Summary

French had been to Liberia many times, first as a college student, then as a young journalist and later to cover the prolonged civil war in the 1990s. He had been evacuated from Monrovia on a U.S. Marines helicopter that launched from the lawn of the U.S. embassy after it had become unsafe for Americans to remain in the city.

French was on his way to visit a three-country subregion that was beset with unrest and violence. The region consisting of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea had been tightly linked since the Atlantic slave trade and the return of former slaves from America and Britain in the 19th century. Now they were linked by modern warfare.

The death toll in Liberia alone had been a quarter of a million in the 1990s and early 2000s. The three...