A true story of violent faith

While I was growing up in Corvallis, Oregon, religion was pretty much absent from my life. My mother was descended from protestant Scandinavians, occasionally attended services at the Unitarian Fellowship, and seemed to believe in of some sort of god, but she didn’t talk about it. Although my father’s ancestors were Jewish, he was an unwavering, life-long atheist.

In 1969, when I was 15 years old, however, I noticed that a number of my classmates and teachers at Western View Junior High School were ardent believers, and I grew curious about their theology. Some were Jehovah’s Witnesses. Some were Seventh-day Adventists. Others worshipped at more conventional Lutheran, Episcopalian, Methodist, or Catholic churches. But the most enthusiastically devout, by far, were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Every Mormon who shared details about their faith with me was certain that when their lives on Earth came to an end, they would be spending eternity in a place called the celestial kingdom, where each of them (if they were male, at least) would become a god, ruling over his own planet.

It was hard for me to wrap my mind around how all of this would actually work, given what I knew about basic scientific principles, but I was fascinated by the intensity of the faith expressed by my Mormon acquaintances, and I envied it.

By 1999, I was working as a freelance writer, had authored three books, and my fascination with religious devotion was stronger than ever. So I decided to indulge my curiosity by making religion the subject of my next book. Because Mormonism was most interesting denomination I’d brushed up against, that was the religion I chose to focus on.

As originally conceived, the book was intended be an exploration of the complicated relationship between faith and doubt. I knew of highly accomplished scientists who were devout Latter-day Saints. How, I wondered, did they reconcile their sincere faith with scientific and historic facts that appeared to blatantly contradict it? As my research led me deeper and deeper down this bottomless rabbit hole, it occurred to me to interview Mark Hofmann, the erstwhile Mormon who had bitterly lost his faith as a teenager, but pretended to remain devout to his parents, his wife, and everyone around him.

In 1979, Hofmann announced he had discovered a document written in 1828 by a close associate of Joseph Smith, the founding prophet of the Latter-day Saints. According to an eminent religious scholar who examined the document, known as the Anthon Transcript, it appeared to confirm the authenticity of the Book of Mormon. The LDS Church purchased the document from Hofmann for $20,000.

In fact, Hofmann had meticulously fabricated the Anthon Transcript in his suburban Utah home; it was a brilliant forgery. He began forging hundreds of other historically noteworthy documents soon thereafter. Along the way he discovered that the LDS leadership would pay even more for documents that impugned the credibility of Smith and the LDS Church, in order to keep them from public view. He had discovered an illegal path to great wealth.

Hofmann got greedy, however, and took advance payment of $150,000 for a large collection documents before he’d gotten around to fabricating them, and when he failed to deliver the documents by the promised date, his scam began to unravel. In a desperate attempt to buy himself more time, he murdered two blameless Saints — Steve Christensen and Kathy Sheets — with pipe bombs, but the diversionary tactic failed. Hofmann was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to spend the remainder of his life behind bars.

When I wrote to Hofmann in 2001, asking if I could visit him in prison to conduct an interview for my book, he’d been locked up since 1987. Two weeks later I got a reply posted from the Utah State Prison, but when I opened the letter I saw that it wasn’t from Mark Hofmann. It was from someone designated “INMATE NUMBER 17109,” who turned out to be a person named Dan Lafferty, Hofmann’s cellmate. Lafferty was serving two life sentences for the ritual murders of his sister-in-law, Brenda Lafferty, and her baby daughter, Erica.

“My cellie showed me a letter he received from you,” Lafferty’s letter explained,

and although he doesn’t do interviews and won’t respond, he thought that perhaps I might. Out of respect for his wishes I won’t share anything about his opinions or beliefs but it might be of interest to know that because of our common backgrounds we have become best of friends…. and although for many years I rejected requests for interviews and suggestions about writing or participating in a book about my experience of coming thru a religious evolution that ultimately brought me here to prison for — as I believe — taking lives for God; more recently I have thought I should accept some opportunities to discuss some of my beliefs and experiences.

My initial reaction was to decline Lafferty’s invitation to interview him instead of Hofmann. But after thinking it over, I made arrangements with prison officials to visit Lafferty, drove to Utah, and spent an afternoon interrogating him in the penetentiary’s maximum-security Uinta facility. At the end of the day, when I walked out of the prison doors into the blinding Utah sunlight, I was literally reeling. I was shocked and appalled by the things Lafferty had described to me. But I knew that I had just stumbled upon one of the most important narrative threads of the book that would eventually be published as Under the Banner of Heaven: A story of violent faith.

Almost everyone in Utah County was familiar with Dan Lafferty and his brothers. This was largely a function of the lurid murders, but the Lafferty surname had a certain prominence in the county even before Brenda and Erica Lafferty were killed. Watson Lafferty, the patriarch of the clan, was a chiropractor who ran a thriving practice out of his home in downtown Provo’s historic quarter. He and his wife, Claudine, had six boys and two girls in whom they instilled an unusually strong work ethic and intense fidelity to the Mormon Church. The entire family was admired for their industriousness and probity.

Allen — the youngest of the Lafferty children — worked as a tile setter, a trade he had plied since he was a teenager. In the summer of 1984 he was living with his 24-year-old wife and baby daughter in American Fork, a sleepy, white-bread suburb alongside the freeway that runs from Provo to Salt Lake City. Brenda, his spouse, was a one-time beauty queen recognized around town from her tenure as the anchor of a newsmagazine program on channel 11, the local PBS affiliate. Although she abandoned her nascent broadcasting career to marry Allen and start a family, Brenda had lost none of the exuberance that had endeared her to television viewers. Warm and outgoing, she made a lasting impression.

On the morning of July 24, 1984, Allen left their small duplex apartment before the sun was up and drove eighty miles up the Interstate to work at a construction site east of Ogden. During his lunch break he phoned Brenda, who chatted with him for a minute before putting their 15-month-old daughter, Erica, on the line. Erica gurgled a few words of baby talk, then Brenda told her husband everything was fine and said goodbye.

Allen arrived home around eight that evening. Tired from the long workday, he walked up to the front door and was surprised to find it locked; they almost never locked their doors. He used his key to enter, and then was surprised again by the baseball game blaring from the television in the living room. Neither he nor Brenda liked baseball — they never watched it. After turning off the TV, the apartment seemed preternaturally quiet to him, as though nobody was home. Allen figured Brenda had taken the baby and gone out. “I turned to go and see if maybe she was at the neighbors,” he explained later, “and I noticed some blood near the door on a light switch.” And then he saw Brenda in the kitchen, sprawled on the floor in a lake of blood.

