Sachs’ appealing book was received with adulation, but critical reviews of it made a splash too. Essays in the New York Times and the Washington Post, for instance, commended the professor for passionately shoving poverty to the fore, yet angrily denounced his central plan. “Sachs’s missionary zeal is infectious, but the flaws in ‘The End of Poverty’ should sound important notes of caution,” said one. “The danger is that when the utopian dreams fail (as they will again), the rich-country public will get even more disillusioned about foreign aid,” warned another.

That last quote (from the Washington Post Book World) was written by the New York University economist William Easterly, once called the “Charles Murray” of the aid debate by then Times columnist, now Times editor, Bill Keller. Easterly’s new book, “The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good,” suggests that the world’s official aid agencies — the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the U.N. — and national agencies such as USAID, have been recycling the same unworkable aid plans for the last 50 years. (Non-governmental organizations are not necessarily included in his argument.) In fact, Easterly claims that Jeffrey Sachs’ strategy resembles failed utopian aid policies that date back to the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. Easterly, on the other hand, believes in small, preferably homegrown, “piecemeal” efforts that focus on one specific problem at a time, perhaps focus on one specific problem in one tiny village.

At times, Easterly sounds a lot like the typical intervention critic, casually denouncing rich white Westerners who, as he sees it, meddle in thorny affairs of which they have no genuine understanding. But Easterly once meddled himself: He worked as a World Bank official for 16 years. “I didn’t know anything,” he told Salon by phone about his 26-year-old self. “I knew what you learn in an economics Ph.D. program. Over time I learned as I went along. A lot of aid jobs are writing reports. As if Africa could be made rich by reports. But I was a slow learner. I stayed in the World Bank for 16 years before I got disillusioned enough to want to try and reform the business I’d been in for so long.”

What does “poverty trap” mean and why don’t you believe in it?

The idea of the poverty trap is that if poor people start off poor, they will have difficulty saving enough to finance the investment they need to get out of poverty. It was appealing as a theory, it sounds like plausible common sense. Like other plausible common sense-sounding theories it turned out not to be true. Poor people save more than you would think and saving is not the only way to escape from poverty. Plenty of countries have started off poor and have had quite decent growth. If we take the poverty trap literally then really it should still be true for everyone — life would have been a place that was nasty, brutish and short. That’s a line I stole from someone else.

But this theory is the guiding principle for aid, isn’t it?

This was the original rationale for aid back in the 1950s and it still is. One thing that strikes me — having been trained in this field and having read all the old and new writings — is just the amazing parallels between what was written in the 1950s (which should have solved the problem by 1965). My good friend Jeff Sachs’ book really capitulates ideas that could have been written by Walt Rostow, an advisor to Kennedy and Eisenhower. He was writing the same stuff about the big push and the poverty trap. Unfortunately, experience since then has pretty amply demonstrated that that approach hasn’t worked. Somehow we don’t learn from failure. We’re trying the same thing over again, which is very discouraging. If occasionally a note of outrage leaks out in the book, it’s because I got so frustrated with the way failed ideas get recycled.

Why do you think they do?

These ideas offer simple answers and promise big things — the end of poverty, for example — in a fairly easy way that doesn’t require huge sacrifices from rich countries: Just increase aid a little bit more, and that would lift the world’s desperately poor out of poverty. I wish that were true myself. But simple is always appealing to politicians: Here is the thing that I can do that will alleviate this tragic problem of world poverty. So politicians like Blair and Bush can give the impression that something’s being done. The public isn’t terribly informed about what’s actually happening in remote villages in Africa. There’s no check on whether problems are being solved or not. Africans don’t vote in our elections — there’s no pushback when plans don’t work out or get results. Nobody is holding the aid donors accountable.

So the people who receive the aid should be holding them accountable?

In aid, 95 percent is implementation. Five percent is raising enough money from rich-country donors. [Bob] Geldof and Bono are talking about solving the 5 percent. The 95 percent has a long chain of poorly motivated and sometimes corrupt actors in between money and poor people. Donor bureaucracies like the World Bank or IMF are even less accountable than Blair and Bush because they don’t have to face election. They’re operating in a place that’s hidden from view. I don’t want to be too cynical. I think there are a lot of well-meaning professionals at these places. I am more cynical about the management, who I think just like to make a big splash in the media. The donor bureaucracies only have incentives to move the money. If it isn’t spent, that will be a scandal, but what happens far away is never known.

Of course, there are tons of problems on the receiving end. These are fragile states with often-poisonous political situations, conflicts, corruption, patronage politics. Health workers, for example, are appointed for political reasons and don’t have much incentive to get medicine to children. Drugs disappear on black markets.

Bob Geldof seemed concerned about accountability when he sponsored his aid concerts this year. What happened when he raised all that money for Ethiopia in the ’80s?

The problem was that the money passed through an authoritarian Marxist government whose main preoccupation was fighting a war against rebels who eventually ended up winning. There are plenty of allegations that both sides used food aid as a political weapon in war. That’s the kind of messy reality on the ground that makes it so hard for good intentions — even a caring person like Geldof — to actually have the money accomplish something good.

“Accountability” seems like a buzzword today, in general.

A lot of people are talking about accountability because that has been a criticism that has been voiced strongly in the last years. And that’s the main criticism that I would make of the whole exercise. But as I learned from being on the inside of a bureaucracy, they’re very skillful at deflecting criticism. When the World Bank is told they don’t have accountability they immediately write five reports about how they will.

But you know it’s become a meaningless buzzword at this point. We have to rescue the original idea. What does it mean? It means you are individually responsible for whether you did something. Someone gives you a reward or penalty — that way of thinking is completely alien to the whole aid bureaucracy, I can tell you.

So how would the people receiving aid hold aid groups accountable?

You’d have to be creative to think of ways to give people who receive aid a voice. The technical solution is to do evaluations before and after.

I thought NGOs already did this.

NGOs do it a little bit, but NGOS are not necessarily the knights in shining armor that will ride to the rescue of aid problems. They have their own problems — they respond to big problems that will be very visible to rich-country publics so rich people will give donations. Like the tsunami. All the NGOs will flock in, even though, as tragic as that event was, the amount of money that went to it was more than could be effectively spent to help the victims. It would be better spent on long-run development, nutrition or school programs.

I think you need to explain what you mean by too much money. The perception is that these poor, and now devastated, communities need everything they can get.

