She was on board USS Gonzalez as it launched the first cruise missile attacks on Yugoslavia. In the weeks that followed, she reported from the Italian air bases, where British pilots are stationed and she's has flown with the crew of the Awacs, Nato's airborne warning and control centre.

BBC News Online's Joanna Ross puts your questions to Kate Adie

Read Kate Adie's answers to your questions about her reporting of this conflict and about her career with the BBC.

Kate Adie: It's quite tense on the USS Theodore Rooosvelt, an aircraft carrier, huge one with 5,500 people. Those people directly involved in launching the aircraft are "head down", very concentrated and very serious about their work. It's a very serious business. However, the other people on the aircraft carrier, I have to say, pretty well "do the job" - "do my duty" is what they say all the time - and they don't take much interest in why the aircraft are being launched or where they're going. It's just a job. It's a workmanlike atmosphere, but it's very inward looking, it's mechanical and it's without much sense of what's going on in the wider world. It's curious.

Alun Davies, UK: Does the average American sailor, understand what's going on in Kosovo, or is it just another tour of duty?

Kate Adie: They do see it very much as a tour of duty. We asked dozens on board the USS Nicholson and the USS Gonzales, both cruise missile ships, firing thousand-pound rockets off towards Serbia and Kosovo and most of them had not the first clue where the rocket ships were headed, what country it was, why they were going there. There is a frightening ignorance of foreign affairs. I don't expect everybody to know the details but a lot of the people on board didn't know they were firing in earnest - that they were actually operational, that they were actually sending cruise missiles into the sky to explode somewhere. It's a very insular attitude. Not everyone's like that - the senior members of the crew know more. But even then there's very little understanding of what has drawn them into this conflict and a lack of curiosity about it. That's what's really striking and no real wish to know.

Majda, Belgrade: What is it like to be a woman reporter in a war zone? I want to do this in the future so that is why I ask.

Kate Adie: I never desired to go into war zones. I never had any thought about it. It sort of just happened as part of the job. I don't find an advantage or disadvantage in being a woman when reporting. What little advantages there might be in some instances is cancelled out by the basic lack of lavatories round the world for women. It may seem trivial but when you're in a frontline unit with 2,000 men in the desert in Saudi Arabia which is flat and has no sand dunes, no trees and no bushes, there were a number of practical difficulties to say the least. It's just the little practical things that I find a problem. On the other hand I find that if you work as a reporter it's not just war zones where you'll notice there are men in the majority. You go to a political conference, an economic summit, a big sports event - men, men - it's still very much a man's world. So I don't find reporting in wars so different and, never forget, how could anybody, and I think some people do, that in a war 50% of the population are women and they are living through it. Just because many of them are not in the armed forces does not mean that they're not experiencing the war as intensely and in some cases more so than men. War zones are full of women.

Anton Smolyakov, Russia: Why is Nato punishing Serbia and doing nothing about the cruel oppression of the Kurds in Turkey?

Kate Adie: That's one for the politicians. As a reporter you find yourself asking a lot of questions. Not all of them on a screen and just for the sake of your work. You find yourself questioning a great number of things. I think you have to see this in the context that Nato up to now, has been a defensive organisation to defend those people who are the members of Nato which includes Turkey. We're in new territory. We're pushing into pastures new which politicians, military people, historians all are finding quite alarming, surprising and as I said new. Journalists of course, along with all of those others, have a lot of questions about what is happening now. The world in the last 10 years has gone upside down and perhaps what happened in Russia and particularly what happened at the Berlin wall was the start of that huge upheaval. We're only now seeing the ripples from what happened at the start of this decade spread outwards. It's fascinating if you're a journalist. You stand on the sidelines. You watch. It's also because it's new, because it's surprising - it's also somewhat alarming at times. We don't have answers we're just, as journalists, on the sidelines watching.

Todd Moss, Michigan, USA: I've heard reports that 90% of daily NATO sorties are flown by US aircraft. Is this true and if so, why aren't the European NATO partners capable of contributing more aircraft?