Upon calling Brenda’s name and getting no reply, he knelt beside her and put his hand on her shoulder. “I touched her,” he said, “and her body felt cool…. There was blood on her face and pretty much everywhere.” Allen reached for the kitchen phone, which was resting on the floor next to his wife, and dialed 911 before he realized there was no dial tone. The cord had been yanked from the wall. As he walked to their bedroom to try the extension in there, he glanced in the baby’s room and saw Erica slumped over in her crib in an odd position, motionless. She was wearing nothing but a diaper, which was soaked with blood, as were the blankets surrounding her. Allen hurried to the master bedroom, only to find the phone in there out of order, as well, so he went next door to a neighbor’s apartment, where he was finally able to call for help. He described the carnage to the 911 dispatcher, and then called his mother.

While he waited for the police to show up, Allen returned to his apartment. “I went to Brenda and I prayed,” he said. “And then as I stood, I surveyed the situation a little more, and realized that there had been a grim struggle.” For the first time he noticed that the blood wasn’t confined to the kitchen: it smeared the living room walls, the floor, the doors, the curtains. It was obvious to him who was responsible. He’d known the moment he’d first seen Brenda on the kitchen floor.

The cops took Allen down to the American Fork police station and grilled him throughout the night. They assumed he was the murderer; the husband usually is. By and by, however, Allen convinced them that the prime suspect was actually the oldest of his five brothers, Ron Lafferty. Ron had just returned to Utah County after spending most of the previous three months traveling around the West with another Lafferty brother, Dan. An APB went out for Ron’s car, a pale green 1974 Impala station wagon with Utah plates. The slayings appeared to be ritualistic, which drew uncommon attention from news media and put the public on edge. By the next evening the Lafferty killings led news broadcasts across the state.

On July 30, Ron’s dilapidated Impala was spotted parked in front of a house in Cheyenne, Wyoming. When they raided the home, police didn’t find the Lafferty brothers, but they did arrest two drifters who had been traveling around the West with the Laffertys since early summer. Information provided by the vagrants led authorities to Reno, Nevada, where, on August 7, the police arrested Ron and Dan as they stood in line for the buffet at the Circus Circus casino.

From jail, before their trial, the brothers launched an unpersuasive media campaign protesting their innocence. Ron insisted that the charges against them were false, and that the Mormon Church, which “controlled everything in Utah,” would prevent his brother and him from receiving a fair trial. Although he confessed to believing in the righteousness of “plural marriage,” Ron said he had never practiced polygamy or belonged to an extremist sect. He then professed to love the Mormon Church, while at the same time warning that the current LDS leadership had strayed from the sacred doctrines of prophet Joseph Smith.

Four days later Dan Lafferty issued a written statement to the media in which he declared that the brothers were “not guilty of any of the crimes for which we have been accused,” and that “the time is at hand when the true criminals will be made known…”

On December 29, five days before their trial was scheduled to begin in Provo, Lieutenant Jerry Scott, the commander of the Utah County Jail, took Dan from his cell to ask him some questions. When Dan returned, he noticed his older brother suspended by his neck from a towel rack in an adjacent cell, unconscious and no longer breathing; Ron had used a T-shirt to hang himself. “I pushed the intercom button and told them they better get down there,” Dan says. Lieutenant Scott arrived immediately but could detect no pulse in Ron. Although Scott and two other deputies administered mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and CPR, they were unable to revive him. By the time paramedics showed up, said Scott, the inmate “appeared dead.”

Despite the fact that Ron had stopped breathing for an estimated fifteen minutes, the paramedics eventually managed to get his heart beating again, and he was placed on a respirator in the intensive care unit of the Utah Valley Regional Medical Center. After remaining comatose for two days, he regained consciousness — an astonishing recovery that Dan attributes to divine intervention. Although the brothers were slated to be tried together three days after Ron emerged from his coma, Judge J. Robert Bullock ordered that Dan should be tried alone, as scheduled, allowing Ron time to recover and undergo extensive psychiatric evaluation to determine if he’d suffered brain damage.

The court appointed two attorneys to represent Dan, but he insisted on defending himself, relegating them to advisory roles. Five days after the trial began, the jury went into deliberation, and nine hours later found Dan guilty of two counts of first-degree murder. During the subsequent session to determine whether Dan should be put to death for his crimes, Dan assured the jurors, “If I was in your situation, I would impose the death penalty,” and promised not to appeal if they arrived at such a sentence.

“The judge freaked out when I said that,” Dan later explained. “He thought I was expressing a death wish, and warned the jury that they couldn’t vote to execute me just because I had a death wish. But I just wanted them to feel free to follow their conscience. I didn’t want them to worry or feel guilty about giving me a death sentence, if that’s what they thought I deserved. I was willing to take a life for God, so it seemed to me that I should also be willing to give my own life for God. If God wanted me to be executed, I was fine with that.”

Ten jurors voted for death, but two others refused to go along with the majority. Because unanimity was required to impose a capital sentence, Dan’s life was spared. According to the jury foreman, one of the jurors who balked at executing Dan was a woman whom he had manipulated through “eye-contact, smiles, and other charismatic, nonverbal attachments and psycho-sexual seduction,” causing her to ignore both the evidence and instructions provided by the judge. The foreman, aghast that Dan thereby avoided a death sentence, was furious.

Dan told me that he, too, “was a little disappointed that I wasn’t executed, in a strange sense.”

Addressing the convicted prisoner with undisguised scorn, Judge Bullock reminded Dan that it was “Man’s law, which you disdain, that saved your life.” Then, his disgust getting the better of him, he added, “In my twelve years as a judge, I have never presided over a trial of such a cruel, heinous, pointless and senseless a crime as the murders of Brenda and Erica Lafferty. Nor have I seen an accused who had so little remorse or feeling.” This admonishment came from the same hardened judge who, in 1976, had presided over the notorious, history-making trial of Gary Mark Gilmore, who became the first convict to be executed in the United States in more than a decade after Judge Bullock sentenced him to death for the unprovoked murders of two young Mormons.

After telling the 1985 court that the jury had been unable to agree on a sentence of death, Judge Bullock turned to Dan and said, “I mean to see that every minute of [your] life is spent behind the bars of the Utah State Prison and I so order.” He sentenced Dan to two life terms.