There’s never too much money in the sense of need. But the problem comes back to 95 percent implementation. You have to have the aid workers or locals who are motivated and accountable make sure money does good things, and they can only handle so much money. Huge amounts overwhelm the system.

So, Jeffrey Sachs is obviously prominent. And so are you. How could two economists come up with such opposite conclusions on a problem that’s been going on for years? Is it political motivation? Ego?

Frankly, I don’t think Jeff Sachs is doing good economics. Call economists at top schools and ask their opinion and I think you would get a similar one. He wants to solve problems in administrative and bureaucratic ways whereas economists want to ask: What are the incentives for people to get things done? Who has the incentive to make things work on the ground? And Jeff doesn’t address that at all in his book. It’s all about the technological, scientific or administrative situation you would need to improve soil fertility. But there’s nothing about who will be the one implementing the solution to soil fertility.

Well, who should be?

I’ll tell you right away my answers are never as convincing as the problems. Because there has been so little incentive to learn from past failures, we’ve been recycling and we have a lot less knowledge than we would have if we’d treated the last 40 years as a trial-and-error experiment with lots of methods on the ground.

The answers differ from one country to another. There’s been far too little learning. To learn you have to admit mistakes. In aid, it’s politically poisonous to ever admit you made a mistake because then the fear is they’ll cut aid.

In defense of aid agencies, they really had a bad political environment in which to operate — they’re never allowed to make mistakes and thus they never learn.

Can you give an example of something that worked then?

I like the example I gave in the first chapter of the book. There’s a nonprofit NGO called Population Services International, which is trying to control malaria in Africa. It’s a huge problem. The prevailing administrative top-down apparatus is to just hand out free bed nets through mass campaigns. That has not worked because when you flood the market with free bed nets and you don’t educate people on their great benefits, they end up not used or they’re diverted — since they’re free — to other uses, like wedding veils or fishing nets.

So PSI tackled this problem in Malawi. They don’t like the model of just flying in the 22-year-old white kid from America to tell the local people how to solve their problems. They employ a lot of local staff. Their local staff came up with a reasonable solution that worked better: They targeted a high-risk group, which is pregnant women and children under 5, and they had the nets sold at a highly subsidized price to mothers through antenatal clinics and gave the nurses a commission. When you give nurses a commission and offer counseling — and these are local Malawian nurses, not rich arrogant foreigners telling them what to do — the number of children sleeping under them went way up. This model is now being copied by other countries.

The free bed net campaigns in some countries have statistics like: 70 percent of bed nets not used. And there are even scarier ones. In a refugee camp in Uganda, a survey found six months later that one-third of the nets were still in the package, one-third were out of the package but not used, and one-third were being used. When Jeff Sachs ignores that kind of problem — that’s why I have to disagree.

But obviously the reaction must be, how could you make poor people pay for things?

There’s a visceral reaction to making people pay for things. That’s another way I think Sachs is being demagogic — he insists they have to be free whereas the PSI camp is charging mothers 50 cents per net. That isn’t trivial, but once the benefits are clear, then 50 cents is very worthwhile for someone who wants to save their child from malaria. The advantage of charging something for someone is that it places some value on it. That doesn’t play well in demagogic politics that surround debates about poverty, but it’s pragmatic. When people pay for things they feel like they have a right to hold you accountable.

Are the products always fairly priced, though?

They make sure it’s within their ability to pay. Then once the villagers pay then they get very angry if someone dies anyway. This is a totally homegrown aid program.

It’s common to rail against white foreigners implementing aid. But is there evidence that poor people respond better to programs run by locals? Or is it simply that locals know more about what’s going on — which I guess would suggest that the white aid people just need to be well-informed?

It’s more the second than the first — the local people just know so much more about local conditions. Especially when there’s some social entrepreneur working on one specific problem rather than the U.N. trying to achieve Millennium Challenge goals.

What are those goals exactly?

According to Sachs, they recommend 449 separate interventions to achieve improvements in the 54 indicators of poverty and suffering and to try and achieve this by 2015. That’s just an impossible, unworkable plan.

Wouldn’t the 449 interventions be 449 small plans, rather than one Big Plan?

When Sachs and I talked, he kept insisting that what he’s doing is not a “plan,” and then I quoted large sections of books he writes that talk about planning and strategies back to him. I think he may not like the word because it’s become pejorative — it sounds like a top-down plan to me. It was designed by 250 world experts meeting on task forces and writing reports — that’s an expert-driven approach. Very top down.

What are we to do about countries with corrupt governments?

The aid business has been stuck on this problem. You get people who say, “Well, the government is not really so bad, let’s give them money anyway.” Which is what I read the U.N. and Sachs as saying. And then you get people like the U.S. government and the IMF and World Bank saying, “Let’s supply tough love and we’ll only give aid if they reform.”

Both of these approaches have been tried and neither has worked. First of all, all the governments are not good governments so the first camp is way out of their depth. Second, although it might sound good in principle — these structural adjustment loans — all the empirical evidence is that aid is not successful in changing behavior. An awful lot of people agree that that’s been a failure. It was applied widely in Africa, the Soviet Union (called “shock therapy”), Latin America, the Middle East and somewhat less in Asia.

Part of the secret of the success in Asia is that they’re in a stronger position to resist being told what to do. They’re big, old civilizations that have strong senses of nationalism and self-determination and they have a big weight on the international scene.

But is there a way to bypass corrupt governments?

I think so. Try and get help to individuals and make products and services available that don’t depend on governments. There’s been this country obsession in the foreign aid business that somehow the objective is to fix countries.

Well, so they can help themselves eventually.

I don’t think countries are what matter so much; I think aid should just try and help individuals. That would free up enormous amount of money and reserves (now being wasted on trying to reform governments) into programs just focused on poor people. On getting drugs and textbooks to the poor. Doing things like the Gates Foundation: trying to create a malaria vaccine.

Is that organization effective?

The Gates Foundation is definitely more creative than official aid agencies, but they have to be diplomatic also. Gates is caught halfway in between the conventional wisdom and trying to think of new approaches that work better.

Your book is pointedly called “The White Man’s Burden.” It’s often said that aid is an extension of colonialism. But isn’t it to a certain extent an effort to rectify the damage done by colonialism?

I don’t think aid is a nefarious conspiracy to keep control in countries that used to be colonies. But it is part of the kind of colonial mind-set that has persisted. Kipling’s “white man’s burden” saw colonials as these benign white people bringing civilization to these people. It was put in much more p.c. language and became “foreign aid,” but still with rich, white people in charge thinking they knew the answers. There certainly isn’t the overt racism as before, but there is paternalism.