Kate Adie: I don't have the precise percentage, I think it's between 70 and 80, was the figure that I heard, but I couldn't be absolutely certain. When you see the size of the American military machine it is awesome. I saw it in the desert in Iraq - mile upon mile of weaponry - of planes, of tanks, of everything. It is a phenomenally huge military machine. It's the biggest in the world and it is much bigger by leaps and bounds than any individual other Nato country. The British do have the Royal airforce. The French have an airforce, the Italians. Lots of Nato countries have airforces. They don't come anywhere near the United States in volume or in variety of aircraft. And one of the things you have to remember here is that because of the problems of weather and also the specific task that Nato has given itself in cutting down the kind of target it's going for, the specific military ones, that you need certain kinds of weaponry, certain kinds of aircraft. Therefore, you are finding them in greater numbers with the Americans. I don't think anybody denies that or tries to cover it up. It's a fact of military life.

Helen Gunn, Australia: Do you find that you are still shocked and angered by some of the events that you report on or do you feel that you have become desensitised? What is your method of coping with such situations?

Kate Adie: I think desensitisation is a myth that knocks around. I think it's one of these rather handy phrases people use to sometimes try and make sense of what they see others doing in the world. I certainly still am shocked, I'm horrified by some things I see, I'm moved by other things, I'm surprised, I'm amused, I'm overjoyed. I have all the range of emotions I hope that anyone would see when you see extraordinary events unfold in front of you. I don't think anybody can report well if they in anyway begin to abandon their sensitivity to what people undergo.
You have to be somebody who understands what people's emotions are. You have to be somebody who reacts to them. I don't think you can report very well if you're numb as a stone, if you're dead in your senses then you won't be able to report properly and full what people are going through. I don't think it happens to many. As I say I think it's a bit of a myth - desensitisation. I think if you have to witness things they still strike you years into the work, years into the job. They still strike you with great force.
I stood on the deck of a cruise missile carrier three weeks ago, for the first night of the attacks. It was terrifying. It was physically terrifying - a huge rocket screaming out in front of us, just clouds away, in the dark, and the sense that it's a death dealing weapon. It's off to do its work. It's terrifying to contemplate. And then you've seen all the pictures of the refugees. If you don't react to that if you don't have your feelings about you, you shouldn't be reporting.

A Jaafar, Singapore: You're a successful career woman. It must be tough juggling your personal and professional lives all these years as a correspondent. How do you manage to do this?

Kate Adie: I never thought of having a career, or of having had one. It just sort of happened. I had to go out and get a job. I found myself in that generation in Britain, which having had a nice, happy childhood, I was I suppose, expected to grow up and do a little dabbling, and a little light teaching, or cooking, or nursing perhaps and then marry and have 2.4 children and not work. I was a 60s generational child and in this country at that time that's when the change took place certainly. Girls took up jobs. They started to go out to work. They started to think about having careers and I found myself as part of this without even realising it and I rather fell into broadcasting, loved it, have always enjoyed it. And at the same time believe that you juggle the social life and the private life along with it. Never marry the job. Very dull, very boring and the job certainly will never actually take you to a nice restaurant or do the washing-up and, well as far as I'm concerned, never mind chop down a tree in the garden. You really have to work it out the way you can. A lot of working women have found, with this development for women, that it's quite difficult. But you try, you make an effort. And I don't think being a reporter it's any more difficult. The hours are a bit strange. The job at times is quite peculiar. But you just make an effort. You put the two together. Because if you don't have a private side to you don't bring enough of yourself to the professional side.

Danny, France: Because you often report on the most dreadful human suffering, don't you ever lose faith in human nature?

Kate Adie: The absolute opposite. I'm an enormous optimist. And I've been staggered, amazed, surprised - think of all the words you can employ for when you see people who, in the worst of circumstances, show kindness, goodwill, tolerance and endurance. I am absolutely staggered with what people put up with - how they cope and how they come through. I have never, ever lost that faith in people. In fact it's grown over the years. I'm amazed by what the human being does on this earth and how people retain a sense of civilised behaviour and goodness of nature in the face of the most dreadful things. Of course you see bad behaviour - at times almost evil. Of course you see the terrible things that man does to man. Even so my overwhelming impression is of people who do good, of people who come through, and of people who survive. And I find it a joy, an absolute joy, and I suppose it must bring from my own personal background. I was lucky enough to have had a happy childhood and be of an optimistic nature. But I've had it all confirmed in front of the most dreadful of things. I'm a raving optimist. I think people are terrific.

