It’s not that Newton wasn’t in fear for his life, not that he doesn’t realize how lucky he was to get out and not that he doesn’t know that not everyone was as lucky as he. The aristocratic disdain with which he regards the Third Reich is this Jew’s ultimate revenge. To Newton, the Führer is an upstart little pisher who interrupted a life dedicated to pleasure, the gnat who intruded himself between a pampered, bourgeois childhood and the world travels of a young roué.

What could be more of an affront to Hitler, that self-proclaimed enemy of “decadence,” than a Jew who spent his entire life celebrating and embracing it? The irony of Newton’s photography is that it is a rigidly controlled expression of something that makes most of us lose control: our erotic fantasies. What more delicious slap in the face to the man who drove Newton from his homeland than to produce images whose inspiration — as the world knows — came from a circumcised Jewish hard-on.

Everybody who picks up Helmut Newton’s memoirs is going to be looking for a good, juicy read, perhaps expecting anecdotes of models misbehaving, of encounters with the famous and sordid. “Autobiography” is a juicy read — but not in the manner of gossipy celeb bios. Who expected Newton to be such a good writer? At its best — that is, roughly the first two-thirds of the book — “Autobiography” reads like the bastard child of Arthur Schnitzler and Henry Miller.

We open in Berlin one evening in the mid-1920s. Little Helmut, 3 or 4, is where all good little boys should be, at home in bed. His nurse is preparing for an evening on the town, half-naked (she’s in a slip) and applying her makeup. This is Helmie’s first vision of a half-naked woman, and he is entranced. His skimpily dressed nanny functions as his Proustian madeleine. Soon he’s remembering how his own mother used to come in to say goodnight in preparation for her own evenings out. Halfway through dressing, in a flesh-colored satin slip — always flesh-colored — she would hold Helmut next to her capacious bosom while he delighted in the feel of her skin and the scent of her Chanel No. 5.

The pampered European childhood that Newton describes is like a 1920s German version of Louis Malle’s “Murmur of the Heart.” It’s a life of middle-class propriety maintained on the surface and happily abandoned when it can be. It’s a life perfectly represented by the family get-togethers during which 13-year-old Newton was happily fondled by his cousin’s ice-skater wife under the table.

The great thing about Newton’s erotic reveries is that they are totally without guilt. He is a man refreshingly unconflicted by pleasure. His only regret about filching his brother’s girlie magazines at the age of 6 was getting caught by his mother. At 13, when his parents expressed concern to their family doctor about young Helmut’s nocturnally stiffened bedsheets, the doctor advised Helmut to find a nice girl to make “boom-boom” with. (The girls with dark rings under their eyes in Newton photographs, he explains, are in homage to the warnings of Newton’s adolescence that masturbation left circles under the self-abuser’s eyes.)

Boom-boom followed the next year with a swimming champ named Illa (quite the looker, to judge from the photo of her included). Heading off to a swim meet one weekend, she helpfully informed her beloved Helmut that she would find a boy who would show her how to do it. True to her word, she came back experienced, and Helmut was the beneficiary of her newfound knowledge.

Newton’s beloved mother must take some credit for his sexual openness. After making love with Illa for the first time, he wolfed down a sandwich in the kitchen and told his mother what had happened. Her response was to tell him he could only do it once a week so as not to interfere with his schoolwork and to increase his pocket money so he could buy condoms. She also took the time to explain about venereal disease and avoiding pregnancy. (Who says we couldn’t benefit from a return to the values of the past?)

His mother saved him in more important ways too. She became the family’s pillar of strength as the mounting restrictions against Jews sapped the will of his father. When the laws forbade Jews from driving, Newton’s father sold the family car and Mrs. Neustadter (Newton’s original family name) insisted on taking the money, knowing that if it were put in the bank it was only a matter of time before the Nazis seized it. It was this money that his mother used to book his 1938 passage to China. (Newton’s parents managed to get to South America.)

One of the book’s more incredible episodes recounts how Newton obtained his visa. Summoned to Gestapo headquarters after requesting to leave Germany, Newton found himself in the presence of an officer who rained abuse upon him, calling him a Jewish pig, interrupting himself only to send his secretary on an errand. As soon as the woman was gone, the officer’s tone became quiet and urgent, giving Newton information on where to get a passport and stressing how important it was for him to get out of Germany as quickly as possible. When the secretary returned, the officer went back into his previous performance, screaming “Get out, you Jew bastard!” But he had very likely saved Newton’s life.

Once out of Germany, “Autobiography” proceeds from Singapore, where Newton became the kept man of a successful businesswoman who set him up as a portrait photographer, to Australia, where he wound up in an internment camp after being deported from Singapore as a “stateless person,” to his four years in the Australian army, to his studio in Melbourne after the war, where he met June, the woman he married in 1948 and who remains his wife to this day.

What Newton achieves in this section of the book is, as the comparison to Schnitzler and Miller suggests, a combination of sophistication and flat-out rut. Newton has described his life as a picaresque tale, and though his circumstances were very different — life in an internment camp is not life at a resort — there are times when he could be one of the perpetually traveling yet essentially languid characters who populate the stories and novellas of Schnitzler. On the other hand, the episode he relates working as a fruit picker in Australia is one that, in its nonchalant raunch, would make Miller smile. Newton and a buddy are sharing a cottage with two Aussie pickers and their girlfriend. The third night, one of the guys comes into Newton’s room and asks, “How would you like to have a go at my sheila?” I’ll let Newton take it from there:

“I hopped out of bed and followed the guy into his room across the landing; there on the floor the girl was curled up with the other guy on a big mattress with a few pillows. She made a welcoming gesture to me. She was pretty good looking, and at least at the time I thought she was fantastic. I just flew into bed. I didn’t take any notice of her friend next to her and started to fuck her. We had a wonderful time, but a few minutes later the other guy, who had brought me into the room, jumped into bed — that made a sandwich with his friend on the left of the girl and me and the other one on her other side. Obviously what he wanted to do was bugger me, and he already had a clinch with my back to him. He was stark naked. I just let out a blood-curdling scream. I don’t know how I got out of his clutches, because I’m not very strong and these guys were all muscle and didn’t muck about, but in desperation I jumped out of bed and raced across into mine and Wally’s room, locked the door, and just crawled under the bedsheets.”

“Autobiography” slows down a bit, as all success stories do, when Newton begins to recount his first forays into professional photography. The book offers glimpses into the formation of his aesthetic, like his loving memories of the rue St.-Denis in Paris where housewives went about their chores while the whores sold themselves. He particularly admires the whores’ “inborn feel for fashion” and admits that he was too fascinated to resist going with them a few times. Newton ends the first part of the book abruptly, in 1983, with the words, “I am ending my story here, for to write about one’s successes, small or big, is simply of no interest to the reader. Getting there is what this book is all about.”

The remaining 66 pages are Newton’s notes on his work and some brief reminiscences. They do not have the sustained charm or flow of the first part, but they are all of a piece. You have to love someone whose spur-of-the-moment fetishism runs so contrary to common sense, like being assigned to shoot Hanna Schygulla for German Vogue and falling in love with her underarm hair, insisting it be seen in every shot. Or who admits that the “Big Nudes” series begun in the ’80s — huge, oversized pictures of Amazonian women — were inspired by the police identity photos of the Baader-Meinhof gang, the left-wing terrorists who tormented West German society.