Ron’s trial began almost four months later, in April 1985, after a battery of psychiatrists and psychologists determined he was mentally competent. His court-appointed attorneys hoped to get the murder charges reduced to manslaughter by arguing that Ron was suffering from mental illness when he and Dan murdered Brenda Lafferty and her baby, but Ron refused to allow them to mount such a defense. “It seems it would be an admission of guilt,” he told Judge Bullock. “I’m not prepared to do that.”

Ron was convicted of first-degree murder, and on this occasion the jury did not balk at imposing capital punishment. They sentenced him to die, either by lethal injection or four bullets through the heart at close range. Ron chose the latter.

On January 15, 1985, immediately after Judge Bullock decreed that the remainder of Dan Lafferty’s life would unfold in captivity, he was taken to the state prison near Point of the Mountain in Draper, Utah, where a corrections officer cut his hair and sheared off his whiskers. When I interviewed Dan in prison a decade and a half later, Dan hadn’t shaved or cut his hair since he was locked up. His beard, wrapped with rubber bands into a stiff gray cable, descended to his belly. His hair had gone white and fanned across the back of his orange prison jumpsuit. Although he was fifty-four years old and crows’ feet furrowed the corners of his eyes, there was something unmistakably boyish about his countenance. His skin was so pale it seemed translucent.

A crude tattoo of a spider web radiated from Dan’s left elbow, wrapping the crook of his arm in a jagged indigo lattice. His wrists were bound in handcuffs, and his shackled ankles were chained to a steel ring embedded in the concrete floor. On his otherwise bare feet were cheap rubber flip-flops. A large man, he cheerfully refferred to the prison’s maximum-security unit as “my monastery.”

Every morning a wake-up alarm echoed through the halls of the unit at 6:30, followed by a head-count. The door to his cell remained locked twenty hours a day. Even when it wasn’t locked, Dan said, “I’m almost always in my cell. The only time I leave is to shower or serve food — I have a job serving meals. But I don’t really associate with people that much. I try not to leave my cell more often than I absolutely have to. There are so many assholes in here. They get you caught up in their little dramas, and you end up having to fuck somebody up. And the next thing you know your privileges are taken away. I’ve got too much to lose. I’m in a really comfortable situation right now. I’ve got a really good cellie, and I don’t want to lose him.”

The cellmate Lafferty was referring to, of course, was Mark Hofmann. Although Hofmann by then had contempt for religion in general and Mormonism in particular, his atheism didn’t seem to be an issue in his friendship with Dan Lafferty — despite the fact that Dan remained, by his own proud characterization, a religious zealot. “My beliefs are irrelevant to my cellie,” Dan confirmed. “We’re special brothers all the same. We’re bound by the heart.”

Prior to Dan’s conviction, and for more than a decade afterwards, he steadfastly maintained that he was innocent of the murders of Brenda and Erica Lafferty. When he was arrested in Reno in August, 1984, he told the arresting officers, “You think I have committed a crime of homicide, but I have not.” Although he still maintained he was innocent of any crime, paradoxically, he no longer denied that he killed Brenda and Erica. When asked to explain how both these apparently contradictory statements can be true, he explained, “I was doing God’s will, which is not a crime.”

Lafferty wasn’t reticent about describing exactly what happened on July 24, 1984. He said that shortly after noon, he, Ron, and the two drifters who had been traveling with them, Ricky Knapp and Chip Carnes, drove to the apartment of his youngest brother, Allen, in American Fork, twenty minutes down the Interstate from where he is now imprisoned. Inside the brick duplex he found his 15-month-old niece, Erica, standing in her crib, smiling up at him. “I spoke to her for a minute,” Lafferty recalls. “I told her, ‘I’m not sure what this is all about, but apparently it’s God’s will that you leave this world; perhaps we can talk about it later.’” And then he ended her life with a ten-inch boning knife.

After dispatching Erica, he calmly walked into the kitchen and used the same knife to kill the baby’s mother. When I met with him seventeen years after committing these two murders, he insisted, very convincingly, that he had never felt any regret for the deed, or shame.

Like his older brother, Ron, Dan Lafferty was brought up as a pious Mormon. “I’ve always been interested in God and the Kingdom of God,” he said. “It’s been the center of my focus since I was a young child.” And he was certain God intended for him to kill Brenda and Erica Lafferty: “It was like someone had taken me by the hand that day and led me comfortably through everything that happened. Ron had received a revelation from God that these lives were to be taken. I was the one who was supposed to do it. And if God wants something to be done, it will be done. You don’t want to offend Him by refusing to do His work.”

The murders Dan Lafferty committed are shocking for a host of reasons, but no aspect of the crimes is more disturbing than his complete absence of remorse. How could an apparently sane, avowedly pious man kill a wonderful, widely admired woman and her innocent baby so viciously, without the barest flicker of emotion? Whence did he derive the moral justification? What filled him such certitude? Any attempt to answer such questions must plumb those murky sectors of the heart and head that prompt most of us to believe in God — and compel an impassioned few, predictably, to carry that irrational belief to its logical end.

There is a dark side to religious devotion that is too often ignored or denied. As a means of motivating people to be cruel and inhumane — as a means of inciting evil, to borrow the vocabulary of the devout — there may no more potent force than religion. When the subject of religiously inspired bloodshed comes up, Americans immediately think of Islamic fundamentalism, which is to perhaps be expected after the events of September 11, 2001. But men have been committing heinous acts in the name of God ever since mankind began believing in deities, and extremists exist within all religions. Muhammad is not the only prophet whose words have been used to sanction barbarism; history has not lacked for Christians, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, and even Buddhists who have been motivated by scripture to butcher innocents. Plenty of these religious extremists have been homegrown, corn-fed Americans.

Faith-based violence was present long before Osama bin Laden, and it will no doubt be with us forever after. Religious zealots like bin Laden, David Koresh, Jim Jones, and Dan Lafferty are common to every age, just as zealots of other stripes are. In any human endeavor, some fraction of its practitioners will be motivated to pursue that activity with such concentrated focus and unalloyed passion that it consumes them utterly. One has to look no further than individuals who feel compelled to devote their lives to becoming concert pianists, say, or climbing Mt. Everest. For some, the province of the extreme holds an allure that’s irresistible. And a certain percentage of such fanatics will inevitably fixate on matters of the spirit.

