There is a photograph that shadows me, entering my imagination at inappropriate moments. It originally appeared in the August 2000 issue of Vanity Fair magazine, accompanying an article by Sebastian Junger called "The Terror of Sierra Leone," which reported from the frontline of a notably fierce and barbaric civil war. The article promised to present "new evidence of the cold-blooded calculation that fuels the rebels' insanity," a claim whose sensationalism made me bristle but whose accuracy I could not deny. The photo was taken by Teun Voeten, a Dutch photojournalist who had first come to Sierra Leone in 1998 and had previously covered the wars in Sarajevo and Kosovo.

The picture shows a girl named Memuna Mansarah. She is three years old, and was living in a refugee camp in Freetown. Memuna has plump cheeks, short fuzzy hair, and large, clear black eyes that stare not quite at us, but slightly upward (Voeten may have been standing when he took the picture): Something ...

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