Newton would probably have no trouble admitting that he is a complete amoralist. Photographing Margaret Thatcher was a dream of Newton’s, for the sole reason that her power seemed sexy to him. It makes sense to see Thatcher as a version of the dominatrixes that have populated Newton’s work, just as it would require a cartoonist or a novelist to take that connection into the pornographic realms where the idea could really explode. (Imagine Maggie with a strap-on, about to make the British Lion her bend-over boyfriend, instructing him to lie back and think of England!) But it would never occur to Newton to consider what Thatcher’s naked lust for power, her determination to root out everyone she believed had no place in Britain, shared with the people who drove him from Germany. But of course an artist should not be required to be a political commentator.

Newton’s “Autobiography” is that rare artist’s bio that does not attempt to explain work but to evoke it. Seen in the context of this book, the Newton photos that scream “Weimar decadence,” the woman dressed as a man lighting a cigarette off a woman backed up against a wall, the settings which always seem to be hotel lobbies or rooms at 3 a.m., the sexual interplay that is both oblique and explicit, simultaneously formal and right on the edge of total abandon, seem intensely nostalgic and yet resolutely unsentimental. If sentiment does creep in, you can see it in a shot of two girls in their lingerie being rowed in a boat by a man with his back to the camera. This is Newton’s re-creation of the outings of his youth, the ones that, for him, still imbue the scent of Nivea cream with the power of an aphrodisiac.

But the photo that gets the spirit of “Autobiography” is the one by Alice Springs on the cover of the book. Newton, camera in hand, stripped to the waist in a pair of creased jeans, looking trim though somewhere (I’m guessing) in his 60s (he is 83 now), while behind him two models diffidently await his bidding. The look on Newton’s face is often the one we see in photos of him, the peaked eyebrows giving an air of assumed (and false) innocence to the closed-mouth grin that is entirely self-satisfied. It’s too funny to seem arrogant, too cagey to seem voracious. It’s the look of a naughty boy who has landed in a dream of thighs and legs and breasts and untold luxury and is still pretending that he has no idea how he got there. “Just lucky, I’d guess,” he’d probably say. The foxy old bastard knows he’s lucky. Boy, does he know.

Few men in public life have understood the importance of the documentary record better than Kissinger. Somehow, he managed to leave public office with his records, and then stashed them in the Library of Congress, closed to historical researchers, except for his selected chorus of acolytes. Kissinger made millions of dollars writing memoirs from that record, all the while successfully preventing others from using his papers for nearly three decades. Similarly, his former deputy, Alexander Haig (who was later secretary of state himself, under Ronald Reagan), managed to depart office with all his papers. Nice team.

History usually is written first with memoirs by participants, and then by disinterested historians, who uncover and explore the documentary evidence. Kissinger has given us an ample record of memoirs. But now he is anxious to provide, select and edit the documentary record himself, which he controls while he is alive. Why should we trust the completeness of these materials? Kissinger acknowledges that Condoleezza Rice herself approved and released some of these documents. Would she approve similar requests from historians? Understandably, she is busy these days; but then, historians other than Kissinger are not former national security advisors.

Kissinger first focuses on the Yom Kippur War. For Nixon watchers, this is one of the most fascinating episodes of his presidency. October 1973, when the Egyptians attacked Israel, was Nixon’s cruelest month. Watergate was approaching a decisive moment, as pressure mounted on the president to release the damning White House tapes. In the meantime, he had to deal with Vice President Spiro T. Agnew’s pending indictment for tax evasion and bribery, charges that resulted in Agnew’s plea bargain and resignation. Rep. Gerald Ford succeeded Agnew, but he was hardly Nixon’s first choice; the president’s diminished power left him no alternative. Finally, special prosecutor Archibald Cox refused to back down from his insistence that Nixon surrender his tapes. The president then dismissed Cox on Oct. 20, and Attorney General Elliot Richardson and his deputy resigned in protest. The ensuing firestorm again left Nixon with no choice, and a week later his lawyers meekly agreed to make the tapes available. Two days after Cox’s firing, the House began its impeachment inquiry (which would ultimately lead to Nixon’s resignation the following August).

Nixon’s ability to deal with the Middle East conflict was extraordinary. This book supplements other documents and materials that have revealed that role. He was in constant touch with Kissinger, sometimes personally and at other times through Haig. It is unlikely that Kissinger has given us the totality of Nixon’s role; nevertheless, there is ample material to demonstrate that the president clearly was in charge and well focused.

Nixon intuitively saw opportunity in the conflict. He would not allow either side to win a victory that would reinforce the resentments of the past. As the war proved more difficult for the Israelis, Nixon dispatched consumable military supplies despite Pentagon resistance. But Nixon had another tack: “[W]e’ve got to squeeze the Israelis when this is over and the Russians have got to know it. We’ve got to squeeze them goddamn hard.” He regularly repeated that he would save the Israelis from being overwhelmed, but consistently added that he would not rescue them again. “I don’t think it’s going to cost us a damn bit more to send in more … supplies,” the president said, “but only for the purpose of maintaining the balance, so that we can create the conditions that will lead to an equitable settlement. The point is, if you don’t say it that way, it looks as though we are sending in supplies to have the war go on indefinitely, and that is not a tenable position.”

The administration’s refusal to allow the Israelis to destroy the Egyptian Third Army resulted in a cease-fire, more or less between equals. Whatever Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s motivations in beginning the war, events soon proved his determination to change things. There is a clear line that leads from Nixon and Kissinger’s 1973 diplomacy to Sadat’s dramatic visit to Jerusalem, and the Camp David Agreement orchestrated by Jimmy Carter in 1977. The ensuing quarter-century has not entirely fulfilled the anticipated reconciliation, but there has no been no armed conflict between the parties.

Vietnam is Kissinger’s tar baby. In this book he focuses exclusively on the last month of the war and the story of the evacuations of Americans and South Vietnamese. It is a tragic and shameful story for the U.S., and a triumphant one for the North Vietnamese. Kissinger glosses over the painful record of the peace accords, except for occasional jabs at his fellow Nobel Prize winner: “I would say anything that [chief North Vietnamese negotiator] Le Duc Tho is eligible for, there must be something wrong with it.” But the facts are inescapable: The “peace agreement” left the North Vietnamese Army intact in the South while American troops withdrew. The papier-mäché South Vietnamese government inevitably collapsed in April 1975.

Historical assessments of Kissinger’s diplomacy are increasing rapidly, thanks to the outpouring of Nixon’s papers and tapes. Such historians as Jeffrey Kimball and Larry Berman, among others, have already compiled compelling evidence of Kissinger’s miscalculation, deceit and eventual failure.

Kissinger describes the last month of the Vietnam conflict as marking the “collapse of an effort to which Americans had sacrificed 25 years of blood and treasure.” He still prefers that we believe his 1973 agreement resulted in an American victory, or at least vindication for our 25-year effort. Did he expect North Vietnam to squander its own 30-plus years of struggle for independence and unification? Congress prohibited further American involvement in June 1973, but Kissinger nevertheless huffs: “It was the first time that the United States had deprived itself of the ability to enforce an agreement for which American forces had fought and died.” In short, in his view the accords failed only because we did not defend them.

