Two thirty in the afternoon, I'm home from work. Winter. Nothing to do. I flip through the channels, nothing but soap operas. I have to fight the urge to climb into bed, afraid I may never get up again. This ennui has taken human form and, with its dusty, white hands around my throat, has me gasping for breath. My mother tells me it's how most people live. You get up, go to work, pay the bills. Cook, clean, do the laundry. If you're lucky, you take a vacation once in a while. You get old, retire, and die. That's life. But all the questions can't be answered already; there's got to be something more. Maybe it's time to get pregnant, buy a house, adopt a dog.

Ashamed, I find myself envying the Iraqis and the Israelis. There seems nothing false about war. Loyalties are strong. The enemy is known. There are none of the subtleties and nuances of ordinary life; you're at the core of every feeling. Nothing else matters but to stay alive. And that's how I want to feel.

He has a funny look on his face; he wants to tell me something. 'Hey, Ken, you know why your boss was so insistent to open the courts and have judges paid salaries, right?' His eyes are twinkling like the sun off the Indian Ocean on the other side of this hard-scrabble court.

I'm trying to think. The boss pushed and cajoled and even put an ad in the fucking paper in the middle of the most violent days of the mission, but I can't guess the answer. 'No, Abdi, why?' I can't help but smile at the leprechaun Somali judge.

He's enjoying himself somehow. 'Because we must to give him fifteen percent of our salaries.' He shows me his pocket and pulls out the lining, big grin, eyebrows and eyes shooting sparks.

He thinks it's funny. I want to kiss him.

And I want to kill the boss. I want to drag him out into the line of fire headfirst and watch his body buckle and jerk as the bullets hit him. I want to watch him bleed to death.

I've been seeing a Swiss girl who works for the Red Cross. It's their job to collect the bodies those big Malaysian guns cut down when we returned fire. The next day she comes stomping into the mess hall looking for me, wild-eyed, dripping with sweat, seething, 'You killed twenty Somalis just to open your stupid American court!'

I hadn't thought of that yet. How many we killed.

Over and over I replay in my head the implications of what we've just done. We told the Haitians that we couldn't physically stop their government from torturing and killing, but that if they told us in detail who was doing it and how, we'd bear witness and seek justice. Eventually the world would be outraged enough to send soldiers and reinstall democracy. We took notes, wrote reports, created summaries and a database of victims. I treated their wounds to give them comfort, an inducement to come forward.

They believed us, risked their lives to turn up at our offices all over the country, in full view of their attackers, to tell their stories. They exposed themselves, crawled in and spilled their guts, sometimes literally. They took off their clothes, told me exactly who stabbed them and how, and trusted me to treat them. I handed out aspirin and Band-Aids while the killers watched and waited. New that they're at then most vulnerable, we're abandoning them, frozen in the head-lights, roadkill for the macoutes' machine. And we're flying out, clutching our precious blue UN passports and bags full of Haitian art.

We just showed Haitians that our lives are more valuable than theirs. The logic of the mission was ours, not theirs, and so is the act of our retreat. 'Tell us the truth and we will seek justice' was our idea. 'It's too dangerous and we must evacuate' is our privilege. Neither applies to the Haitians. A ship with soldiers arrives at the dock and exits the dock. Haitians have no exit.

The most basic principle they teach you at medical school, years before you even get to touch your first patient, is 'First, do no harm.' But harm is exactly what we've done, identifying the next victims for the assassins running Haiti. It was a vicious setup from the beginning.

Across the crowd I catch the eye of one of our drivers. We both know that the moment the plane takes off, he's a target: I'm amazed he's come to the airport. We're fighting about money and banana trees and crying for ourselves and our rag dolls while he serves our mission to its sordid end.

Sometimes he cries, sometimes he just sighs, but always he looks up into my face in panicked bewilderment and says, 'Monsieur Ken, eh la, comment?!' I don't know exactly what the eh la means, but it punctuates everything; he says it in exasperation and passionate disbelief, exhaling, a low growl. But I understand 'Comment?' How, Mr. Ken? How did you people let it happen?

The UN was here when the massacres started, twenty-five hundred troops. UN Headquarters in New York knew it was being planned, they had files and faxes and informants and they sat in their offices, consulted each other, and ate long lunches.

Most UN forces ran to the airport, they couldn't get out fast enough. This is not a case in which the UN failed to send troops to stop genocide. An armed, predeployed UN force evacuated as soon as it started. All those signatures on the Genocide Convention, dozens of rapturously celebrated human rights treaties, a mountain of documents at UNHQ on the subject of genocide, law professors all over the world making a living talking about this, and we evacuated. Tanks and supply planes and helicopters and soldiers sat useless and stationary for six months in Somalia, two hours away by C-130, and then drunk peasants armed with machetes and lists of names killed 800,000 civilians in Rwanda. And we evacuated. Eh la, comment?

So I'm here a little late. My job is to help collect evidence for the UN War Crimes Tribunal, the biggest genocide investigation since the Holocaust. There are 800,000 bodies rotting under the African sun. The entire country smells of decomposing flesh. The sickly sweet smell is nauseating and trips the gag reflex. It gets onto your clothes, into your hair, onto the bed sheets, the kitchen utensils.

The next step will be harder. In the morning I go see Jean-de-Dieu's boss, Lieutenant Alex, at the gendarmerie. The RPA officers hate us. I understand, I kind of hate as too. A drunk Hutu militia with machetes killed 800,000 humans in ninety days. The UN evacuated and the only action Clinton took was to block other countries from intervening. Don't cross the 'Mogadishu line.' Let them kill each other this time. So the Tutsis died a thousand deaths for our cowardice. Every three hours for ninety days.

But Rwanda is a tiny country with only a few paved highways. The Hutu militias were undisciplined, lightly armed, and they fought badly. It was the opposite of Somalia; it would have been easy to intercept them and stop the massacres, and everyone knows it. Lieutenant Alex knows it because the RPA did it. When the massacres started, they broke out of their enclaves in the north, smashing weak, drunken, undisciplined enemy positions everywhere they made contact. But they had no airlift, so it took three months to move overland all the way south and west, and by then it was too late.

What is the value of American power if we don't use it? We didn't stop genocide here because we failed in Somalia. They said it at the White House, they said it at the State Department, even the cooks and maids here know. To me, that means if we had succeeded in Somalia, we would have intervened here. Historians can write a mountain of books and politicians can give a thousand speeches disputing that, but a million civilian corpses are decomposing right now in unmarked graves in Bosnia and Rwanda. And the dead read our books and the dead listen to our speeches.

I think I'm actually starting to understand. I was hell-bent on being an effective humanitarian in Cambodia and Somalia. But a naïve fog is finally lifting. Revealed is a train wreck of illusions, the depravity of someone else's war, the futility of a competence still-born there. To understand this you have to become this.

Two weeks later the Haitian government announced election results from this region, with UN blessing: government wins 62 percent of the vote, opposition parties 38 percent. I watched all the ballots burn before anyone had counted them; they were still bound in boxes. I wrote a memo to UNHQ detailing the fraud. They answered that because my memo was transmitted without the signature of my boss, it was not an official communication, so therefore headquarters could not officially respond to my memo. [...]