid of snipers and there's hundreds of places they could be."

Nearly three-quarters of the Charlie Company encampment here is situated at the bottom of a lovely valley on an unplowed part of a cornfield. In what commanders say is an early gesture of even-handedness toward the warring sides, an artillery battery will lodge here with guns pointed toward the Muslim side of the front.

Up a small rise are Kessler and company, standing guard in their Bradleys, small and manueverable armored vehicles that sit on the corners of a playground behind a school and near a wooden cross marking the foundation of an unbuilt church.

The biggest worry so far has come from the ammunition warehouse. Since Company C rolled in Tuesday, Bosnian Serb soldiers have been unloading truckload after truckload of ammunition from the warehouse - mortar, small-arms and tank rounds - and storing it at a house in town on the other side of the ridge.

Jackson is eager to go inside the warehouse - he gave it a half-hearted shot Thursday - and hopes to do so formally today, an early deadline for moving weapons back from the zone of separation.

He also is eager to meet again with Serbian military officials to try to clear the streets of the men with guns, former soldiers in a war that is supposed to have ended.

On a patrol of the area around the encampment - passing old personnel carriers, a skinny dog lapping from a frozen puddle, a restaurant named Mir, or Peace ("We serve beef," the sign reads) - he tried to catch the eye of these Serb soldiers.

"I can tell we're going to have a good time with these boys," Captain Jackson said, looking ahead to the difficulties he anticipates. "As soon as I get an interpreter - that's the key - I'm going to tell them there will be no automatic weapons 15 kilometers outside the ZOS," or zone of separation.

"We're going to have a come-to-Jesus meeting," he said. "We're going to have a heart-to-heart talk."

Up the rise from the main camp, Pvt. Michael Freiheit, 18, of Milwaukee, and Pfc. Anthony Cheney, 19, of Brush, Colo., dug a mortar bunker and said they worried that the U.S. attitude on the Serbian side of the line has been chillier than on the Muslim side.

The Serbs already have little trust in U.S. impartiality, the soldiers said, and the strict rules not to talk to locals here, though violated frequently, will not help.

"It's a little tense," Freiheit said, shoveling out the damp earth. "They sent us to keep the peace and stuff, but unless there are good relations, this whole operation is a failure."

Cheney said, "I don't think that people around here fully understand what we're trying to do."

There is plenty of griping, but as Company C approaches the more difficult part of its mission - to enforce the separation, starting Friday - the men still say they find small pleasures.

Bosnian Serb contractors delivered wooden floors to the rest of the tents Friday afternoon, an improvement over the grass. Everyone here agrees that the new "Meals, Ready to Eat," though dated 1993, are actually edible, especially the pork chow mein (Pfc. Jason Alaniz, 19, of Portage, Ind., has made a career out of ensuring that no one else in his tent gets one).

In the greatest boost to morale, the soldiers of Company C finally began to receive mail last week. Sgt. Tom Scott's wife, eight months pregnant, wrote to say their fourth child will be a girl. Specialist Lex Oren's mother reported that the family dog, Baxter, is going to have puppies.

"We thought it was a boy when we got it," Oren said.

And Specialist Jim Allen, 23, of Garden City, Kan., received a note from his wife saying that she had been to see a lawyer and has decided not to divorce him.

Is he happy?

"I am," he said. "Immensely."