On July 21, 2003, I was sitting in the newsroom of the Fort Collins Weekly scanning through images my friend Chris Hondros had filed from the civil war in Liberia. The day before, I’d edited a story he wrote about the combat in Monrovia that was killing scores of civilians daily and which was too hot for most journalists to endure. Chris was among just a handful of foreign reporters and photographers who stayed to see the bloody conflict through to the end. The story was rea...

About this time next month, I’ll once again be far from home in the jungles of West Africa. I haven’t been to Sierra Leone since October 2001, a tense time that had me hiding out in a remote coastal compound of run-down cabanas to avoid a small gang of local criminals who’d pegged me as a mark for extortion. I had some local muscle on my side, a battle-hardened veteran of Sierra Leone’s diamond war, and he had negotiated a détente with their leader. But since those who were haras...