What’s happening now in countries like the Congo and Sierra Leone and Sudan and all these failed states — there’s this new rhetoric which I find worrisome that we should do something like shared sovereignty or trusteeships. That sounds a lot like colonialism to me. I’m not saying we’ll re-colonize — that certainly won’t happen — but they are failed states where very intrusive political and military intervention is taking place, which is somehow seen as the same package as foreign aid. That’s very neocolonial. I get invitations now and then to attend workshops with soldiers and aid workers who learned how to work side by side to reform society. Those e-mails scare the daylights out of me. That’s the last thing that should happen.

Not to overkill something that has been overkilled, but in Iraq we’re showing signs of these bad tendencies: military and aid are part of same package.

But are you saying we should never intervene militarily, even during genocide? You mentioned Sudan.

One should never say never. It’s very hard to watch “Hotel Rwanda” and say the West should never intervene. I’m sure if we’re on the ground in Darfur it would be very hard to say the West should keep hands off. But again, that’s the contrast between the grandiose plans to fix whole countries vs. the piecemeal apparatus that tries to help individuals and solve specific problems. Even with military intervention I think this same divide could apply. Yes, try and figure out a way to rescue civilians in Darfur from rape and murder and burning villages, but certainly do not attempt to invade Sudan and achieve regime change that is aimed at turning Sudan into an oasis of peace and prosperity. Just have more specific doable things that you can be held accountable for.

But Kristin’s also a self-proclaimed bitch with a truly awful SoCal accent, the girl who snarls at classmates in geometry and probably throws a decent punch, the kind the girls fear will steal their boyfriends and the boys describe as a “really cool chick.” And, of course, Kristin plays herself on TV, and so sensitive MTV viewers will note that it’s her real-life catty-girl persona that, for some reason, is being rewarded these days. Kristin is a rich, triumphant mean girl, the stuff ’80s soap operas were made of. But, ultimately, she isn’t pleasurable in the classic Alexis Carrington way because, well, this scary queen bee actually exists.

All of which makes her popularity slightly odd. In many ways, it’s amazing any vaguely likable character emerged from the palatial estates and plastic chins of Laguna Beach. Dubbed “The Real O.C.,” this show is a blander narcotic than even “The Real World.” Cameras follow around a crop of attractive American high-schoolers as they drive Range Rovers, tan their bums and shop for ugly sunglasses. Of course, it’s all spellbinding in that it forces you to confront serious questions about yourself: Why am I watching this? Will Character X ever complete a full sentence? Was I like this when I was 17? How lucky am I to be in the sinkhole of adulthood?

Which might be why Kristin’s such a star. At a time when we’re ever more attentive to the intricate miseries of teenagers, Kristin seems strangely aware that all of this, all of this high school stuff, is total bullshit. Considering how one of the requirements of adolescence is to assume that nothing will ever get better — the concept of perspective is as confusing as constructing attractive outfits for gym class — this quality makes her quite different from your run-of-the-mill teen.

When the show was being conceived, it was Lauren Conrad — charismatic, blond and button-nose cute with an ability to flash sad, sweet eyes on cue — who was meant to be the focus of the show. But the louder, springier Kristin stole every scene out from under Lauren’s espadrilles. A love triangle formed with dark-haired, fine-boned Stephen as the prize. A beach bonfire showdown was in the making, and one’s loyalties naturally fell to Lauren. She was so much nicer, and when she spoke, it didn’t make your ears hurt.

Slowly, though, Kristin began to exhibit bizarrely rational and admirable behaviors. Prime example: When the hard-won Stephen asked her what they’d do once he went off to college, Kristin, not missing a beat, replied with that arrogant shrug of hers: “We’ll break up.” Usually, a boyfriend departing for the planet of coed bathrooms is a traumatic, all-consuming event. But for Kristin, a fun-filled year of high school was far too precious to throw away for teary late-night phone calls and pointless bouts of jealousy-filled rage. Kristin clearly relished her role as the hard-partying heartbreaker (who, out of her friends, also seems to do the best in school). She also probably knew that it would make for better TV.

Lauren continued to let Stephen mess with her head; Kristin moved on. While the other normal girls on the show fell for typically caddish surfer boys, and fought with each other at fashion show fundraisers, Kristin continued to roll her eyes at them and cackle, I just wanna, like, have funnnnnn. You know? a mantra that seemed radical amid her friends’ hand-wringing. When she chastised her friend Jessica for still speaking to her cheating ex-boyfriend, it was with the sort of fury that can only be unleashed in the privacy of an upscale boutique dressing room: STOP CALLING HIM, JESS-I-CAAA. I’M SERIOUS. ENOUGH. When their mutual friend Alex noted that Jessica was the type of girl who would do anything for a guy, Kristin replied across the pedicure station with decades-old wisdom, And that’s sooo not gu-uuuud. It wasn’t that she became a more palatable character but rather that she seemed to possess knowledge that her peers did not, namely that: Ten years from now I will probably forget this piddling crap ever happened, and yet if I make a fool of myself, it will be on tape forever. It became fun to watch her savvy: She wasn’t just one-up on the boys, she was one-up on the cameras.

In fact, Kristin’s something of a snotty little sage, as if she’d graduated high school long ago, climbed in a time machine, and returned with a vengeance for another shot at teendom. Few parents would want a teen with Kristin’s soul, not to mention her dialect, and who knows whether Kristin will turn out to be a coldhearted, calculating woman someday. But teens could do worse than to adopt her sense of perspective. For anxiety-riddled tween-somethings everywhere, she’s a reminder that high school is the last breath of childhood, the twilight years of irresponsibility, and the tingly last days of brainless fun.

These renderings of the genocide include many unfathomable images of men furiously hacking at other men, of whole communities decimated while seeking refuge in church, of bloated, days-old bodies choking the country’s rivers. As by now most people know, in Rwanda, the vast majority of the Hutu population participated in the mass killing of their fellow Tutsi countrymen (as well as Hutu moderates) in only 100 days, a little more than three months. The killing was done without the efficient aid of gas chambers or bombs or machine guns; instead, most of the murders were of the one-on-one sort — a very personal, laborious killing in which many, many people willingly, almost enthusiastically, took part.

