Hillary held a huge indoor rally in Dubuque today, and the vocal crowd of 700+ seems to have energized her enough to do something she refused to do with reporters this morning — hit back at Barack Obama’s crack that foreign policy experience is more than which world leaders you “had tea” with.

Recounting her visit to Bosnia shortly after the peace accords, Senator Clinton described a “corkscrew landing” at an airfield in the area, followed by a sprint out the door due to the threat of sniper fire.

“I don’t remember anybody offering me tea on the tarmac when that was happening,” she said with a grin.

She also described a visit to Macedonia in 1999 to negotiate an agreement on refugees from neighboring Kosovo — a new element in her stump speech that may be designed to push back against stories like this one claiming her role in foreign policy in the Clinton White House was more limited than she seems to suggest on the trail.

UPDATE: Hillary also describes the incident in very similar language on pages 322-323 of her autobiography “Living History” — but in this retelling, she left out the fact that this March, 1996 trip also included her daughter Chelsea, musician Sheryl Crow, and 1990’s comedian Sinbad.

At a town hall forum in Coralville, Iowa, Friday, Senator Barack Obama turned the tables on the experience issue. While both Hillary Clinton and the Republicans have called into question Obama’s lack of foreign policy credentials, Obama said that experience is “not just what world leaders I went and talked to at the ambassador’s house; who I had tea with.”

While he didn’t name Hillary Clinton by name, of course, it’s pretty apparent that Obama was knocking his rival’s time as First Lady when she was the “face of US foreign policy.”