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 harassing me were in cahoots with corrupt cops, I thought it best to be scarce around Freetown until my flight left. So I spent the last week on the beach and in the pool about two hours down the coast among the palm trees and mangroves, making friends with fishermen in the neighboring villages who would serve me up a nightly feast of fresh-caught crab and lobster. I ate at a cheap plastic table under a thatch umbrella in the sand, and the fishermen kept me company with stories of typical Sierra Leonean life.

Not that life there had been very typical for the previous decade or so. The war that ripped the country apart over the control and exploitation of the country’s vast reserves of raw diamonds was the topic of a book I was there to research. The chaos of that time was especially brutal. The soldiers of the Revolutionary United Front, some as young as eight or nine years old, terrorized the country’s population with a reign of diamond-funded terror that was horribly unique in at least one aspect. In addition to wanton murder, mass rape, forced labor and brutal beatings, civilians also suffered the RUF’s signature war crime—amputation. In every village, people who’d been permanently disfigured and handicapped by the RUF’s axes and machetes struggled to learn how to eat, bathe and clothe themselves without hands.

The book that resulted from my last visit, Blood Diamonds: Tracing the Deadly Path of the World’s Most Precious Stones was the first general-audience nonfiction book to introduce the world to the sordid trade in conflict diamonds. It won awards, inspired an Oscar-nominated movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio, informed documentaries and television shows, and continues to teach new generations that where a diamond originates — and under what circumstances — is often far more important, and far more opaque, than any other consideration brides and grooms make at the corner jeweler.

Next year, Blood Diamonds will reach its 10-year anniversary and to mark the occasion, I’m returning to Sierra Leone to update it with two new chapters in advance of its being re-released by Basic Books. In one of the later chapters, I fantasized about what a peaceful Sierra Leone would look like and those passages must have struck chords with readers. Not a month passes that I don’t receive an email from a reader wanting to know how the country has fared. Have Sierra Leoneans recovered from the war? Has their government taken control of its natural resources to the benefit of its citizens? Do the conditions that allowed the brutal RUF insurgency in the first place still exist? What has become of the old warlords who terrorized so many?

And on a more global scale, has the trade in conflict diamonds ended or are these precious stones still as vulnerable to exploitation by greedy corporations, terrorist organizations and opportunists as ever?

I know the answers to some of these questions; suffice it to say that conflict diamonds are as much an issue today as when Blood Diamonds was first published, but for reasons that will surprise many readers. Returning to Sierra Leone, I will investigate the issue in the best way I know how—with my feet on the ground, at sweltering diamond mines and in the slums of Freetown. Traveling with me is my friend and colleague Mike Seamans, an outstanding photographer. In addition to updating the book, we’ll be working on several newspaper and magazine articles from the region (details to come as we flesh them out over the next several weeks).

As difficult and forlorn a place as Sierra Leone was when I was last there, it’s always been a special place for me. I’m eager to return and illustrate for my readers both its victories and struggles as it continues to emerge from one of the most brutal wars in recent memory.