Although Western writers and artists have attempted, and will continue attempting, to translate the reality of a mass extermination, it’s a nearly impossible task. They succeed in many ways, but what they can’t quite get across is technical: What is it like for one entire population to kill another, day after day, for an entire season of the year? Did the men go to work too? Did they make love at night, and wake up and kill in the morning? Did they read books, get drunk, tell bedtime stories — all after a day’s kill? Did they cry?

“Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak,” the second book on Rwanda by French journalist Jean Hatzfeld, attempts to answer some of these questions, and gives this madness a shocking sort of order. Hatzfeld interviewed 10 Hutus six years after the genocide, while the men served time in jail. These Hutus were from the rural Nyamata district (population 119,000), which includes a small town and 14 surrounding hills (Rwanda is lush and mountainous) split almost half between Hutus and Tutsis. Beginning in April 1994, within six weeks, five out of every six Tutsis in Nyamata were killed.

The 10 men, ranging from 20 to 62 years of age, hailed from these hills, where most of them were farmers. “None of them has ever quarreled with his Tutsi neighbors over land, crops, damage, and women,” Hatzfeld writes. In fact, they lived next door to Tutsis, played soccer with them, went to church with them. “But these ten banded together,” Hatzfeld explains, “because of the proximity of their fields, their patronage of a cabaret, and their natural affinities and shared concerns.” Hatzfeld gives the reader a basic sense of who the men are — the little detail already provided in this review — but he wisely lets the men talk first before proffering their proper biographies. “That bunch was famous on the hill for carousing and tomfoolery,” said Clementine, a local Hutu who is married to a Tutsi. “Those fellows did not seem so bad.”

The Rwandan genocide officially began after the death of President Juvénal Habyarimana, a Hutu, whose plane was mysteriously shot down on April 6, 1994. The death of the president was the excuse the Hutu extremists needed to begin the killing that they had long planned. (Obviously, Rwandan history is ever more complicated: Hutu extremists had long been paranoid about Tutsi power; at various times Tutsis had suffered, and been slaughtered, at the hands of Hutus; a group of exiled Tutsis organized the Rwandan Patriotic Front, with whom Habyarimana had signed peace accords in 1993. Later, the RPF would enter Rwanda and stop the genocide.)

Hatzfeld’s band of ordinary Hutus, incited by extremists broadcasting on the radio, gathered together, singing songs and screwing around, and then headed down to the marshes where they believed the Tutsis were hiding. The new killers indeed bonded immediately: “We gathered into teams on the soccer field and went out hunting as kindred spirits,” said Ignace. “We had to work fast, and we got no time off, especially not Sundays — we had to finish up,” said Elie. “We canceled all ceremonies. Everyone was hired at the same level for a single job — to crush all the cockroaches.”

The most difficult part of all of this is to comprehend the moment when men become killers. The Hutus claimed not to have been forced to kill, though they did fear the consequences of not joining in at the beginning. By the time of the interviews, killing strikes them as quite normal. It’s not as though their first kill is particularly memorable. Still, they attempt to recall it:

Fulgence: “First I cracked an old mama’s head with a club.”

Alphonse: “I was quite surprised by the speed of death, and also by the softness of the blow.”

Adalbert didn’t remember the “precise details” of his first kill: “Therefore the true first time worth telling from a lasting memory, for me, is when I killed two children, April 17.”

They meditate on murder like this throughout the book. Elie: “The club is more crushing, but the machete is more natural. The Rwandan is accustomed to the machete from childhood. Grab a machete — that is what we do every morning.” Alphonse: “Saving the babies, that was not practical. They were whacked against walls and trees or they were cut right away.”

Indeed, especially for farmers, slicing at things was routine. The men use the word “cut” to describe their murders, as if what they did was akin to dragging a paper edge across a thumb. Obviously it’s a callous way of distancing themselves from their deeds, but it also signals the parallel they saw between hacking Tutsis and working in the fields.

Yet, there were differences. “Killing was a demanding but more gratifying activity,” said Pio. “The proof: none ever asked permission to go clear brush on his field, not even for a half-day.” Soon it became addictive, and there were rewards: “We could no longer stop ourselves from wielding the machete, it brought us so much profit.” The looting that accompanied the killing was dazzling for the poor farmers, and it offered a way for the women to pitch in (though some women and children did kill). They stole everything — some even grabbed the bloodstained clothing of the dead. “If you went home empty-handed, you might even be scolded by your wife or your children,” one man said. And despite knowing that their husbands were out raping women and then killing them, most wives still made love to their husbands at night.

Many men insisted that this life — the one where they woke up and killed people all day — was a better one. “Man can get used to killing, if he kills on and on,” said Alphonse. Fulgence went one step further: “The more we saw people die, the less we thought about their lives, the less we talked about their deaths. And the more we got used to enjoying it.”

As the killing went on, the men became intoxicated by the idea of “finishing the job.” The idea appears to have been that when it was all over, the Tutsis would be gone, and there would be no reminder of them. So the drive to kill every last Tutsi became more ferocious. In Nyamata not one bond of friendship spared a life, writes Hatzfeld; unlike in Nazi Germany, for example, Tutsis found “not a single escape network.”

But there was another key component to the genocide’s ferocity: No one was watching. There is nothing so damning in “Machete Season” as when the men speak of the “whites.” One man suggests that the idea of genocide germinated in 1959, when Hutus massacred many Tutsis “without being punished.” And in 1994, Hutu extremists gradually realized that the world was averting its eyes from the present atrocities as well. “All the important people turned their backs on our killings,” said Elie. “The blue helmets, the Belgians, the white directors, the black presidents, the humanitarian people, and the international cameramen, the priests and the bishops and finally even God … We were all abandoned by all words of rebuke.” Pancrace agreed: “Killing is very discouraging if you yourself must decide to do it … but if you must obey the orders of the authorities … if you see that the killing will be total and without disastrous consequences for yourself, you feel soothed and reassured.”

These were ordinary men, for sure. And ordinary men would have feared the punishment of others; as soon as the West pulled out of Rwanda they knew they were free to kill. It’s clear that if some force had been monitoring them, at least some of the motivation to kill would have withered away. Fittingly, one of the chapters in the book is titled “A Sealed Chamber.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, because of this long absence of condemnation, the men have no regrets. “I want to make clear that from the first gentleman I killed to the last, I was not sorry about a single one,” said Leopord. Hatzfeld notes in amazement that the killers speak in monotone and “never allow themselves to be overwhelmed by anything.” During the men’s seven years in prison, they knew of not one Hutu suicide. If they were depressed, it was only because they were locked up. “Aside from the anguish of my years in prison,” said Pancrace, “I do not see my life as harmed by all these regrettable events.” The unfortunately candid Elie takes a stab at remorse: “In prison and on the hills, everyone is obviously sorry. But most of the killers are sorry they didn’t finish the job.”