Nixon had promised the South Vietnamese he would continue to defend them despite the congressional injunction. But when the South’s government collapsed in April 1975, Ford had been president for eight months. He made a gesture toward intervention, but no more. Secretary of State Kissinger, at that moment, at least, recognized the futility of further involvement. Now he rails against the immoral course of Nixon’s successors who failed to enforce a presidential promise. Such agreements, he writes, “impose a moral, not a legal obligation on his successors.” Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon generously supported Dwight Eisenhower’s commitment to maintain an independent South Vietnam. Consider the costs. Presidential promises, like the act of a legislature, are neither sacred nor binding. While we did not necessarily lose a war, our policy had failed, and not because of our refusal to commit blood or treasure. But the North Vietnamese most assuredly had won. By April 1975, that was the reality; we had no choice.

When the Yom Kippur War erupted, Kissinger told Haig, then the White House chief of staff, that “our domestic situation [i.e., Watergate] has invited this.” Watergate so weakened Nixon and his successor, Kissinger insists, that neither could keep Nixon’s promise of retaliation if the North Vietnamese violated the truce. But Congress’ refusal to authorize any further involvement reflected a turn against the war on its merits, and had precious little to do with the president’s weakness.

No stranger to backbiting and innuendo, Kissinger blames “radical McGovernites” in Congress for the Vietnam retreat. This is a cheap shot, at best. Sen. George McGovern will be remembered for his overwhelming defeat by Nixon in 1972, however prophetic he may have been. He was no great mover and shaker in Congress. Congressional opposition to the war was molded by Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, D-Mont., and Sen. J. William Fulbright, D-Ark., chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, allied with many prominent Republicans, including Sens. John Sherman Cooper, R-Ky., Mark Hatfield, R-Ore., and George Aiken, R-Vt., who famously suggested that we put our troops onboard ships, withdraw and then declare victory. Nevertheless, Kissinger persists in blaming the Watergate crisis and the new Congress elected in the wake of Nixon’s resignation for the Vietnam debacle.

Make no mistake: Kissinger sees Watergate as the convenient scapegoat for his and Nixon’s failures. He urges us to assess “why good men on all sides found no way to avoid this disaster [Vietnam] and why our domestic drama first paralyzed and then overwhelmed us.” History is a ready guide. We can begin by considering whether Kissinger’s “good men,” presumably including himself, simply were wrong, misguided and frozen in rhetoric that long had outlived its relevance and reality. And why did our domestic drama paralyze and overwhelm us? That one is easy. Richard Nixon had abused power and involved himself in criminal activity, and he was found out. Or has sometime-historian Kissinger simply and conveniently forgotten the elementary facts of Watergate?

Fatal encounters with carousing Americans troops aside, by the year 2150 zoos and test tubes will likely be the only places that Bengal tigers and all other man-eating predators will survive, according to natural history writer David Quammen in his new book, “Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind.”

Quammen eschews “zoological melodrama” or “predator pornography,” as he dubs the pulpy genre that encompasses most true-life tales of encounters between humans and the carnivores that occasionally eat them. His book is less monster bloodbath than an effort to understand how humans and their sometime predators still (barely) coexist today, and what exactly will be lost if the big cats, bears and crocodiles go extinct.

To take stock of the state of human-predator relations, Quammen traveled to lion territory in India’s Gir forest, the saltwater crocodile lands of northern Australia, brown bear habitat in the Romanian mountains, and Siberian tiger country in the Russian Far East.

He went crocodile harpooning with aboriginal hunters in Australia and traveled across the snow with a Russian biologist who once spent 45 days on skis tracking a single Siberian tiger, feeding on leftovers from the tiger’s kills when his own food supplies ran low.

In a phone interview with Salon, Quammen talked about how slaying all our monsters could soon put us on the top of the food chain, and why we need them around to remind us that we’re “just another flavor of meat.”

When you’re in the Russian Far East, one native Udege man tells you that he’s personally killed four Siberian tigers. There are only a few hundred of these tigers left in the world. You write that hearing this was like a splash of “cold water,” but that since you’ve been traveling to investigate alpha-predator populations that share land with humans, you’ve learned that the “the world is full of cold water” and you’ve often found yourself “chilly and wet.” What do you mean by that?

I started the book project partially because I was very interested in what big predators meant to the people who live closest to them, who live in the highest jeopardy.

I suppose I had a preconception, as maybe a lot of people would, that native people would have sort of a mystic resignation and spiritual acceptance of these big predators, that they’d say: “Oh, they’re part of the land. They’re part of the world. They represent gods to us. They’re spiritual beings, and we have found ways to adapt.”

And some of the native people told me things like that. One Romanian shepherd said: “A forest without bears is empty.” That’s a wonderful statement, but I also heard people say: “To hell with the bear. Kill them all.”

Or, they’d say, “Oh, the tiger? I’ve killed four of them, and I’d kill more of them if I had the chance, because they compete with me for the red deer and the wild boar.”

Which humans have the most to fear from these alpha predators?

The people who suffer the most inconvenience, the most danger, the most misery from big predators, the ones who pay the costs of big predators, are generally the poor and the dispossessed of land. They’re native people who live very close to the landscape with a very small margin of safety.

The difficult question is: How do we as a world society rearrange things so that it’s not the poor people who are paying the costs of big predators and the distant, affluent people in cities across oceans who enjoy the benefits of the continued existence of big predators? Namely, the aesthetic sense that these charismatic creatures are still out there, and the ecological benefits from the fact that they’re still balancing these ecosystems.

Are there any good examples of that kind of rearrangement?

Only a very few pilot projects or beginning programs that need to be built. One of them is in the Northern Territory of Australia, where Aboriginal people are being allowed to begin harvesting crocodiles again.

Those people live out there in crocodile habitat, and if anybody is going to be killed by a saltwater crocodile, they’re sort of the first in the crosshairs. But now they’re also being allowed to harvest crocodile skin.

There’s a community organization, a group of young guys known as the Djelk Rangers, who collect crocodile eggs for commercial sale of hatchlings and who occasionally harpoon crocodiles for sale of the skins. They’re not using exactly traditional methods, but they’re using half-traditional methods in that they’re harpooning instead of using high-powered rifles.

In the book, you also mention that you’re uneasy with the idea that the only way predators can be protected is if they’re hunted, whether they’re the bears in Romania or the crocodiles of Australia. What about that idea bothers you?

There are some very intelligent and experienced people who would argue that if you want to save any endangered species on the planet, you’ve got to put a commercial value on it. And that will provide an incentive for people to protect the habitat and to allow this thing to continue to reproduce, and therefore that it will continue to exist. That it’s more effective than simply saying: “It’s off limits. It’s completely protected. We’re going to lock people away from it.” Because then it has no commercial value, and the protections will erode and be circumvented and the critter will suffer decline and eventual extinction.

So, the forest will be harvested for timber if you don’t give people a reason to preserve the forest because you can get something else valuable out of it, like bears for trophy hunting.

