I didn’t think much of any of this at the time, during either my hurried excursion in 2009 or my extended stay in 2006 and 2007. This was how it was, this is how it had been for a while, and I had yet to allow myself to explore the haunting realities hiding behind such a thin layer of bureaucratic instruction. Others had taken on a superior posture toward the region’s lumpenproletariat, much like they did toward most civilians. The lumpen were lazy and undisciplined, the sort that warranted whatever came their way. In a word made popular on Parris Island, they were nasty. That they had managed to find themselves in such a grotesquely helpless state made them all the nastier. I’d like to think the cause of my indifference lay elsewhere. In retrospect, I wasn’t so much contemptuous as I was afraid, afraid of what their bare existence said about me and my place in the world. The thought that I had been living at the expense of others had crossed my mind more than once, but to see that cost in the flesh was too much to bear, and so I didn’t think about it.