“Machete Season” is realistic and, above all else, terrifying; Hatzfeld brilliantly organizes his subjects’ stories for maximum effect. His method captures the rhythm of a genocide — the cold, workmanlike, fierce nature of its repetition. The book goes on and on, the killers are still alive, they persist, they won’t stop talking. Just when you think they won’t mention their machete again, it’s back.

When the men return home from jail, it’s to a country in trauma. “The silence on the Rwandan hills is indescribable and cannot be compared with the usual mutism in the aftermath of war,” writes Hatzfeld. What Hatzfeld suggests is the possibility of an Africa in turmoil because of many of its people’s learned fatalism. Perhaps the most terrible line in “Machete Season” is spoken by Pio, who noted with astonishment the silence with which the Tutsis confronted their deaths, even as he came near to where they hid in the marsh, machete in hand. They did not fight back. They did not cry out. “They felt so abandoned they did not even open their mouths.”

Readers hungry for the mere mention of Osama’s name, especially now, at a time when Sept. 11 remains fresh but the only glimpse of Osama is on “Saturday Night Live,” will turn these few sentences over and over in their minds. During the Afghan-Soviet war, Carmen Bin Ladin writes: “He was admired. He was involved in a noble cause. Osama was a warrior — a Saudi hero.” After meeting him for the first time, she notes, almost unimpressed: “He was not strikingly different from the other brothers — just younger, and more reserved.” But then there’s this: “When Osama stepped into the room, you felt it.” It’s one of many lines in “Inside the Kingdom” that leaves us desperate for more. What did she feel?

Of course, in Saudi culture, hardline Wahhabi Muslims like Osama insist that women’s faces be covered. Carmen Bin Ladin’s real, human contact with Osama was limited, and by Western standards almost nonexistent. But one scene in this plainly written but arresting memoir does shed light on Osama.

It was 1977, a time of relative freedom and ease in Saudi Arabia, after the rush of oil money flooded the country and two years before the Iranian revolution. The extended bin Laden brood had taken off to the family mountain house, two hours from their compound in Jeddah and the deadly August heat. Even in the mountains it was 100 degrees, but Osama’s wife Najwah, a tellingly miserable woman, refused to feed her tiny baby with a bottle. She was trying to feed him with a teaspoon, because her husband had decreed that his child would not be fed by bottle.

Carmen Bin Ladin, scared that the infant might become dehydrated, pleaded with a bin Laden sister to tell Yeslam, who was in the other room, to tell Osama that the child would become ill. (The men and women of the family couldn’t socialize together, and Carmen couldn’t intrude on the men as a female bin Laden blood relative could; often in Saudi Arabia, these elaborate, infantile games of “telephone” must be staged.) Yeslam’s reply? “It’s no use. This is Osama.”

This experience was a huge turning point for Carmen Bin Ladin, a Lausanne-born woman of Swiss and Iranian heritage. Not long after, she decided to leave Saudi Arabia behind forever and save her three daughters from an uncertain but probably unhappy fate. It coincided with another realization, an ominous and foreboding one for those Americans who are questioning our dubious relationship with the Saudis: “Underneath [Saudi men] have always maintained their self-assured and inflexible value system, and it rises to the surface as they age. This is what happened to the Bin Ladens in the years I lived with them, and it’s what happened to Saudi Arabia as a whole while I was there. It is still happening today.” The pictures of the Westernized Bin Laden brothers in their youth, sprinkled in the book, all Afros and bell-bottoms, are hard to shake, and the transformative power of the Wahhabi ideology that later overtook them seems at once bone-chilling and bewildering, fantastical and childish.

Carmen writes, however, that Osama bin Laden was never, as some have claimed, a playboy as a young man in Beirut. He may have been more Western at one time, but “the now famous photographs that were taken of a crowd of teenaged Bin Laden brothers in Sweden — they don’t show Osama either.” She maintains that “the boy identified in the media as Osama is in fact another brother.”

Ultimately, what is most interesting and perhaps most important about “Inside the Kingdom” are the details it provides about daily life in Saudi Arabia. “The Saudis are the Taliban, in luxury,” Bin Ladin writes. And “Inside the Kingdom” is also a personal, emotional account of a royal family and its bin Laden business friends — people to whom the United States and President Bush’s family remain inextricably linked, despite their autocratic rule and uncertain relation to the author of the Sept. 11 attacks.

The stark transformation of Carmen Bin Ladin’s own life might be what strikes readers most personally. The author married Yeslam Bin Ladin very young, when she was a stunning, sexy, glamorous-dressing Westerner, a woman who had traveled freely to her mother’s native Iran and back to her home in Geneva. In the early years of their marriage, Yeslam and Carmen lived in California, and the book features happy pictures of the handsome couple in sundresses and suits, T-shirts and jeans, lying on the grass in the sunshine.

When the couple moves to Saudi Arabia, it’s as if the world goes black and mute. Carmen writes of her first time wearing an abaya, the suffocating shrouds women must wear over their faces and bodies: “I looked out of the car window and through my veil I saw just a dim light — no people, no buildings. Even the streetlights were dark.” Not surprisingly, it gets worse. An extraordinarily rare trip to the grocery store, so she can get the proper milk for her daughter, involves an arduous charade: “And in order that one completely black-shrouded woman could walk inside with her husband, the store had been emptied — completely emptied — of all its clients and staff.”

In Saudi society, women simply have nothing to do. “There were no books,” Bin Ladin writes. “There were no theaters, no concerts, no cinemas. There was no reason to go out, and in any case we could not go out: I was not allowed to go for a walk, and legally could not drive.” Foreign newspapers featured blacked-out, unreadable sections — those bringing news of two countries: Israel and Saudi Arabia. Her daughters’ schooling is all religion, and “no sports, no debates, no discussions. No games, marbles, or tricycles.” Wafah, the oldest, returns home one day with “I hate Jews, I love Palestine” scrawled in her notebook, just as a normal girl would scribble her first name beside the last name of the little boy she loved.

After this beginning, it’s confusing to learn that just a few years later, the country flush with oil money, the bin Ladens could enjoy Thursday night parties where the sexes mingled and alcohol was served. Carmen Bin Ladin says she initiated these happy nights: Western businessmen and diplomats would visit for tennis matches and a perusal of her proud library. No Saudi women ever showed, but a few Saudi men did. One gets the sense that the Bin Ladens, under the protection of the Saudi royal family and their own astonishing wealth, really could do what they pleased.

