In that time of our life.

• Author: Norris, Jerry

One night into my assignment to La Plata, Huila I was reading by the dim light of a 40-watt light bulb a banned copy of La Violencia en Colombia. I was riveted by its 1948 description of the lunchtime assassination of Jorge Gaitan, the liberal leader, at a sidewalk restaurant next to the country's leading newspaper, El Tiempo. As its principal author, Orlando Fals Borda wrote: "it was a lone act which stripped with a single bullet the thin veneer of civility from an entire society".

La Violencia then goes on to detail a country's descent into anarchy. By nightfall, Bogota was in flames. The country's elite troops were standing shoulder-to-shoulder, rank upon rank, on the steps of the Ministry of Justice, firing volley after volley into the madding crowd. They had long given up on leg shots and were now firing into upper torsos and heads, to no avail. Cali went up the next night, and city after city, town after town, followed in a wild melee of collective murder and unsheathed angst.

Before it abated, some 13 years later, the lowest official mortality count stood at 365,000 from a country of less than 13 million. That's nearly equal to the rate suffered by the U. S. in WW II, but from a population base of 145 million. In the latter war, death came within the insatiable maw of technological warfare. In Colombia, it was as often the machete and knife as it was the rifle and handgun.

Was there a home in Colombia without a red swath running through it, a family untouched from this political infanticide? All this violent death with no honor to it, no trumpet to call forth a defense of national interests, however vague this might have been--and no subsequent footnote in any Western history book to mark its passing.

La Violencia didn't find its way into our training program, as the official response was to ban it and exile Fals Borda. The government preferred to have silence fill this void.

When we arrived in Colombia, its vestiges lingered on in a cauldron at low simmer. The emotions of an entire people were spent. We were atop a blown horse of history and didn't know it. We could move at will throughout the entire country without fear for our personal safety, until 1983 when Volunteers had to leave as Colombia was poised on the abyss of declining into a narco state. Most of us were unaware of the country's dark soul before arriving. We remained virginal in our belief that we were there to help the ever-enigmatic campesinos, who could hardly...