Right. Good and intelligent people make that argument. I’m not completely comfortable with that argument, partly on aesthetic as much as rational grounds, and partly because I don’t think it necessarily applies to all types of species.

For instance, the Siberian tiger in the Russian Far East. It’s a very different kind of creature from the saltwater crocodile. It reproduces much more slowly. It needs big areas of land for habitat that is going to be very valuable in other ways for other potential partial harvest.

And I’m just not persuaded that the notion of auctioning off the rights to kill tigers, and then distributing the money to the local people, is the best way to preserve this ecosystem with the tiger in it.

There are other cases where the commercial-harvest argument has been taken to an extreme, like the bears of Romania, where it’s being used and it’s working in the sense that there are now 10 times as many brown bears in the mountains of Romania as there are in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem.

Why are there so many bears there?

The Carpathian Mountains in Romania now support a little over 5,000 brown bears. The greater Yellowstone ecosystem supports maybe 400 or 500. Romania, which we think of as this blighted Eastern bloc, post-communist country — how could it possibly have 5,000 brown bears?

The answer is complicated. It partially has to do with Nicolae Ceausescu having been dictator there for 25 years and fancying himself a great bear hunter. It partially has to do with the Romanian forest department’s long tradition of nurturing bears, essentially farming bears. And it has to do now with the commercial value of those bears when the hunting rights are sold to foreign big-game hunters.

So, bear trophy skins are now an important export product from Romania. There are these 2,200 hunting areas in the Romanian forest, many of which contain bears and bear habitat. In each area there is a gamekeeper responsible for giving the bears supplemental feed, for observing the bears’ behavior, and then essentially for targeting the bears and delivering them, almost the way a pimp would, to these foreign hunters.

And it’s not hunting in the sense that we would consider hunting in the U.S. It’s baiting them to artificial food and then shooting them from a blind.

So is autocratic oppression good for alpha predators?

That’s one of the ironies. In this case, and probably in several other cases, democracy is not conducive to conservation, and autocracy has been conducive to conservation. Then, how are we liberal, right-thinking greenies supposed to feel about that? A little bit uncomfortable.

This is a California question, because I’m in California. Do you think that there is any chance that grizzly bears could ever come back to the state?

It’s not impossible. Some people thought it would be impossible to bring wolves back to Yellowstone, and then there were a few persistent, very patient, very politic folks who did the necessary political work on the ground to make that happen. There are people now working on something called the Wildlands Project, who are trying to knit together the last well-preserved wild lands throughout North America into a continuous sort of network of interconnected reserves, protected areas and corridors.

One of their projects is the so-called Y-to-Y project, the Yellowstone to Yukon project, which involves connecting land between the great national parks and wilderness areas to establish a continuous corridor of livable wild landscape for big and small animals all the way from the Yellowstone ecosystem to the Yukon. There are also networks in California that could be reconnected. Reconnecting wild landscapes is an important part of preserving any big creature, but especially big predators.

Beyond conserving land, you argue that if these predators are going to survive, we have to learn to live among them, not just preserve separate areas for them.

Right. We have to find models and frames of mind that allow us to share landscape with these creatures, because we want so much landscape, and because they need so much landscape. The cases that I focused on were cases where there had been an overlap between human populations and predator populations. And I tried to suggest that it’s possible, but it involves some very particular arrangements and also some altered expectations.

One thing about big predators and humans is that livestock is where the rubber meets the road. That’s where the conflict appears more quickly and more severely than anywhere else. So, in North America, for instance, the reason that grizzlies have been eliminated from most of their range, and that wolves were almost entirely exterminated, and that cougars were depleted for a while, although they’ve come back, was not really because humans were so afraid of these creatures, but because we had populated the landscape with exceptionally stupid, vulnerable prey — namely, sheep and cows.

It was in trying to protect our sheep and cows that we decided that the big predators had to be killed. Predators were doing what was natural, and that was preying on the big vulnerable animals, since we killed off the bison and essentially replaced large herbivores in a lot of these areas with our own domesticated herbivores, and the predators preyed on what was there — sheep and cows. And therefore they had to die.

Romania offers a model of how people can raise sheep in bear country without using guns, without using poison, without exterminating the bear.

How do they do it?

First of all they use good, really nasty, dangerous dogs. Second, they have a lot of shepherds out there living with the sheep, so it’s labor intensive, unlike sheep ranching in the Western U.S. And third, they have a little bit more of a stoic acceptance of the fact that they will lose sheep occasionally. That does not justify the feeling that the bears must all be exterminated and the government owes them a predator-free landscape. They have essentially a different conception of what is acceptable risk.

You express distaste at the prospect of hordes of eco-tourists overrunning the breeding grounds of the saltwater crocodiles in Australia. Is there any good role for eco-tourism in saving these predators?

I think eco-tourism is very valuable in some situations. My only quarrel is that it gets oversold. It’s sometimes thought of as the solution for every conservation situation around the world.

One of the places that it fits extremely well for big predators, among others, is in East Africa, because it’s mostly savannah. It’s very open. The lions and the cheetah and the leopard are out there, visible, hunting on the savannah, stalking these big herds of native ungulates. And it really lends itself to eco-tourism, because people can go there and they can see a lot, sitting in a Land Rover as it drives across the savannah as it follows a family of cheetah or a pride of lions while they chow down on a wildebeest.

But it’s very different, for instance, in the case of the tiger in the Russian Far East. I can’t imagine that’s going to be an eco-tourism spot, because there are Udege people who I talked to out there who have hunted and trapped in those areas for 40 years, and who’ve never seen a tiger, despite the fact that they know that the tigers have been around them all the time.

If we do lose these alpha predators, what are some of the likely ecological consequences?

Large predators, in many cases, seem to be what the ecologists call a “keystone species.” My analogy is the keystone in a stone arch: It’s that wedge stone at the top that balances the opposing gravitational forces, and if you pull the keystone out, then the arch collapses. If you eliminate the keystone species, its absence has effects throughout the ecosystem. In the case of a big predator, you might eliminate a big predator that’s preying on middle-size predators.

So the population of middle-size predators booms, and they are preying on ground-nesting birds. Suddenly, you find that your populations of ground-nesting birds are going extinct. Why? Because you’ve eliminated the big predators.

That’s one of the sorts of ecological ramifications, but I’m as interested in the spiritual and the psychological consequences of the elimination of these things as I am in the ecological consequences.

What do you see as the psychological and spiritual consequences?

Big predators have for more than a million years reminded us humans that we’re part of a food chain. We’re not separate from nature, we’re not above nature, we’re not detached from nature, we’re part of nature. We’re part of a food chain and not necessarily always the top link on that food chain.

They’ve reminded us that, among other things, we’re just another flavor of meat. You take away these big predators, and suddenly that reminder disappears. I think that already we have enough tendency to believe that human civilization and nature are two separate things. And we don’t need any more reasons, excuses or license to embrace that false perception. The loss of the big predators is a huge step toward losing that awareness that we’re a part of nature.

Why do you think we have a greater fear of being eaten by a grizzly or a crocodile than being trampled to death by an elephant? What’s so bad about being meat?