Susan, UK:In your opinion, why are the British and Americans/Nato so reluctant to deploy groundtroops in Kosovo?

Kate Adie:There's no doubt about it. I've been working alongside the military for some years now and there's no doubt about that in America in particular, not so much in Britain, but in America there is a very definite philosophy, a belief that's taken hold amongst politicians, American politicians, that they are unable, or will be unable, to pursue a political course of action if it results in young Americans being brought home dead in body bags. This has got its roots in the Vietnam war. Even though it was not shown in that war that public opinion drained from the war because of casualties. There were much more complex matters at work later on in the war. But the idea has grown that politicians are vulnerable if they initiate something which results in their young people being killed. Now, curiously enough public opinion may be more mature and less taken with this idea than the politicians are. It's quite interesting in the last month, how the politicians are quite determined that they should cling to this view that no lives should be expended at all on their side. Whereas, public opinion is a bit more what I would call traditional and recognises that if some jobs have to be done then you may have to make sacrifices and you may have to get tough and life may get nasty. It's quite an interesting diversion from political views to the general public's view. I'm curious about it. But that's what lies behind it. It's an obsession over the last twenty to thirty years. It's particularly an American obsession about the body bag syndrome.

Jonathan Hartley, England: From your position as a correspondent in war zones for many years, how likely do you feel that the Kosovo crisis could escalate into a wider conflict, possible involving Russia?

Kate Adie: I cannot bring any experience to bear from being a reporter. It's a curious business. You stand in the middle of the chaos, confusion, fear of war. You haven't a clue what is going on the in the next village, never mind what is going, as they used to say, in the chancelleries of Europe. You don't know what the politicians are doing at a high level. You have no idea what plots may be being hatched by men in military uniform in another country. You are far from public opinion at home in your own country. And curiously enough, as a reporter in the field, you have almost no idea where a war is going. You can only see the hellish things that happen in your immediate vicinity. It's one of those limiting things about the job.
So curiously, for the four weeks I've been reporting on this, of course I've been reading opinion, I've been reading as widely as possible about what other countries are saying, and other people. But as a reporter when you're in the middle of it you have no idea which direction it's taking. The only thing I have noticed is that there's a build up of military hardware going on and there's clearly not an easy solution on the plate. That in itself leads you to understand that this may well be a long haul. Whether it spreads I don't know.
Let me just mention that it's no coincidence that when you saw a Hollywood film about war, old-fashioned war, what's the commonest way that people show it spreading? They show a licking of flames around where the conflict starts and it begins to burn up the map. That's what wars are like, and it's no coincidence that that kind of image is used. It's a dangerous time.

Lynne Douglas, Scottish Journalism Student - Boston University, U.S.A: As a journalist how difficult is it to report the truth during wartime? Is truth the first casualty of war?

Kate Adie: That's the great saying. And it is a great saying because in itself it holds much truth. War is fought and not only with soldiers and with weapons, but with ideas, with words, with propaganda, with lies, with images, with tales, with gossip, with deception. All these are part of the armoury of war and every side indulges in them - every side. So a reporter knows that at the moment the dogs of war are unleashed, that their baying will drown a lot of the straightforward cool words of facts. On top of that you have to remember that all countries throughout the world, if they're attacked, expect their journalists to be as patriotic as they are. If they're not being attacked, if they're attacking someone else, they will also expect loyalty. The readers of newspapers, the viewers of television, the listeners to radio, will expect the reporters to be at least loyal, if not determinedly patriotic, if not in some instances jingoistic. If you're involved in someone else's war at a distance then again there are still issues about support being positive. All of these are very worrying for journalists. They all put up huge questions of being less than truthful, of being the voice piece, the mouthpiece of a government, of being the advocate of a certain number of people in uniform. It's very, very difficult. On top of that, having examined your own conscience, which you must do regularly, you then have to consider if your words in a war, even if they're true and honest might not result in someone's death inadvertently. That's the biggest worry for journalists on a personal level. By saying, going down a road, I have seen a group of soldiers heading for a village, you broadcast that and they are attacked by people who hear your broadcast and had not realised they were coming down the road, you have to examine your conscience as a journalist during war many more times than you would at other times and it's not easy and you have to work out a set of values and principles that you stick to.

Mr Quantick, England: How do you prevent reporting propaganda whilst on board a naval ship, whose staff are only told a particular slant on facts?

