Sex and drugs in hell

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.

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