Maybe it’s a more vivid reminder that when you’re dead, you’re dead, and your molecules dissipate and go their ways. Whether or not you believe in an afterlife, it’s a little bit scary for your corpse to be dishonored. And there’s no more vivid form of dishonoring the corpse than predation by a man-eater. That sense of the importance of honoring the corpse goes back hundreds, thousands, of years in all sorts of different cultures. And so if a man-eater kills you and eats you, it’s sort of the ultimate horror.

Why do you predict that by 2150 all the big predators will be gone?

I don’t have a crystal ball, but if the human population increases from 6 billion to 11 billion, as projected by the U.N. population division, I just don’t see any large enough, wild enough spaces to support genetically viable populations of these big predators. Sadly, I think that they’ll be gone.

I don’t think that they’ll be gone entirely. We’ll have them in zoos, and we’ll have them in test tubes. But there will be no place where you can have the experience of walking out through forest and subjecting yourself to the wonderful, terrible, titillating sense that you’re a potential prey item for a creature that’s bigger and scarier and more majestic than you are.

I think that that will be really bad and depressing and boring for our great-great-great-grandchildren.

It will be like a sanitized-for-your-protection world.

The planet will be more convenient and safer in the most basic, reductionist sense. It will also be uglier, more boring and more lonely.

Fussell has long insisted that for the critic and the historian the importance of experience, “sheer, vulgar experience,” as he calls it, trumps received ideas of propriety, niceness and comfort. Working as both a critic and a historian, Fussell has long relied on the testimony left behind by memoirs, journals and letters, history written by those present at the events they are recording. Valuing ambiguity and contradiction over judgment, he sets out to demonstrate Virginia Woolf’s observation that nothing is one thing.

More than anything else, Fussell’s view has been shaped by his combat experience during World War II. War has been his recurring theme in “The Great War and Modern Memory” and “Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War” (one of the books I return to most often and a model for the book that, 30 or 40 years from now, needs to be written about this moment in American culture); in a number of essays, the best of them being “Thank God for the Atom Bomb” (the title alone proclaims its willingness to upset accepted notions of civility on a subject about which civility is not possible); in his editing of “The Norton Book of Modern War”; in the introductions he has provided to war memoirs like E.B. Sledge’s “With the Old Breed” and Robert Graves’ “Goodbye to All That.”

He has returned to World War II in a new book from the Modern Library Chronicles series, “The Boys’ Crusade: The American Infantry in Northwestern Europe, 1944-1945,” his recounting of the experiences of the largely teenage conscript American infantry during the awful land battles of the final year of the war.

A faithful reader of Fussell might wonder what he has left to say about that war. Publisher’s Weekly has already proclaimed the book “slight,” which shows only that its critic was unable to distinguish between size and scope. At just 169 pages of text (plus a bibliography, index and suggestions for future reading), “The Boys’ Crusade” moves in short chapters from topic to topic. But those brief chapters, relying as is customary for Fussell on memoir and eyewitness testimony, add up to a sustained and bitterly contrarian view of the experience of combat for America’s teenage soldiers during World War II.

Nothing better justifies Fussell’s approach than the irony that this view, while markedly at odds with the official version of the American can-do spirit as exemplified in World War II, is the one shared by the men who experienced the war. Perhaps not the ones who, stationed at a division headquarters, were miles behind the front lines, but the ones who actually engaged in combat. With the generation of World War II veterans approaching 80 and older, Fussell has decided once again to speak for the dwindling numbers of the living, as well as those who never came home at all.

To understand why “The Boys’ Crusade” goes off in your mind as a series of explosions, you have to take into account not just what Fussell is saying here but the fact that he’s saying it now. We are less than 10 years from the nostalgia that accompanied the 50th anniversary of D-Day, still in the glow of “Saving Private Ryan” and “The Greatest Generation.” Of the Spielberg movie, Fussell recommends the “retention of and familiarity with the first few minutes … depicting the landing horrors” while consigning the rest to “the purgatory where boys’ bad adventure films end up.” You can assume that what he’s objecting to is that a film with the guts to reduce the actual fighting of “the good war” (those ironic quotation marks added to the phrase by Studs Terkel in his book of the same name) to brutality, sadism and unrelenting horror winds up embracing the clichés of duty and honor and sacrifice that Spielberg’s opening sequence bloodies.

In addition, we are still in the post-Sept. 11 revival of patriotism, which has entailed much that is moving as well as much that is false and meretricious. It’s not hard to imagine that, for Fussell, the most objectionable thing is the reliance on euphemism and distance from experience by which a necessary undertaking is transmuted into a noble cause.

Fussell is perhaps the truest antiwar writer we have. Not in the pacifist way in which that description is almost always used. Fussell is antiwar because he has seen war, because he knows that no matter how justified it is and no matter how honorable the ends, the means are always brutalizing, traumatizing, always a waste, always a mockery of every decent human impulse. In “Wartime,” he quotes an American private who fought at Anzio as saying, “Whatever we were fighting for seemed irrelevant,” and another saying, “It took me darn near a whole war to figure what I was fighting for. It was the other guys. Your outfit, the guys in your company, but especially your platoon.”

Fussell’s critics have been quick to misread that view. Some of the reviews of “Wartime,” notably Simon Schama’s moronic piece in the New York Times Book Review, picked up on these sentences from the book: “It was a war and nothing else, and thus stupid and sadistic … It takes some honesty, even if that honesty arises from despair, to perceive that some events, being inhuman, have no human meaning.” According to Schama and others, that meant that there was no difference between the Allies and the Axis, that fighting the war was pointless.

But if you are repulsed by Fussell’s sentences then you have to believe that young Americans with insufficient training and no experience of combat, put in the position of watching their buddies being blown to pieces or slowly and agonizingly dying from wounds that could not be mended, should properly have been high-minded enough to remember that they were engaged in the cause of destroying fascism instead of just trying to stay alive. For a historian like Schama to hold such a view means abjuring the hard truth of experience in favor of the wishful thinking of propaganda.

The sentence that I believe may get Fussell into trouble in “The Boys’ Crusade” comes at the back of the book in the “Suggestions for Further Reading” section. “The troops’ memoirs in my listing of sources will be found rewarding, especially to readers interested in exploring the fact that what has been celebrated as the Greatest Generation included among the troops and their officers, plenty of criminals, psychopaths, cowards and dolts.” The objectors to that sentence will, I imagine, perceive it as an insult to the troops instead of the inevitable truth. How could it be otherwise in a conscript army needing sheer manpower to win a war that, as Dwight Eisenhower recognized, could not be won by air power alone? Furthermore it is not some antimilitary polemicist who has made those observations about the less than honorable behavior of some of the soldiers and officers — but a comrade of those men.

If we lived in a world less susceptible to the redemptive narratives of war, it would not be necessary to point out that nowhere in any of his writings does Fussell ever say or imply that World War II did not need to be fought, or that the men who fought it don’t deserve our eternal gratitude. To have saved the world from fascism, Fussell knows, is to have fought for the very concept of what it means to be human. But, refusing the reader easy comfort, Fussell reminds us that that goal had to be achieved by inhuman means. No contemporary American writer has done more to explain, understand, and thus to honor the experience of Americans in combat, and by honor I mean paying his comrades the respect of faithfully recording what they saw, did and felt.