The zealot may be outwardly motivated by the anticipation of a great reward at the other end — wealth, fame, eternal salvation — but the real recompense is probably the obsession itself. As a result of his (or her) infatuation, existence overflows with purpose. Ambiguity vanishes from the fanatic’s world view, a narcissistic sense of self-assurance displaces all doubt. A delicious rage quickens his pulse, fueled by the sins and shortcomings of lesser mortals, who are soiling the world wherever he looks. His perspective narrows until the last remnants of proportion are shed from his life. Through immoderation, he experiences something akin to rapture.

Faith is the very antithesis of reason. Spiritual devotion defies rational analysis. And when religious fanaticism supplants sound judgment, all bets are suddenly off. Anything can happen. Absolutely anything. Common sense is no match for the voice of God.

On June 5, 2002, in the middle of the night, fourteen-year-old Elizabeth Smart was abducted at knifepoint from her Salt Lake City bedroom while her parents slept in a nearby part of the house. Smart’s abductor — a 49-year-old street preacher named Brian David Mitchell — took her to a secluded campsite in the foothills above her home, where he and his 57-year-old wife held a weird, self-styled wedding ritual in which Smart was “sealed” to Mitchell in “the new and everlasting covenant” — a Mormon euphemism for polygamous marriage. Immediately thereafter the girl was forced to remove her red pajamas, and Mitchell consummated the marriage with an act of rape.

Details of the audacious kidnapping were reported breathlessly and without pause by the news media, leaving much of the country aghast and riveted. When a massive investigation failed to locate Smart or her then-unidentified abductor by summer’s end, people assumed the worst: that she had been subjected to some unspeakable ordeal and murdered. Then, nine months after she disappeared, she turned up alive, surprising almost everyone.

The astonishing reappearance of Elizabeth Smart occurred in the jittery days immediately before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Most Americans, made fretful by the uncertainties of the impending war and a sputtering economy, were desperate for some good news, any good news, and rejoiced with commensurate intensity when the girl was reunited with her family.

Like so many of his countrymen, Dan Lafferty was spellbound by the Elizabeth Smart saga, which he monitored from a cheap television in a cramped cell, deep in the bowels of the Utah State Prison, where he is serving two life sentences for murdering a young mother and her baby in 1984. Within hours of the Smart’s rescue, the media disclosed that her abductor was an excommunicated Mormon. “With that small piece of information,” Lafferty boasts, “I immediately guessed that he was probably a fundamentalist, and that Elizabeth was somehow involved in a polygamy situation.”

Lafferty was soon proven correct. Brian David Mitchell was indeed a Mormon Fundamentalist, a religious zealot who believed the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had made a ruinous blunder when, in 1890, its leaders renounced polygamy, which until then had been promoted as “the most holy and important doctrine ever revealed to man on earth.” Nineteen months before snatching Elizabeth Smart, Mitchell received a divine revelation in which the Lord explained that he had been placed on earth to serve as God’s mouthpiece on earth during the Last Days. God also commanded Mitchell to take seven additional wives, of whom Elizabeth had the misfortune to be the first.

None of Mitchell’s behavior struck Dan Lafferty as surprising or particularly outlandish, because he, too, was a polygamist and self-described religious zealot who received frequent communiqués from God. As Lafferty has explained on numerous occasions, it was God who commanded him to commit the murders that landed him behind bars for life.

Balanced atop the highest spire of the Salt Lake Temple, gleaming in the Utah sun, a statue of the Angel Moroni stands watch over downtown Salt Lake City with his golden trumpet raised. This massive granite edifice is the spiritual and temporal nexus of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which presents itself as the world’s only true religion. At last count there were more than 16 million Saints the world over, and Mormonism is among the fastest growing religions in the Western Hemisphere. Presently in the United States there are more Mormons than Presbyterians or Episcopalians. On the planet as a whole, there are now more Mormons than Jews.

From the beginning, Joseph Smith had preached that if Mormons lived piously and obeyed God’s commandments, He would communicate with each of them directly, one-on-one. Mormons were instructed to seek “impressions from the Lord” to guide them in every aspect of their lives, and the concept proved to be immensely popular. Many people were drawn to the new religion because it gave them an uncommonly intimate relationship with God. It was like nothing they had experienced before, and it stirred their religious passions.

These days, the affairs of the Latter-day Saints are directed by a cadre of elderly white males in dark suits who carry out both their holy and corporate duties from a 26-story office tower beside Temple Square. To a man, the LDS leadership adamantly insists that Lafferty should under no circumstances be considered Mormon — a religion with a membership that has earned a reputation for being chaste, optimistic, outgoing, dutiful, and law abiding. Although the faith that moved Lafferty to slay his niece and sister-in-law is Mormon Fundamentalism, LDS leaders bristle visibly when Mormons and Mormon Fundamentalists are even mentioned in the same breath.

Nevertheless, Mormons and those who call themselves Mormon Fundamentalists (or FLDS) believe in the same holy texts and the same sacred history. Both believe that Joseph Smith, who founded Mormonism in 1830, played a vital role in God’s plan for mankind; both LDS and FLDS consider him to be a prophet comparable in stature to Moses and Isaiah. Mormons and Mormon Fundamentalists are each convinced God regards them, and them alone, as his favored children: “a peculiar treasure unto me above all people.” But if both proudly refer to themselves as the Lord’s chosen, they diverge on one especially inflammatory point of religious doctrine: Unlike their present-day Mormon compatriots, Mormon Fundamentalists passionately believe that Saints have a divine obligation to take multiple wives. Followers of the FLDS faith engage in polygamy, they explain, as a matter of religious duty.

There are more than 30,000 FLDS polygamists living in Canada, Mexico, and throughout the American West. Some experts estimate there may be as many as 100,000. Even this larger number amounts to far less than 1% of the membership in the LDS Church, but all the same, leaders of the mainstream church are extremely discomfited by these legions of polygamous brethren. The LDS leadership has worked very hard to persuade both the modern church membership and the American public that polygamy was a quaint, long-abandoned idiosyncrasy practiced by a mere handful of 19th-century Mormons. The religious literature handed out by the earnest young missionaries in Temple Square makes no mention of the fact that Joseph Smith — still the religion’s focal personage — married at least thirty-three women, and probably as many as forty-eight. Nor does it mention that the youngest of these wives was just 14 years old when Joseph explained to her that God had commanded that she marry him or face eternal damnation.

