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Author’s Note   I began writing about the war five years after it was over; a war the world witnessed from afar but for which I was very much present In this memoir I set about chronicling the collapse of that unhappy nation Throughout my life I have always been the most diligent keeper of diaries I think it’s that it never seemed sensible to me for a person to trust solely in his own memory Whatever the reason, when I finally sat down to writing, with the help of those notebooks I was able to recall not just the headlines and the chapter headings (the day the rebels broke the city limits, for example, or the tragic burning of Happy Days Church), but also the minutia – the observations which to others might have seemed inconsequential in the midst of all that was going on (the ill-judged red of one negotiator’s nails as she co-signed the first, doomed peace accord) But it was in these small details that I later found the blueprint for reconstructing that ravaged country that I once so loved   In the writing of this memoir I have replaced some people’s names with pseudonyms or used their nicknames in order to protect their true identities Others remain unchanged On a few occasions I have reproduced key conversations and scenes for which I was not present However, each of those instances is indicated by a footnote, and in every case I was informed in great detail about what happened or what was said very soon after the event took place Without exception, the second-hand information I received was from friends and colleagues whom I trust implicitly That being said, this is a memoir, not a history For readers in search of a more comprehensive account, there are at least three impeccably researched books that explain those awful years with far more objectivity than I could ever hope to achieve They are: Anne Lynn Jones’ Red is the River, Michael Mwandishi’s The War the World Ignored, and Jacob Neilson’s The Smaller Half – books which unravel the labyrinthine