Just as it falsifies the victims of Sept. 11, 2001, to turn them into combatants who died in the name of freedom (they were civilians murdered as they went about their lives), it falsifies the experience of the soldiers in World War II to deny the terror, deprivation and filth they lived in. Fussell never denies that heroism is possible in battle. But heroism for him means something more complex than the simple-minded rhetoric of giving your life for your country. It can mean something as simple as holding on to your humanity in an inhumane predicament or providing the sort of leadership that imparts a feeling of confidence in the men under you. Or it can mean something as noble as putting yourself in danger to save the lives of your comrades.

Fussell does not single out for scorn the men who cannot be called heroes simply because they reacted as human beings with fear or paralysis. It’s the reckless, the cowardly, the ones who blithely sacrifice the lives of others (as opposed to the officers who are sometimes in the terrible position of having to issue orders they know will result in the deaths of their men) who deserve scorn. One of the war memoirists whom Fussell most admires, Eugene B. Sledge, a Marine who fought at Peleliu and Okinawa, two of the worst battles of the war, writes memorably about the false rhetoric of heroism. On Peleliu, Sledge and a buddy were sent into a gun pit where two Marines had been attacked the night before. The blood of those men still stains the coral rock. Sledge writes, “As I looked at the stains on the coral, I recalled some of the eloquent phrases of politicians and newsmen about how ‘gallant’ it is for a man to ‘shed his blood for his country,’ and ‘to give his life’s blood as a sacrifice,’ and so on. The words seemed so ridiculous. Only the flies benefited.”

It’s a measure of how much phrases like those have penetrated into our conception of war that Fussell needs to remind us that American soldiers were not Robert Taylor in “Bataan” or John Wayne in “The Sands of Iwo Jima.” The soldiers who fought the land war in Europe were, Fussell writes, “largely … American boys 17, 18 and 19 years old.” Seventeen-year-olds could enlist with their parents’ permission, though many of that age used false papers “not rigorously inquired into.” (The same is likely true of those who fought in the Pacific.) Though the infantry composed only 14 percent of the total number of Americans the Army sent overseas, Fussell quotes historian Roger Spiller that it suffered “more than 70 percent of all battle casualties among overseas troops.”

“The Boys’ Crusade” goes on to lay out the intensity and viciousness of the fighting that led to such high casualties among such a comparatively small number. But, sticking to his determination to faithfully record experience, Fussell does not shy away from the facts that a number of those casualties were the result of the screw-ups on our side. Some of those are plain dumb oversight, like the failure of the army to provide the troops in the Hurtgen Forest with dry socks and boots, leading to trench foot and, in many cases, amputation.

Some episodes display such a lack of basic common sense that they exemplify the source of the black comedy from which Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22″ sprung. Of these none seems more of a fuck-up than the COBRA operation. The aim was to eliminate the hedgerows that made Allied advance through occupied France so slow and so dangerous. Gen. Omar Bradley came up with the idea of using fighter-bombers to fly along a six-kilometer stretch of road close to German positions and bomb two kilometers on either side of it. In the first two days, 136 American troops were killed by “friendly fire” and nearly 500 were wounded. COBRA proved devastating to the German troops in the area. But no one had accounted for the way that the heavy cloud of dust and smoke stirred up by the bombings would drift back to obscure the American troops and thus make them vulnerable to attack from the air by their own forces. The Associated Press published a photo of American soldiers being dug out of ruined foxholes, claiming they were victims of German shelling. Fussell concludes his narrative of COBRA with these typically terse lines embodying his disgust for the official view of war: “Tourists prowling around the COBRA area should not waste time looking for a memorial to the boys killed by the bombing error. There is none.”

Along with the myriad slaughters and foul-ups that run through “The Boys’ Crusade” are the everyday indignities, like men eating unpalatable food in hot, stinking mess halls catching a glimpse of officers being served ice cream in dining rooms with white linen on the tables. Fussell’s main concern here is to impart a knowledge of how war, from petty indignities to heinous atrocities, brutalizes its participants. In “Wartime” he devoted many pages to Cyril Connolly’s editorship of Horizon magazine from 1939 to 1950, and the way Connolly acted as if civilized culture were still possible — were more necessary than ever — in a society preoccupied with war. To Fussell, Connolly’s dedication did not represent the fussy propriety of culture but an intellectual determination to believe that something other than death and destruction still existed.

It is hard, Fussell knows, to keep that belief alive when you have been trained to kill and when casual brutalization is part and parcel of your routine. There is a scene in “With the Old Breed” where Sledge watches a buddy nonchalantly pitching coral pebbles into the open skull of an upright Japanese corpse. Fussell doesn’t write of that episode here, perhaps because many others will suffice. He is, in “The Boys’ Crusade,” concerned with how war brutalizes not just actions but attitudes. In much of his writing on World War II, Dwight Eisenhower is something of a hero for Fussell, a man who was able to be a realist (as noted, he perceived that air power alone would not win the war) and was also able to retain something of his essential decency. In his war memoir, Eisenhower writes of the battlefield at Falaise that “it was literally possible to walk for hundreds of yards, stepping on nothing but dead and decaying flesh.” Fussell adds, “And Eisenhower was gentleman enough not to offend readers … by dwelling on the smell.”

That small passage is, in a way, the key to “The Boys’ Crusade.” What, Fussell is asking, does it do when a man like Eisenhower, whom he describes as “brought up in Abilene’s civilized church atmosphere and thoroughly indoctrinated there in the Golden Rule and simple related moral tenets,” confronts that kind of reality? And, by extension, what does it do to impressionable youngsters who have no experience of battle? The title “The Boys’ Crusade” may seem an ironic nod to Eisenhower’s war memoir titled “Crusade in Europe,” but by the end of the book any irony is burned off as Fussell discusses what the revelation of the Nazi concentration camps did to American troops.

Ultimately, “The Boys’ Crusade” is about how, without giving in to the false sense of purpose that is conferred on battles after the fact, the American infantry did gain a sense of what they were fighting for. Fussell quotes Gen. James M. Gavin as saying that this sense came only at the end of the war. And he quotes a major who saw the corpses at a concentration camp and said, “Now I know why I am here.” This did not mean that war suddenly became a noble act. Fussell recounts how American troops at Dachau were given the job of guarding 122 SS men who continued to make threats toward the now liberated former inmates. The troops turned their guns on the SS, killing all of them. One then gave his bayonet to a former inmate who proceeded to behead a guard. Fussell records the words of one lieutenant who, after liberating Dachau, said, “I will never take another German prisoner armed or unarmed.”

It may appall some that Fussell refers to killings like this as “informal acts of justice.” He is not concerned with assuring delicate sensibilities but with faithfully recording experience. Even before encountering the camps, Eisenhower, in 1944, proposed dealing with conquered German troops as follows: Exterminate the general staff, liquidate “all members of the Nazi party from mayors on up and all members of the Gestapo.” The irony that someone fighting an enemy who liquidated and exterminated those it despised can come to propose something similar is not lost on Fussell. But it is not the basis for easy moral equivalency.

Sometimes, Fussell is saying, evil demands retribution if we are to retain our sense of what it means to be human. It may be useful here to recall the words of Hannah Arendt in justifying Adolph Eichmann’s execution. “Just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations,” Arendt wrote, “we find that no one, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you.”