In fact polygamy was arguably the most sacred credo of Joseph’s church — a tenet important enough to be canonized for the ages in The Doctrine and Covenants, one of Mormonism’s primary scriptural texts. The revered prophet taught that a man needed at least three wives to attain the “fulness of exaltation” in the afterlife. He warned that God had explicitly commanded, “all those who have this law revealed unto them must obey the same… and if ye abide not that covenant, then are ye damned; for no one can reject this covenant and be permitted to enter into my glory.”

In 1844, Joseph was murdered by a mob of Mormon-haters in Illinois. Brigham Young assumed leadership of the church and led the Saints to the barren wilds of the Great Basin, where in short order they established a remarkable empire and unabashedly embraced the covenant of “spiritual wifery.” This both titillated and shocked the sensibilities of Victorian-era Americans, who tended to regard polygamy as a brutish practice on a par with slavery. In 1856, recognizing the strength of the anti-polygamy vote, Republican candidate John C. Frémont ran for president on a platform that pledged to “prohibit in the territories those twin relics of barbarism — Polygamy and Slavery.” Indeed, it’s likely that in the nineteenth century, polygamy was actually abhorrent to many more Americans than slavery was. The latter, after all, had a multitude of proponents in numerous states, whereas it was hard to find advocates for polygamy outside of Utah.

Frémont lost the 1856 election, but a year later the man who did win, President James Buchanan, sent the U.S. Army to invade Utah, dismantle Brigham Young’s theocracy, and eradicate polygamy. The so-called “Utah War,” however, neither removed Brigham from power nor ended the doctrine of plural marriage, to the annoyance and bafflement of a whole series of American presidents. An escalating sequence of judicial and legislative challenges to polygamy ensued, culminating in the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887, which disincorporated the LDS Church and forfeited to the federal government all church property worth more than $50,000. With their feet held fast to the fire, the Saints publicly renounced polygamy in 1890, but continued to condone it secretly for another twenty years or more.

But if LDS leaders were initially loath to abandon plural marriage, eventually they adopted a more pragmatic approach to American politics, emphatically rejected the practice, and actually began urging government agencies to prosecute polygamists. It was this single change in ecclesiastical policy, more than anything else, which transformed the LDS Church into its astonishingly successful present-day iteration. Having jettisoned polygamy, Mormons gradually ceased to be regarded as a crackpot sect. The LDS Church acquired the trappings of a conventional faith so successfully that it is now widely considered to be the quintessential American religion.

Mormon Fundamentalists, however, believe that acceptance into the American mainstream came at way too high a price. They insist that the church sold them out — that the LDS leadership abandoned one of the religion’s most crucial theological tenets for the sake of political expediency. These present-day polygamists therefore consider themselves to be the keepers of the flame — the only true and righteous Mormons.

This piece was adapted from my book, Under the Banner of Heaven: A story of violent faith

Murder Among the Saints was originally published in Galleys on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A report from Nepal

Nepal is an astonishing country. A visit there might change your life, but the boundless poverty is likely to break your heart. The misery of the poorest Nepalis, moreover, is often compounded by predators who enrich themselves by exploiting their most vulnerable compatriots. Perhaps the worst of these malefactors are the men calling themselves “brokers” who prowl through indigent villages hoping to lure teenage girls from their homes with promises of marriage or lucrative jobs in distant lands.

Because life can be so hard in Nepal, families of teenage girls often fall prey to the brokers’ deceptions and hand over their daughters for payment of a dollar or two. Occasionally families are so desperate to offer their children better lives that they actually pay the brokers to take their daughters off their hands. Some girls are delivered to Saudi Arabia, Dubai, or Lebanon and given quasi-legitimate employment as household servants. But the brokers are just as likely to take the girls to India and sell them to whorehouses in Mumbai or Kolkata for $500 or more. The younger the girl, the greater the payment. Many of the girls are only twelve or thirteen when they are sold into sexual slavery. Some are as young as ten.

In 1992, an eminent Nepali physician and activist named Aruna Uprety traveled to Mumbai to attend a seminar on HIV/AIDS. While there, she visited a girl named Nisha who had worked in a brothel for the previous seven years, was hospitalized with AIDS, and had recently given birth to a baby girl. Three days after Dr. Uprety’s saw her, Nisha succumbed to the virus. Deeply disturbed by Nisha’s death, Uprety visited some nearby brothels, where she spoke with numerous women and girls, some as young as fourteen, and discovered that a significant number of them had been trafficked from villages in Nepal, like Nisha. Uprety observed that for years at a time, prostitutes in Mumbai brothels are

“physically abused and held in debt bondage, which is tantamount to slavery. They are raped and beaten severely if they don’t surrender easily or if they refuse to have sex with customers. Brothel owners — who may be either men or women — will even beat them after submission if they don’t bring in enough money. Many of these young and illiterate girls contract AIDS, and once this condition becomes known to their keepers, the girls are thrown out of the brothels to return home to die — that is, if their communities will accept them back.”

Reports issued by the U.S. Department of State and other government entities estimate that as many as 20,000 Nepali women and girls are trafficked annually. Most are no older than eighteen when they are taken from their homes. Many are only twelve or thirteen. Some are ten or even younger.

Uprety told me that her visit to the Mumbai brothels twenty-eight years ago was “the turning point in my life, when I thought that something must be done for the girls.” The upshot was a groundbreaking program called Stop Girl Trafficking (SGT) that she launched in 1997 in partnership with the American Himalayan Foundation. Rather than rescuing victims from brothels after they had been trafficked, as other anti-trafficking charities were attempting to do, Uprety created SGT to prevent as many girls as possible from being trafficked in the first place. She understood that prevention was rescue, but without all the suffering that happened first.

Several years ago I spent a month traveling around Nepal with Uprety to see for myself how SGT operated, and to meet some of the girls in her program. One of them was a shy, seventeen-year-old Tamang girl named Ranjila who had spent her entire life in a dirt-poor settlement in the Middle Hills of central Nepal.

During a visit to Ranjila’s village, Uprety and her staff determined from conversations with Ranjila’s mother, her teachers, and village elders that the challenges faced by Ranjila’s family made her particularly susceptible to being trafficked. She lived with her illiterate mother and six siblings in a mud-walled hut. Ranjila’s father died when he fell from a tree while gathering fruit to feed his children. To provide for the family after his death, Ranjila’s mom toiled in other families’ fields for less than three dollars per day. This wasn’t enough income to make ends meet, however, so she was forced to borrow money from a loan shark at outrageous interest rates — a debt that grew larger every month, which she had no hope of ever repaying. Ranjila was under tremendous pressure to quit school and go to work to help her mother pay the bills.