Kate Adie: First of all you have to define propaganda. Is it what your government wants to put about about something that is merely a PR gloss about something or is it blatant lies, or is it something to deceive the enemy in order to further a victory? All these things qualify as propaganda. You have to be careful about it. The more lurid, the more shocking and the more outrageous a story is you always have to look at it very hard and say, just a moment, this surely is some form of propaganda.
Because part and parcel of any war is demonising the enemy and that is done with lies, and is done with horror, and is done with extremist language. So you have to look at that. But these days so many organisations, multinational firms, governments, any group knows about public relations, knows about putting across the right image. Across the world the business of PR has grown phenomenally. People like to look good. There's nothing new - centuries ago kings used to employ people to tell good tales about them and to sing songs which glorified them when they were dreadful people. So there's nothing new. But nowadays there is a sophistication in image-building which is quite extraordinary. All journalists have to be alert. They have to look for the facts and they have to look for the plain and unvarnished truth. It's not easy.

Jane Thomas, Cornwall, UK: As a consequence of the travelling your career has involved, have you developed an affinity for any particular country/culture and if so, why?

Kate Adie: Places with good weather and good food and good wine really and friendly people. I'm fairly catholic in my tastes. I've liked the oddest places. I've been entranced by the strangest of places. I remember one of them during the Falklands war and I ended up in what really looks like a godforsaken tract of land down by the Straits of Magellan in southern Chile. The BBC had decided it was only half an inch on the map from the Falkland Islands and we'd get there quickly. Wrong in every way. But it was a bleak windswept end of the earth kind of place. I though it was magical. Places like that. Other places where you're shown kindness in the middle of immense poverty and distress and people come up to you and you can't believe in an ugly and dreadful landscape people are being wonderful. That's happened before now. There are all sorts of places. I wouldn't choose a favourite place. It's too difficult. But I love travel in the sense that there are always interesting places to find. I had it drummed into me as a child that you should never be bored. Being bored was a kind of sin of your own making. You should always look for the interesting. You should always enquire. You should always say, right, now what's going on? What can I find? What is interesting here?

Charles Ojelade, Nigeria: What drives you to continue to do this sometimes very dangerous work?

Kate Adie: I don't choose it for the danger. I'm as scared as the next person. In fact I'm probably more scared than some people because they've seen what can be done to human beings. I know what fear is. I'm fascinated by people. I think that the world is quite, quite riveting. It's got so much in it. There's so much to do, so much to see.
I sometimes set as a test for media students that they should go to somewhere like a hardware store and write something exciting about it or they should go to the meeting of the local bowls club and find somebody interesting and interview them. It can be done. I sort of had this said to me professionally when I joined local radio thirty years ago. I used to stagger back into the radio station at the end of a hard day, saying I could interview a lamp post and get something from it. I was so determined to bring things to life and to find out what was going on.
I've always found, for example, if you take a room of twenty people - it doesn't matter where in the world - and you can say with confidence there will be somebody in this room who has done something extraordinary which will make the other nineteen of us sit back and say: good heavens - that's the secret of being a good reporter - finding out who number twenty is.

Devin Scobie, Scotland: Would you ever consider a career in politics, like your former colleague Martin Bell?

Kate Adie: I think Martin's view would be one's enough. I've never been drawn to politic per se. I've never been a particularly political animal. Nor have I ever done much in the way of political reporting. I've done a little, but not much. I've never been a party political animal. It somewhat evaded me and it just hadn't occurred. That doesn't mean I'm absolutely mad about the things that politicians do and will take the floor with any of them in order to argue it out. I am fascinated by how our society ticks and I would love to change it. There are so many things I'd like to do - lots of things.

Ken Schwing, USA:What if anything have the Islamic nations of the Middle East been doing to help the Muslims of Kosovo?