Fussell’s understanding of how inhuman means are sometimes the only way to affirm your humanity is hard to stomach for doves or those prepared to declare all war evil (which is distinct from declaring it sadistic though sometimes necessary). And it’s equally hard for hawks who want to buy into the crap of boys’ book adventures like “The Four Feathers,” which tell us that war is a proving ground for young men to realize their nobility and bravery. It’s difficult to imagine either of those groups not recoiling from the quote Fussell includes from the British captain John Tonkin who said, “I have always felt that the Geneva Convention is a dangerous piece of stupidity because it leads people to believe that war can be civilized. It can’t.” Tonkin wasn’t arguing for abusing prisoners of war. He was arguing against the cushy notion that cruelty can be finessed.

Most of all, “The Boys’ Crusade” will not comfort anyone who wants to bask in the patriotic good feeling of what Fussell calls the contemporary “chatter” about “the Good War and the suggestions of special virtue among the boyish citizen soldiers.” But holding that view is not, as I have argued, an attempt to dishonor the troops, but rather an attempt to accord them the respect of honoring the complexity of their experience. For civilians those experiences are unthinkable. For many who fought, they remain unspeakable.

“The Boys’ Crusade” is Fussell’s distillation of what he has found in memoirs like Sledge’s “With the Old Breed,” Robert Kotlowitz’s “Before Their Time” and William Manchester’s “Goodbye, Darkness” (an uncomfortably honest memoir). What unites all of these books, and what colors all of Fussell’s writing about World War II, is barely disguised bitterness. Sledge and Kotlowitz, Manchester and Fussell, and presumably all the men they speak for, know the necessity of what they did. But they still resent having had to do it. They know in their guts that war always represents some basic failure — of diplomacy, of vigilance. And these writers write as men who were forced to learn things that they would rather not have known, that no decent person could ever want to know. To drape that knowledge in glory is, for them, an insult. It’s the act of people like the ones Sledge refers to, those who talk about the honor of shedding blood for your country without ever having had to see the blood themselves.

In an act of true intellectual bravery, Fussell has chosen to write “The Boys’ Crusade” at a time when we are once again susceptible to the notion of the experience of combat (as distinct from the purpose it serves) as one of selfless sacrifice to a noble cause. In many quarters, we are told that to doubt that premise is to be unpatriotic. But if we can still conceive of patriotism as encompassing skepticism, ambiguity, honesty and criticism, then by any reasonable measure Paul Fussell is a patriot.

Everything smelled hotly of fuel. It was as though we were downwind from a grounded F-15 with its engine at full burn. I remembered this smell. The last time I had smelled Tashkent was as a freshly arrived Peace Corps volunteer with hopes of teaching the natives English. I was not much of a traveler at the time. I used words like “natives.” This was five years previous.

We had arrived in Tashkent at night. In 1996, only five years after Uzbekistan declared its independence from the Soviet Union, Tashkent’s airport seemed ominously dark. When we landed and rolled toward the terminal, I saw that some of the runway lights were flickering. A few were burned out completely. Three-wheeled trucks of strange vehicular provenance sat abandoned along the runway. I remember that some of them were on fire, but this could be an enhanced memory. We deplaned and waited in clubbed silence on the tarmac. After a while a rickety metal tram arrived to haul us to the terminal. Inside the tram it was cattle-car dark and cold. It was a terrible joke — not mildly funny or even distracting — when, as the tram lurched toward the terminal, I began humming the theme to “Schindler’s List.”

Now I waited for that same tram, upon that same tarmac, at that same airport. I looked around at my fellow passengers. Every pair of eyes shone with the glassy overlay of the seven-hour flight from Frankfurt. Every face was thick with sleeplessness. Many blue-jeaned and sweatshirted Germans idled around. I leaned over and asked a British man with whom I had chatted a bit on the plane, “What’s with the Germans?” and rolling his eyes he answered, “Tour groups.” Three tour groups, in fact. It seemed that, for reasons unknown, Germans love Central Asia. I later learned that they are, per capita, its most frequent tourists. Lingering on the crowd’s edges were several slumped Uzbek or Turkish businessmen. They seemed tired, dignified and quietly unhappy. I looked around. No one, with the exception of the Germans, appeared very happy, not even the young Russian-speaking Uzbeks in jean jackets and stylish black shoes carrying bags of duty-free booze and cigarettes. They looked over at me with lavish pouts and fading sullen eyes, still fried from having spent their weekend discothequeing in some glamorous international capital. Not typical citizens of Uzbekistan, needless to say. I wondered if they were government ministers’ kids, seedlings of the vlasti (the unopposable few who controlled Soviet politics, culture and society, and who in most of the former Soviet republics survived wholly intact), or the spawn of the Uzbek mafiya. Before I left on this trip, an Uzbek friend now living in Kentucky had sprung upon me the following koan: The economy in Uzbekistan was much, much worse today than in 1996, he said, but people were living better. I spent several nights attempting to comb the logic snarls from that sentence. Now, looking at 19-year-olds loaded up with importny loot, I had an idea of what he meant.

Those who were living better today were living better than anyone here had ever lived, better even than the Soviet bosses who in the 1970s had cruised around Tashkent in black Volgas with gray-curtained windows hiding the whores in the back seat. But ten years of corrupt, hybridized capitalismoid development was slowly teaching Uzbekistan’s people that such lifestyles did not exist for those who had no “in,” no clan, no muscle. No matter what average citizens of Uzbekistan did, no matter how good or honest or hardworking they were, the prestige-goods economy would remain beyond reach.

Two trams pulled up, their red running lights blinking. The tram I labored aboard was no cold, dark cattle car but a brightly lit Cobus 3000 with comfortable cushioned seats. It pleased me to see that Tashkent’s airport seemed less eschatological than I remembered. Some of the buildings near the main terminal still looked slightly shelled, but several new buildings were going up.

The Germans had annexed Tram One, and Tram Two seemed drab in its silence. Some Russian was spoken, quietly, behind me. I turned. A young Uzbek mother in a leather jacket crouched and played peekaboo with her daughter. Her husband, a straphanging Uzbek wearing a gold watch, looked down at them and smiled with weary contentment. A cell phone blipped Mozart. Several people reached into their pockets, but only one withdrew. He was large, thick-necked, shaven-headed, Slavic. He glanced at the number on the phone’s LCD, frowned, and put the phone back into his pocket. It rang a few more times and stopped.

Next to me was a young man wearing blue jeans and a flea-market dress shirt the color and texture of a tennis ball. His birdish thinness ceded a strange prominence to his otherwise normal-sized Adam’s apple. The piping of his wraparound insectoid sunglasses was a bright iguana green. His chopped hair was purposefully messy. Everything about him suggested: American. He was enjoying a pose of which traveling Americans seem fond. This pose broadcast, roughly, I am an American, and you are an American, and we are both in a strange place. Despite that, I am not going to speak to you or make myself available in any way. I wondered if he was a Peace Corps volunteer fresh from a reefer-fueled jaunt across Thailand. Maybe he was an employ of one of the hipper agencies like Human Rights Watch. Maybe he was the “cool” Christian in some evangelical platoon spreading the Word to Central Asians. But he was returning to what he regarded as home — that much was obvious. He had the careless look of someone comfortable enough in a foreign environment not to worry anymore about looking like he belonged.