Witnessing the paper-thin margin by which Ranjila’s family survived from week to week and year to year made it easy to understand how a parent could be desperate enough to sell a child to a stranger. To preclude this eventuality, SGT staffers invested a lot of time educating Ranjila and her mother about the dangers of trafficking, and then, to keep Ranjila in school, offered her a scholarship that covered the cost of her books, school supplies, school uniforms, fees, and a backpack.

The plan worked. Ranjila remained enrolled in school and excelled at her studies. Indeed, according to her teachers, Ranjila became a role model for girls throughout the village. One teacher told me that Ranjila and other “SGT scholars” now regularly warn their classmates to steer clear of brokers, and that trafficking in the area has dramatically declined as a consequence. When I asked Ranjila how long she intended to wait to get married, she assured me with a hearty laugh, “Long time. Not until my education is complete!”

Uprety’s methods are ridiculously simple on the face of it: Identify the girls most at risk, then do whatever it takes to keep them in school in order to prevent them from being trafficked. But the success of the program ultimately depends on a large network of dedicated, well-trained field workers who repeatedly visit the SGT scholars in their villages, some of which are inaccessible by road and can only be reached via a half-day hike. This allows SGT workers to maintain personal relationships with the girls, their parents, and their teachers, and provide ongoing counseling about the perils of trafficking.

SGT doesn’t just keep girls safe. The larger goal is to fundamentally transform the way girls are viewed by their families, their communities, and themselves. In much of South Asia — but especially among the lower-caste and tribal communities — girls are too often seen as having little or no value. They are considered to be disposable. But this changes dramatically when a girl is enrolled in SGT. As she gets an education and begins to flourish, her value becomes obvious to her family and her community. She is transformed from a liability into an asset. Fathers who’d been willing to send away their daughters for a couple of dollars actually weep with pride when they see their girls graduate as SGT scholars.

After starting with 54 girls in 1997, SGT has now established programs at more than 500 government schools in districts plagued by some of Nepal’s highest rates of trafficking. Presently 12,000 girls who were at risk of being trafficked are safely attending school thanks to the efforts of Dr. Uprety and SGT. Another 11,000 have already graduated. The graduation rate for SGT scholars is 82%, and less than 2% have dropped out of the program. All of which has been achieved at a cost of just $100 per girl per year.

By employing these straightforward, hands-on methods, SGT has proven to be highly effective. And over the past three decades the program’s mission has expanded into something much larger than simply protecting individual girls, because solving the problem on a grand scale requires transforming the communities where predators seek victims. To bring about such widespread change, SGT arranges for the girls who graduate from the program to serve as mentors and role models for the younger girls in their villages who look up to them. To date, this has generated an army of remarkable young women — 23,000 strong, and growing by another 1,200 girls every year — who are determined to end trafficking in Nepal.

You can learn more about Dr. Aruna Uprety and the Stop Girl Trafficking program, or make a donation, by visiting the American Himalayan Foundation website.

Sex Trafficking was originally published in Galleys on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Where Men Win Glory

The Odyssey of Pat Tillman

PROLOGUE

If David Uthlaut was still angry when the convoy finally rolled out of Magarah, Afghanistan, the young lieutenant kept his emotions hidden from the forty-four Army Rangers under his command. Certainly he had reason to be steamed. For the previous six hours his platoon had been stopped in the middle of Taliban territory while he argued with headquarters over what to do about a wrecked Humvee. When the discussion finally concluded, Uthlaut was on the losing end of the debate. He was ordered to complete a series of problematic tasks before nightfall, and not nearly enough time remained to meet the deadline without taking dangerous chances.

The date was April 22, 2004. For eight straight days Uthlaut and his men had been combing the rough backcountry of Khost Province for Taliban insurgents. The Rangers had slept in the mud, been soaked by freezing rain, humped up and down towering escarpments with inadequate rations. At one point they got so hungry that one of the platoon’s machine gunners had resorted to rooting in a garbage dump for edible morsels. But none of these tribulations had kept the elite Special Operations unit from executing its mission.

At 11:30 that morning, however, the gnarly terrain delivered a terminal blow to one of the platoon’s eleven vehicles, bringing the Rangers to a halt in Magarah, a ramshackle hamlet where the Taliban held sway. Both of the Humvee’s tie-rods had broken off, leaving its front wheels flopping uncontrollably in opposite directions. After the platoon mechanic determined that repairing the damage in the field was impossible, Uthlaut radioed headquarters to request that a helicopter be dispatched to hook a sling to the vehicle and airlift it back to their base, an operation considered routine for a CH-47 Chinook — a jet-powered, tandem-rotor behemoth that brings to mind an immense titanium insect.

Earlier in the day the Rangers had observed Army Chinooks lumbering purposefully across the sky, but headquarters told Uthlaut that no helicopter would be available to extract the crippled Humvee for at least ninety-six hours.

With a sling-load operation ruled out, someone in the platoon suggested they simply pull the .50-caliber machine gun from the Humvee’s turret, yank its radios, blow the damn thing up with C-4 explosives so the Taliban couldn’t salvage it, and abandon the smoldering wreckage where it lay. Uthlaut knew from a prior tour in Afghanistan, however, that destroying a vehicle was strictly forbidden without approval from the commander of the 75th Ranger Regiment. Because the colonel in question happened to be on the opposite side of the planet at Fort Benning, Georgia, such approval was unlikely to be granted any time soon, if ever. Some other solution to the problem would be required.

At 4:00 p.m. headquarters provided one. Uthlaut was ordered to split his platoon into two elements. Half his unit was directed to immediately begin towing the damaged Humvee toward the only paved road in all of Khost, which lay on the far side of a high massif. Concurrently, the other half of the platoon was supposed to proceed to a village called Mana, situated four roadless miles from Magarah in the opposite direction, to complete the day’s mission: search every building in the settlement for caches of enemy weapons. Word came down the chain of command, moreover, that “this vehicle problem better not delay us any more.” The platoon leader was admonished to quit wasting time and “put boots on the ground” in Mana before nightfall.