Even in 1979, after the Islamist revolution in Iran, when Saudi Arabia returned to harsher ways, being a bin Laden meant something. In Saudi Arabia at that time a husband couldn’t tend to his pregnant wife in public: “One afternoon, I was in a supermarket when a pregnant woman fainted; her husband rushed to help her up. The mutawa [religious police] were there, and they stopped him, yelling at him that he must not take his wife in his arms in public.” Carmen, however, had a Sudanese driver by her side to shield her from the mutawa with two words: “Bin Laden,” the driver would say, and the police would back down.

The truth is that the bin Ladens choose to live the Wahhabi way, even though, as Carmen often suggests, they had the potential for more freedom than everyone else. The Iranian revolution also made Yeslam and his extended family, extraordinarily nervous and religiously obedient, terrified of the militant radicals in their own country. Yeslam would change forever, becoming a perpetually sick, intolerant, harsh and religious man, and later a harsh, religious man with mistresses on the side.

It was these changes in her husband that finally broke Carmen — both Yeslam’s infidelity and his demand that she have an abortion when she became pregnant with her third child. It was a request she’d complied with before, much to her despair. The hypocrisy in Saudi Arabian culture about women is difficult to get your mind around. Bin Ladin writes of Saudi princesses, locked up and disdained by their husbands, suffering from “bone density problems from lack of sunlight and exercise,” who, not surprisingly, fall in love with one another.

“We all heard rumors of a kind of lesbian party circuit in Riyadh,” Bin Ladin writes, “where women would socialize and pick each other up.” In Saudi Arabia, homosexuality is punished by public flogging. Yet, Bin Ladin implies, who can really be bothered to punish the silly Saudi lesbians? “Women don’t matter to a Saudi man,” Bin Ladin explains. “Possessing them matters — matters crucially — but once the women are locked in and breeding, what happens among them doesn’t count for much.” The rules in Saudi Arabia, it seems, are at once terrifyingly oppressive and weirdly arbitrary.

Carmen Bin Ladin rarely, if ever, talks about how the rest of the bin Laden clan regard the U.S. and the Western values that her former brother-in-law Osama despises so much. Yeslam and some of his other brothers conduct themselves like Westerners while vacationing in the West (Yeslam now lives in Switzerland himself), but we get no sense of whether their politics fall in line with those of their militant brother.

But Carmen does discuss the intense bin Laden clan loyalty, the Bedouin mentality that she believes makes Saudi Arabian men unique. She writes that she “cannot believe” the bin Ladens would cut Osama off completely: “I simply can’t see them depriving a brother of his annual dividend from their father’s company, and sharing it among themselves. That would be unthinkable — among the Bin Ladens, no matter what a brother does, he remains a brother.” At the end of the memoir, Carmen “openly defies” the bin Ladens to open their books and prove that they had nothing to do with Sept. 11.

The author, who now lives in Geneva and whose daughters studied in America, also never says outright what she thinks of the close relationship between the U.S. and the Saudi regime. Considering the steady and compelling case she builds for the tyranny of the society, however, it’s pretty easy to read between the lines. Or, at least, to share with her this fear about Saudi society and America’s silence about it: “If we, in the Western world, are not vigilant enough, there will be no end to their terrorism.”

The party is one of a handful of exuberant moments that Cain, Postlewait and Thomson have detailed in their book, “Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures: A True Story From Hell on Earth.” It’s also one of the reasons a few conservative media outlets have portrayed the book as being what the title signaled it might be: an American bender of sex and drugs and irresponsibility in exotic places. “U.N. missions painted as booze-soaked orgies,” the Washington Times’ headline trumpeted. “UN beset by sex, drugs, book says,” said Canada’s National Post. “Sex & Drugs at U.N.,” said the New York Post.

“Emergency Sex” does spotlight sex and drugs: Heidi writes of ripping off her boyfriend’s clothes immediately after coming under sniper fire in Somalia (“It has to be right now, not in ten minutes, not five … Emergency sex”). Andrew describes a beloved marijuana cocktail, the Space Shuttle, that he consumed while in Cambodia. Still, the headlines are silly in light of the U.N.’s much graver problems, and misleading in light of the book’s obvious intentions and accomplishments.

“Emergency Sex” is serious, beautifully composed and aggressively honest. Weaving the authors’ three distinct narratives, it’s uniquely able to show how various peacekeeping and intervention efforts in the post-Cold War 1990s completely fell apart after Somalia. Heidi and Kenneth were stationed in Somalia when 18 American soldiers were killed and the United States pulled out; Andrew, working in Haiti, watched in despair as the United States abandoned its mission there, too. What followed was a series of catastrophic miscalculations and cowardly acts, by both the U.N. and the U.S., from Africa to Europe, much of which the authors bear witness to on the ground, and afterward, quite literally, in the graves of Rwanda and Srebrenica.

Today, Andrew and Heidi still work for the United Nations, which is now threatening to fire them for publishing their memoir. Kenneth is a writer and was nominated for a National Magazine Award in 2000 for a Human Rights Quarterly article on war crimes in Liberia. Salon spoke to all three at a cafe across the street from the U.N., which they heartily slammed. They also discussed what it’s like to stand in a grave of 10,000 human bodies, how U.N. peacekeeping soldiers sometimes terrorize the countries they’re sent to protect, and, of course, why sex is sometimes the ultimate solace in the field.

Heidi and Andrew, are you being disciplined for writing this book?

Heidi: There hasn’t been disciplinary action taken. We got a letter of reprimand that was kind of open-ended. There’s so much media attention about us publishing the book and the U.N. potentially firing us that they’ve backed off on that a little bit. But they’re not letting it go.

Andrew: What’s very clear is that the galleys have been read at the highest levels of the organization, by people in the inner circles of Mr. Annan. They’re the ones who are driving this process. I take these threats really seriously. I don’t think it has anything to do with the sex. I don’t think these people are hopeless prudes at all. For me, it’s everything to do with [the U.N.'s] failures to stop genocide in Rwanda and Srebrenica.

Is there any chance that it’s about the sex and parties?

Andrew: It’s been a really opaque process. The place runs like an authoritarian regime. But the building leaks like a sieve and what I’ve heard is that they’re not happy with our eyewitness account of the aftermath of two genocides that some of them could and should have done more to stop.

