Sex and drugs in hell

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.

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