Khost Province was the home turf of Jalaluddin Haqqani, a short, scrawny man with Coke-bottle eyeglasses and a beard like black steel wool that hung to his belly. Although his physical stature was unimpressive, he was legendary throughout Afghanistan for his bravery and military acumen. Commander of Taliban forces in much of the country’s eastern region, Haqqani was one of Osama bin Laden’s most trusted associates. The enemy fighters the Rangers had been hunting were part of the so-called Haqqani Network — a loose amalgam of Taliban militias and tribal insurgents. Mana was the last village in the area that the Rangers needed to search for Haqqani’s forces, and headquarters was adamant that they clear it at the earliest possible opportunity in order to conform to a schedule established weeks earlier by deskbound officers at a distant base.

Uthlaut and his men were no less eager than headquarters to finish their business in Mana, because as soon as it was completed they could return to Forward Operating Base Salerno, where they’d be able to shower off the stink and grime, repair their battered vehicles, re-zero their weapons, and spend a night or two on honest-to-God cots before heading back outside the wire. But the Rangers on the ground weren’t keen to take unnecessary risks simply to meet an arbitrary bureaucratic timeline set by “fobbits”: officers who seldom ventured beyond the security of the forward operating base (FOB, in military-speak), and therefore, from the grunts’ perspective, had no clue what it was actually like to fight a war in this unforgiving country.

Uthlaut sent a series of e-mails that respectfully but vigorously registered objections to the orders he’d received. The twenty-four-year-old platoon leader pointed out, among other shortcomings, that the mountainous topography would make communication between the divided elements problematic, and that embarking for Mana with just half a platoon, in his view, “was not safe.”

One of the most highly regarded young officers in the Army, Uthlaut had graduated at the top of his class at West Point as first captain of the Corps of Cadets. When George W. Bush was sworn in as president in 2001, Uthlaut was the guy chosen to lead the Army’s procession down Pennsylvania Avenue in the inaugural parade. After leaving the academy and becoming a platoon leader in the 2nd Ranger Battalion, he quickly earned the admiration of the enlisted men and non-commissioned officers who served under him. Uthlaut was a disciplined soldier who seldom questioned orders, and never without a compelling reason. But his urgent requests to reconsider the directive to split the platoon elicited this brusque reply from headquarters: “Reconsider denied.”

“Nobody on the ground in Magarah thought it was a good idea to split the platoon,” recalls Specialist Jade Lane, who, as Uthlaut’s radio operator, had been privy to the entire extended debate between headquarters and the platoon leader. “The PL didn’t want to do it. But in the Army you obey orders. If somebody with a higher rank tells you to do something, you do it. So Uthlaut split the platoon.”

Less than an hour of daylight remained by the time Uthlaut had finished dividing the platoon into two elements. After placing himself in charge of the element bound for Mana (designated Serial One, it consisted of two Humvees and four Toyota pickup trucks carrying twenty Rangers and seven Afghan Militia Forces), he hurriedly rolled out of Magarah in the lead Humvee at 6:00 p.m. Absent a road, Uthlaut’s convoy drove down an intermittently dry riverbed, followed closely by the second element’s convoy, designated Serial Two. A few minutes outside the village they reached a fork in the wadi. Uthlaut’s convoy turned downstream, to the left. Serial Two, towing the trashed Humvee, turned upstream, to the right.

A British soldier named Francis Leeson, who battled a fierce tribal insurgency in this same area in the late 1940s, wrote a book in which he characterized the terrain as “frontier hills [that] are difficult of access and easy to defend. When one speaks of them as hills, rolling downs on which tanks and cavalry can operate are not meant, but the worst mountain-warfare country imaginable — steep precipices [and] narrow winding valleys.….” Six decades after Leeson’s tour of duty, this remains a chillingly accurate description of the landscape that confronted Uthlaut’s Rangers.

Half a mile west of the junction where the convoys had separated and gone in opposite directions, Serial One entered the mouth of a spectacularly narrow canyon. It was 6:10 p.m., and the lower flanks of the gorge already lay in shadow. The afternoon’s warmth had been supplanted by the chill of the advancing evening, prompting the Rangers to don Gore-Tex jackets beneath their body armor. The air smelled of sage, dust, and wood smoke rising from cooking fires in a nearby village.

Ahead, the route snaked through a deep, crooked slot the river had gouged into the bedrock of the surrounding mountains. In places the passage was only a foot or two wider than the Humvees and was constricted by vertical limestone cliffs that reduced the sky overhead to a pale blue stripe. Only by sharply craning their necks could the soldiers see the canyon rim. Up there on the heights, far above the gloom of the valley floor, the otherwise barren slopes were dotted with graceful Chilgoza pines still washed with sunlight, their silver bark and viridescent needles glowing in the fleeting rays.

The magnificence of the setting was not lost on the Rangers as their vehicles lurched over gravel berms and limestone ledges. This canyon was the most dramatic landform they’d seen since arriving in Khost: the sort of geologic wonder one might encounter in Utah’s Zion National Park, or the Mogollon Rim of northern Arizona. One soldier remarked that it would be “an awesome place to go rock climbing.” But most of the Rangers were less interested in the natural splendors than in the unnatural hazards that might be lurking somewhere above them.

Specialist Russell Baer was in the convoy’s fourth vehicle, a Toyota Hilux pickup. Turning to Sergeant Bradley Shepherd, who was driving the truck, Baer declared, “This looks like those movies they showed us before we deployed. Back in the 1980s the Afghans used to ambush the Russians in places just like this. They slaughtered them in these canyons from above. It’s how they won the war.” Shepherd pondered the obvious implications of this comment, nodded soberly, then pulled out his camera and documented their passage through the dirty windshield as he drove.

For the next twenty minutes the convoy crept through the claustrophobic rift, forced by the severity of the terrain to move at an excruciatingly slow pace. The slot was so tight that the Humvees’ fenders sometimes scraped against its sheer walls. The Rangers remained twitchy and anxious, expecting to be attacked from the high ground at any moment. According to Private Bryan O’Neal, a rifleman, “The canyon was very rough, there were large boulders everywhere, and the walls were at least a hundred feet high on each side. I actually had to lay on top of the vehicle to be able to pull security” — the cliffs rose so precipitously that O’Neal had to lie flat on his back in order to scan the canyon’s ledges for Taliban through the scope of his M4 carbine.

After twenty minutes, Uthlaut’s Humvee emerged from the western end of the slot. The valley opened, and the canyon floor broadened into a relatively flat gravel channel some thirty yards across. Corn and poppies grew in terraced plots of cultivated earth on both sides of the wadi. Clustered on a dun-colored hillside just outside the mouth of the narrows, eight or nine mud-walled buildings stood above the opium fields. Young Pashtun boys in filthy clothing ran up to the convoy as it rolled by, waving and laughing. The danger of an ambush appeared to have passed.