Kenneth: They’ve threatened to dismiss Andrew and Heidi for having written their memoirs. However, for example, there’s $10 billion missing in Iraq right now from the oil for food program. Is anyone waving staff rules at any of those senior administrators and saying we might fire you? No. One million lives were lost in genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia that could and should have been prevented by U.N. soldiers on the ground and were not, by this very leadership. Has anyone there been disciplined for losing 1 million lives?

Andrew: They’re more concerned about their own reputations than they are about learning lessons or remembering.

Heidi: We didn’t write about anything that hasn’t been written about 100 times before. They’re making a big deal of the fact that we’re U.N. staff members who are writing this. They’re questioning our loyalty.

So let’s get to the sex, for a moment, as I’m sure by now many people are curious about what exactly goes on during these missions. I imagine that in dangerous, life-threatening situations sex serves many purposes.

Heidi: Everything is intensified and magnified — friendships, your faith, your desire to stay alive. Andrew said something about the sex being an antidote to that feeling of being near death. “Emergency sex” is a metaphor for that intensity. People out there don’t have their usual family support systems. You don’t have a daily routine. You’re really needy. You’re seeing terrible things. In a month, you’re in a kind of relationship that would take three or four years here. They don’t generally last after the mission is over, which is probably a good thing.

I was interested in your relationship with Yusuf, in Somalia, because eventually he asked you to be his second wife, and you considered it. It seems like after living in that culture for so long you actually had become part of it in some way.

Heidi: The thing about that was that nothing was real out in the field. He bought me Somali clothes and I would cover my head and go out with him. I got to go places in Somalia that no other non-Somali went to because he had relatives there who would come and pick us up and sneak us out. They would show up in pickup trucks outfitted with an antiaircraft gun — these enormous things bolted to the back — and all these guys would be sitting on the back chewing khat, with AK-47s slung over their shoulders. It was like Mad Max. I was living in a fantasy world with him.

He actually left the country with me and we lasted about two months in New York. When it became real life, I realized that I could never tolerate some of things he expected.

Anyone else want to talk about sex?

Kenneth: What Heidi was saying is a very American thing. I felt for a long time that I was in a movie. It took me until this guy I knew got killed, and me getting physically shot at, for me to snap out of the idea that I had stepped into some crazy, hyped-up version of “M.A.S.H.” It’s very American and probably all of us went through it, except for Andrew, who’s from New Zealand, where they don’t have movies.

Andrew: Or sex.

Kenneth: Also, the violence and the chaos — and we felt this a little after 9/11 in New York — makes the barriers, the walls between people, crumble. When life is abnormal those walls go away. You think: Why did it just take the fact that my buddy was just killed for me to finally hug this woman here?

The media response has been really interesting on the sex. Mostly they’ve written about Heidi’s sex, or exclusively about Heidi’s sex. I had sex too — it’s in the book!

Heidi: The New York Post cut two of my sex scenes and put one right after the other. One wasn’t good enough, there’s two, so it seems like all I wrote about in the entire book was getting fucked. No.

The thing is, I was in relationships. They flow throughout the book. So there’s some sex, but that’s about a woman finding herself, being in a man’s world, and doing the same things that men normally do — like going to a prostitute. In the field, God, you drive past where all the prostitutes are and it’s nothing but U.N. vehicles. But Ken’s sex scenes are far more graphic than mine: A woman screaming in French, “I’m coming! I’m coming!”

I also think there’s something else going on — when Heidi describes her experience with the [male prostitute] in Kenya. Americans aren’t used to young women going off alone and sleeping with African men, period. It’s foreign, dangerous, to them.

Heidi: As soon as I went to Cambodia I understood that this was an opportunity for me to have experiences. I wasn’t going to be held back by any sort of stigma. I mean, you don’t have to necessarily run off with a Kenyan prostitute. But people are so afraid when they travel that they miss so much in life.

OK, we can go back to the U.N. now, since it’s certainly becoming clearer that sex and partying is probably not what upset them about the book. Is it possible that they’re concerned about failing certain missions that are going on right now, for example, Sudan? Are we at one of those moments — as we were in Rwanda in 1993 or 1994, when we should all recognize that we are experiencing another genocide?

Heidi: Yes. The government of Sudan is saying they don’t want a peacekeeping operation. That’s always a problem for the U.N. But they’re not tough enough.

Kenneth: The Security Council can say, “We don’t care what the government says, we’re going in.” From the immediate post-Cold War moment, when Mr. Annan was the head of peacekeeping, the institution has squandered its moral authority. It’s been in a permanent process of disgracing itself. It started in Somalia. The week that the U.S. pulled out of Somalia was the week that the war started in Rwanda. It was then that the safe havens collapsed in Bosnia. All hell broke loose in the early ’90s. Well, people notice. So the government of Sudan knows that it’s more or less costless for them to say that they don’t want a peacekeeping force. They know nothing’s going to happen.

Andrew: It is a chance for Mr. Annan to redeem himself over his personal failures in Rwanda and Srebrenica, and I’m following it with great interest. You can call it ethnic cleansing, acts of genocide, crimes against humanity — who gives a shit? People are dying and they’ve been dying for a long time. The Sudanese government needs to be leaned on hard. During the genocide in Rwanda, Rwanda had a seat on the Security Council. And the Rwandan ambassador — the ambassador who represented the government that was busy killing its own people — was listened to and respected. Why didn’t someone punch his lights out? Or throw him out of the Security Council? It’s obscene, this politeness. Throw Sudan out of the U.N.

Kenneth: The players get addicted to the credibility they get at a major conference. In Somalia, there were dozens of peace conferences in Nairobi. You have these Somali warlords who are raping and butchering and stealing, and you march them up to Nairobi for a peace conference and give them a five-star banquet. They have a lot to drink and they have ready access to prostitutes. Of course, they don’t want to leave the peace process! They’re happy to have more peace process!

Somalia was really the turning point for U.S. foreign policy, but it’s hard to grasp its effects and how it might be affecting our current situation. You were in Haiti, Andrew, at the time. Can you describe what that was like?

Andrew: It was amazing how rapidly it all fell apart. “Black Hawk down” in Somalia led to a loss of nerve in the Clinton administration, and it led them directly to order that boat, the USS Harlan County, out of Port-au-Prince harbor. The boat had military and civilian police on it and our civilian mission collapsed. It was a shameful moment.