“Hey,” I said.

He looked over at me. I could see nothing behind his tinted lenses. His mouth did not move.

“Do you live in Tashkent?”

He shook his head. His Adam’s apple bobbed, then sank, its transit appearing somehow painful.

“Do you work here?”

“No English,” he said suddenly.

“I’m sorry?”

He unplugged from himself a small flesh-colored earpiece. For the first time I heard the tinny sound of synthesized R&B. “No English,” he said again. That everything about this young man suggested American should have been the first thing to tell me he was not an American.

“Oh,” I told him. “Sorry.”

He replugged his earpiece. “No problem.”

A few moments later the tram stopped with an angry hydraulic hiss. The doors levered open. We filed into a long gray hallway that fed into the terminal. Tram One had beaten us here and already the end of the tunnel was clogged with humanity. Customs. Uzbekistan had for a time been one of the most difficult former Soviet republics to get into. This was not xenophobia. Rather, it reflected a long, complicated ignorance of how the mechanics of international travel were handled. Stalin had from the early 1930s until his death in 1953 sealed off Central Asia not only to other nations but to the Soviet people themselves. The legendarily stalwart adventurer Gustav Krist said in the 1930s that he “would sooner pay a call on the Devil and his mother-in-law in Hell” than travel through Central Asia without the proper papers. Travel here during that time often resulted in tragedy. Post-Stalin, there were two types of visitors to Uzbekistan: young banana-republic Communists from the Afro, Arab and Asian worlds of Successful Socialist Modernization, who were flown to Tashkent, the New Showcase City of Modern Communism, in order to witness What the Future Held; and those few tourists who decided to endure a journey in this isolated, wildly unpredictable part of the world. The latter were almost always a part of the Soviet travel agency Intourist’s forced marches through what the authorities allowed to be recognized as Uzbekistan’s cultural highlights (very little Islam, much anonymous peasant striving and only the most architecturally unignorable mosques). Uzbekistan, prior to its independence, had rarely seen its consciousness touched by the notion of individual, unauthorized travel. Even Uzbektourism, the infinitely more relaxed successor to Intourist, had for a time in the early 1990s demanded that all visitors present an invitation from an Uzbek host and documented proof of one’s HIV-negative status. But things had changed. Provided you were a citizen of the United States, entry into Uzbekistan now required nothing more than an easily obtainable visa.

After 30 minutes my turn came. My passport was kept in a black pouch I wore on a rope around my neck. I did this so no one would suspect that I had other, more important documents stashed upon my person, which, point of fact, I did. I approached the glass cube in which a young blond Russian customs official sat pianoing his fingers. I pushed my passport through the slot. The Russian retrieved it and cracked it open. He consulted the screen of his very, very old computer, then looked at me with coldly official eyes. That Russians have cold eyes is a cliché, but it is true. To gaze into this blond Russian’s eyes was like being stabbed with an icicle. He was wearing the spruce-green fatigues of the Uzbek military, his breast stamped with Uzbekistan’s tri-bar flag, a strange but not unpleasing combination of sky blue, white and kelly green. An Islamic crescent was found in the top bar’s far left corner. To see an unconditionally Slavic face in such proximity to one of Islam’s most potent emblems was affecting. I smiled at him, hoping he would assume from the smile’s vacuity my tranquil ignorance of the Russian language and ask me nothing.

I needed to avert the possibility of questions because I had $6,300 strapped in a money belt against my lower abdomen, only $4,000 of which was mine, only $500 of which I planned on declaring. Along with that $6,300 was a letter from a representative of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) to the wife of an Uzbek journalist I will call Omad, who was in the fourth year of his imprisonment by the Uzbek authorities for publishing a parody of the nutritionless prose style of Uzbekistan’s president, Islam Abduganievich Karimov. Omad was also dying of cancer. I was to make contact with Omad’s wife, give her the letter and $2,000, then quickly take my leave. We needed to meet somewhere private, as her phone and home were no doubt bugged, and we needed to meet in a way that would not tip off those monitoring her. Otherwise, minutes after I left, a “tax official” would show up. One complication: She was not expecting me. Another: I had absolutely no experience doing anything of this sort. CPJ had asked me to mule the money after learning of my trip through a friend of a friend, and I agreed mostly because of my respect for the organization. Adding to that, I had another letter stashed away in my luggage, this one from a Washington, D.C., lawyer to the daughter of an Uzbek official in the United States who was trying to defect — a difficult thing to do, it turns out, between nations with good diplomatic relations, as the United States and Uzbekistan enjoyed even in the spring of 2001. This potential defector was working stateside, on official business of the Uzbek government, and happened to be looking into the possibility of becoming an American citizen when, two months before, his daughter, who lived in Tashkent, telephoned him in a panic. Men had just broken into his apartment, she said hysterically, and burgled his papers and things.

He was accused, he later learned, of violating Article 159 of the Penal Code, i.e., “anticonstitutional activity,” i.e., government overthrow. After a 1999 bombing in Tashkent, a miniaturized Great Terror was launched at observant Muslims and democratic reformers. Most were innocent, and many had been tortured into confessing various antigovernment plots. President Karimov had gone on a much-publicized hajj when polite Islam was fashionable in newly independent Central Asia, but a decade later he loathed and feared the faith, brutalizing even those Muslims unmoved by the idea of neo-Mohammedan rule. Democratic reformers did not fare much better, even though Karimov always cited democracy as the desired end point of Uzbekistan’s development. Many others had fallen into this dragnet. When Uzbekistan’s former ambassador to the United States became interested in defecting to America, for instance, his daughter, Nadira Khidoiatova, was soon arrested on drug-smuggling charges. Khidoiatova was pregnant, and under Uzbek law was therefore supposed to have been released on bond. The Uzbek authorities sidestepped this nicety by forcibly aborting her fetus. The former ambassador, for his part, now lived under protection in the United States.

This background is to provide some sense of the panic our own potential defector must have felt before going into hiding. He had made contact with a second-year law student at Georgetown, who was trying to figure out, pro bono, how his first and only client could reasonably seek political asylum here. He needed to get the man’s daughter a letter, asking her to write back a detailed brief on the circumstances as she understood them. The whole situation seemed incredibly murky, to say the least, and because my involvement stemmed merely from a response to a post left on the Returned Peace Corps Volunteers Web site, I hesitated. But Mr. Georgetown lawyered me into agreeing. My task was simple. Any mail coming to the potential defector’s daughter from anyplace other than Tashkent, with anything on it other than authentic Uzbek handwriting, would be opened by the authorities screening her mail. All I had to do was find someone to address the letter, come up with a convincing fake address, and pop it into a mailbox. I was not even doing anything politically untoward, when I thought about it, though my relative innocence would have been difficult to clarify with the Uzbek authorities.

It did not matter. The blond Russian customs official said nothing to me, stamped my passport, nodded curtly, and waved me through into the highly relative freedom of the Federal Republic of Uzbekistan.

Excerpted from “Chasing the Sea” by Tom Bissell. Copyright 2003 by Tom Bissell. Excerpted by permission of Pantheon, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.