Kate Adie: I don't think you see much in the way of tangible help that gets through, maybe some aid. The curious thing is, I find, and this was particularly so with Bosnia, is that the affinity that people would think automatic between Albanians, Kosovo Albanians, Bosnian Muslims, and the Middle East is not that strong. I've always thought that the Islam which you encounter is the most European Islam that I've ever met. One of the things that fascinated me was that the industry that kept going right through the Bosnian war in Sarajevo, the only industrial unit that never seemed every to cease production, was the Sarajevo brewery. You will find pork, ham sandwiches on the table, throughout the area. You will find an attitude to Islam which is very similar to the western European one to maybe Protestant mainstream religion these days. It's a set of ethics, a code of living, and oh yes we remember to pop into the mosque once a year, one of my translators used to say in Sarajevo. Yes, mum insists on it. And you thought, hmm, this sounds familiar, and it is a very Europeanised kind of Islam. Not that it isn't true Islam in all its ways. But it certainly doesn't have the kind of lifestyle which we'd automatically think of when we think of Islam in the Middle East. This has come as a huge shock, for example, to the Mujahedin fighters who came to Bosnia, who are absolutely alien to the way of life and thinking of the Bosnian Muslims in their attitudes to women, to alcohol and to society in general. They were from another world and so therefore, there may be some aid going in. But in a sense they are very, very distant societies.

John Masters, UK:I remember a quote some years ago from a serviceman that said "We know we're in real trouble when Kate Adie arrives!". How do you feel about being associated with "front line" reporting and what effect has it had on your life and family?

Kate Adie: My family accepts that I have a job which has always been pretty eccentric and they're amazingly tolerant and supportive. It doesn't really affect me when I'm doing it because when you consider the places that I work, if you're in a ditch somewhere or scrambling through a wood in Kosovo - I was in Pristina five weeks ago. Nobody knows me there. I'm just another hack from a foreign country so it doesn't affect doing the job in that sense at all. And I certainly don't feel that I carry trouble with me. I hope I don't. It's just that there are stories where you know that unless you actually pursue them, stick with them and get close to them you won't actually get them. So there is an inevitability that if there is trouble up ahead you have to calculate what risk you're going to take and see what you can find out about it.

Roger Hillingdon, UK: I notice that you are still wearing the same earrings as you have done for a very long time Are they always the same pair? Have you ever lost one or both? Is there a story behind them?

Kate Adie: The tale of the earrings. I think it was sheer laziness that I kept sticking in the same ones day after day. When I got to the Gulf War, nine years ago, I found I was wearing uniform because I was a war correspondent and had joined the British army which was a terrible shock to the system to find yourself a middle-aged woman digging trenches. But I determinedly held onto the pearl earrings and found myself questioned by people: 'Oh we've read in all the papers you've lost them and the British army have been looking for them.' I then discovered that at least, if not, the author of this story, one of the people who perpetrated it, was a woman who should have known better on one of the tabloid newspapers, when actually looking at more serious things women have to do in life in order to gain equality.
I have hung onto them. I have to admit that there are pearl earrings littering the world. I've been donating pearl earrings to all sorts of places and war zones and bits for a very long time. The commonest thing is sitting in helicopters like last week, with all sorts of bits and pieces of survival clothing on, in the dark, in this rattling, mad eggbeater, thundering across the waves with a box of engine parts on my knee where there wasn't really enough room for me in the helicopter that I was stuffed into, the American helicopter. And you have a pair of ear defenders on, and lo and behold, every time you take them off, the ear defenders grow an earring. So there must be people around the world in various navies and armies who find Adie's pearl earrings stuck inside like a grommet.

Catherine Carroll, England:Has there ever been a time when you wished that you were not a reporter? If so, what other profession would you like to have undertaken?

Kate Adie: I think that the times you wish you weren't a reporter is when you see great sorrow and great grief because you feel like you are a spectre at the feast, you feel like an intruder - you shouldn't be there. And that's the time you wish you weren't a reporter and that you didn't have to convey what people are going through to others. That is a truly dreadful time and I've had a number of those and you wish you weren't. As for what I would be I came to the conclusion a long time ago that what hallmarks a reporter is an inability to do other people's jobs. That's why you watch them doing them - a complete inability to sort of grasp and stick with the professional disciplines that other people have. The wonderful thing you see about being a reporter is being able to turn up at so many different things and observe and learn about and occasionally do such a variety like a terrible dilettante, like a terrible will o' the wisp, like a little butterfly alighting on something every so often and saying, ooh, this looks interesting. I don't think I would be madly good at doing anything else. Put it this way: the world was spared a third rate opera singer and a second rate teacher.

Graham Shedd, England:If you had a chance to report on any event in the history of the world what would it be and why?