Kenneth: It’s a little hard to disaggregate where we point fingers at the U.N. and where we point fingers at the U.S. That particular moment was a U.S. failing. What the Clinton administration and the U.N. couldn’t understand is how bad the loss of authority is when you promise to intervene, and withdraw right after. [Civilians] come forward and tell the truth about the regime. And then you leave. That can backfire terribly for that [civilian]. The decisions we’re making in Iraq right now are going to have implications for a decade in the Middle East, and policymakers constantly forget that.

Andrew: The men on the ground with the guns are very sensitive to the smell of any capitulation. Once they see a boat sailing out of the harbor with the troops that were supposed to bring peace, everyone’s a target.

Heidi: I also think the U.N. needs to stop pretending that it’s a neutral party, because it has a greater impact than any other group once it steps into a country.

Is what happened in Somalia still affecting U.S. policy now?

Kenneth: Today, we have a group of people [in power] who understood what a catastrophe that was in terms of the U.S.’s authority, and they have gone way too far in the wrong direction. The blowback from Somalia is now going on in Iraq, going in the wrong direction.

The decision was made not to send civilian peacekeepers to Iraq, correct?

Heidi: Not now. We have no one in Iraq now. They’re running the civilian part of the mission from Cyprus.

And that’s because it’s too dangerous?

Heidi: Yes.

Andrew: What can we do for the Iraqis if we can’t even protect our own staff? We’re still in shock from that suicide truck bomb hitting our headquarters in Baghdad a year ago, last August. Twenty-three dead, 100 wounded. An investigation showed that U.N. security was dysfunctional at every level, right up to the top, high up.

Kenneth: Every six months there’s an egregiously scandalous moral catastrophe in that building about which no one is responsible.

Andrew: Now we have a food-for-sex scandal in eastern Congo, where our peacekeepers have been exchanging food for sex from young Congolese women who have been raped and brutalized.

And that happened in Liberia, too, correct, which you write about. That chapter is one of the most harrowing in the book — Nigerian and Ghanian peacekeepers raping and killing young Liberian girls. So there’s no screening process for U.N. peacekeeping soldiers?

Heidi: None. I remember when we were in Cambodia there was a group of African troops. They were barefoot. They had no shoes. They weren’t soldiers at all — they were people they picked up off the street, put on a plane, and shipped to Cambodia.

Andrew: If we can’t send peacekeepers who are going to help the people they’re supposed to help, let’s not send them at all.

All of you admitted when you had enough and stopped going on missions. I can’t imagine that that was easy. When did you know you had enough?

Heidi: I know in the book that it seems that I was leaving Haiti after my boyfriend died, but the day he died was my last day at work. I had already resigned. I was tired of it. It wasn’t the U.N. It was just that I was ready to settle down and do something else.

Kenneth: I was in Liberia where the U.N. was working with a West African collection of peacekeepers called ECOMOG, who were as corrupt and depraved a group as you could assemble and still call them peacekeepers. Much of the fighting had to do with Nigerian troops [peacekeepers] occupying the diamond mines, and a lot of people were dying because of that. That was too much.

There’s a certain self-congratulation for being courageous enough for doing this kind of work, and therefore it’s very difficult to stop because then there’s an element of cowardice. When my partner and I were going to the prison in Mogadishu and it was dangerous, I wrote that neither of us had the courage to say that we were too scared to go. You have to work up the courage to say that you’re scared or that it’s not worth it. That’s hard.

Andrew: Mine was a rolling process that went downhill gradually. I was ready to resign after the evacuation from Haiti. But the opportunity came up to run the forensic investigations for the two war crimes tribunals [in Rwanda and Bosnia], and my logic was that at least if we weren’t able to stop these bastards from killing hundreds of thousands of people, maybe we can go back in and get the forensic evidence to nail them in court. Morally, my last two missions were positive, but psychologically and physically they were devastating.

What do you mean?

I remember sitting in the shower in Bosnia, trying to get the stench out of my pores, and losing all track of time, thinking I’d been there for five minutes when it was an hour. A lot of your ideals can get left behind in the last mission you did and the temptation is to do one more. Eventually, you decide I’m going to die or I’m going to go crazy and you leave your ideals behind and go home.

Is it hard to adjust to normal life?

Heidi: It’s tremendously hard. On mission there are always other people and always something going on and you know where to find people if you need them. You come back here and live this isolated existence — I found myself staring at the wall for days. You get used to a simple existence on missions — you’re happy if you can get a vegetable that day or a bag of sugar or a hot shower.

Kenneth: Another thing that happens in the field is that you get very angry. People are dying and people are constantly screaming at you and there’s physical violence. I had a hell of a lot of trouble when I came home. I was working at a silly job in the asshole of the entertainment industry and I clocked my boss at one point. I thought he was acting unethically and my blood boiled and I just clocked him. Then I was horrified.

Andrew: To tell you how out of it I was: When I got back to New York in 1997, I would wander around the streets thinking about genocide in New York City. Thinking about, what would it be like if you cut this city off from north of 42nd Street and east of Fifth Avenue and you started to kill everyone with blue eyes — something arbitrary — or black hair. Or everyone who was short. That was insane, walking around the streets and thinking of genocide on the Upper East Side. It took me a while to get back to choosing the right shampoo.

Kenneth: In late summer, in the subway, there’s this smell. I think it’s urine going bad. It has the whiff of the rotting bodies of Rwanda. And that smell always sends me far.

Andrew: To be very close to horror doesn’t allow you to process to it. I remember in Rwanda, my senior forensic expert and I had gone to some mass graves and we found one huge grave where the locals — the survivors — had taken all the dead from one commune, dug a huge hole which was probably 30 meters long and 9 feet deep, and put all the bodies in there and tried to stack them. The bodies that were whole were stacked in one corner and then all the heads that were loose in another corner, femurs and different bones in another corner. I don’t know — 5,000 bodies? 10,000? 15,000? I remember standing on the side of that grave and lowering him in on a rope and thinking, “This is not different from the photos of the liberation of Auschwitz and Dachau with the bodies piled high.”

And I felt nothing. I couldn’t feel anything. Then I started giggling because I left him in the hole and I wouldn’t pull him out. When we eventually got out, we were both giggling. Then someone invited us to a wedding which was maybe 15 feet from that grave, and a Rwandan couple was getting married and as you can imagine we got totally drunk, we just got smashed. And we were giggling.

It wasn’t until I got back that I started to feel that. It’s like riding a bicycle: As long as you keep pedaling, you stay upright — and when you stop, you just fall off.