A moment later, a series of loud explosions echoed from the narrows behind them. “I turned toward where we had just come from,” says Baer, “and all of a sudden it looked like Star Wars back there. Red tracer rounds were flying up out of the canyon, lighting up the sky.” Tracers are special bullets manufactured with a pyrotechnic charge that ignites as each projectile exits the barrel of a weapon, making the bullet’s trajectory appear as a bright red streak, enabling the shooter to more easily adjust his fire toward the intended target. Every fifth bullet loaded into the machine guns used by American forces in Afghanistan was a tracer round; the Taliban in that area didn’t use tracer ammunition. Baer understood instantly, therefore, that the red streaks flashing through the canyon’s shadows were bullets from American soldiers returning fire against an enemy ambush. “I knew it was our guys getting hit,” he says. “It was the other half of the platoon.”

The platoon’s other element, Serial Two, was supposed to be miles away by then, towing the derelict Humvee in the opposite direction. Uthlaut and his men had no idea why Serial Two would impulsively reverse course and follow them, but apparently their counterparts in the other element had done precisely that, and were now caught in the middle of what looked and sounded like an intense firefight half a mile away.

Serial One skidded to a halt and the soldiers jumped out of their trucks and Humvees. The element’s highest-ranking Ranger under Uthlaut was a self-possessed staff sergeant named Matthew Weeks who had been awarded a Bronze Star for his valorous actions during a firefight in Iraq the previous year. He assigned a half-dozen soldiers to stay with the six vehicles, and then ordered most of the rest to move with him up the north slope of the canyon toward the cluster of mud buildings they’d just driven beneath. Weeks informed Uthlaut, “I’m going to try to push past the village and see if I can overwatch [Serial Two’s] movement out of the ambush zone,” explaining that his squad would move no farther than a brow of high ground above the settlement.

A Ranger platoon is typically organized into three squads, each consisting of two “fire teams” of six or fewer men. When Uthlaut was forced to hastily divide his platoon back in Magarah, he put Third Squad (commanded by Weeks) in Serial One, and assigned the bulk of First and Second squads to Serial Two. Because the two convoys needed to be of more or less equal size, however, Uthlaut pulled two men from Second Squad and added them to Serial One. These two soldiers were Private O’Neal, a baby-faced eighteen-year-old who was the youngest, greenest member of the entire unit; and Specialist Patrick Tillman, the leader of O’Neal’s fire team.

Tillman — twenty-seven years old, previously employed as a strong safety in the National Football League — was unquestionably the most famous enlisted man in Afghanistan. When the World Trade Center came crashing to earth on September 11, 2001, he had been a star player with the Arizona Cardinals, renowned for patrolling the defensive backfield with riveting intensity. But Tillman came from a family with a tradition of military service that went back several generations, and he believed that as an able-bodied American he had a moral obligation to serve his country during a time of war. He didn’t think he should be exempt from his duty as a citizen simply because he played professional football. So after the 2001 NFL season he walked away from a $3.6 million contract and volunteered to spend the next three years of his life as an infantryman in the U.S. Army. His brother Kevin, fourteen months younger than Pat, had enlisted at the same time and was a member of Uthlaut’s platoon, as well.

When the platoon was split in Magarah, Kevin had been assigned to Serial Two. Now, as Pat listened to the exploding mortar shells and the pop-pop-pop-pop of rifle fire, he was hyper-aware that his little brother was somewhere back in the confines of the canyon getting hammered. The moment Sergeant Weeks directed the Rangers to move up the hill, Tillman sprang into action. “Pat was like a freight train,” says Private Josey Boatright, recalling how Tillman sprinted past him. “Whoosh. A pit bull straining against his leash. He took off toward the high ground, yelling, ‘O’Neal! On me! O’Neal! Stay on me!’”

According to O’Neal, Pat told him, “‘Let’s go help our boys,’ and he started moving. And wherever he went, I went.”

The route to the village ascended a steep gully, the bottom of which was six thousand feet above sea level. Between his weapons, body armor, night-vision optics, CamelBak water bladders, grenades, and extra ammunition, each Ranger was carrying more than sixty pounds of dead weight. Thus burdened, within seconds of leaving the vehicles,everyone was gasping for air, but the sounds of the nearby battle — moving noticeably closer by the minute — kept the Rangers pushing upward despite the pain. When they reached the village, the Rangers performed a “hasty clear,” passing quickly through the settlement without pausing to search inside any of the buildings, and then hurried toward the crest of a spur that rose above the village.

Tillman was among the first to arrive atop the spur, which was devoid of trees or other cover. After pausing for a few seconds to assess the lay of the land, he continued over the crest and scurried down the other side to a pair of low boulders, accompanied by O’Neal and a twenty-seven-year-old Afghan soldier named Sayed Farhad. These rocks afforded only minimal protection from enemy fire but provided an excellent view of the wadi where Tillman expected Serial Two to emerge from the mouth of the gorge.

A few minutes later two vehicles came speeding out of the canyon and stopped ninety yards beneath the boulders. Several Rangers climbed out of a Humvee and gazed up toward Tillman and O’Neal, who waved to let their buddies know they were up there and had them covered. It appeared as though Serial Two had escaped the ambush and everything was copacetic. And then, without warning, hundreds of bullets began to pulverize the slope around Tillman, O’Neal, and Farhad.

Ever since Homo sapiens first coalesced into tribes, war has been part of the human condition. Inevitably, warring societies portray their campaigns as virtuous struggles, and present their fallen warriors as heroes who made the ultimate sacrifice for a noble cause. But death by so-called friendly fire, which is an inescapable aspect of armed conflict in the modern era, doesn’t conform to this mythic narrative. It strips away war’s heroic veneer to reveal what lies beneath. It’s an unsettling reminder that barbarism, senseless violence, and random death are commonplace even in the most “just” and “honorable” of wars. Consequently, and unsurprisingly, when soldiers accidentally kill one of their own, there is tremendous reluctance to confront the truth within the ranks of the military. There is an overwhelming inclination to keep the unsavory particulars hidden from public view, to pretend the calamity never occurred. Thus it has always been, and probably always will be. As Æschylus, the exalted Greek tragedian, noted in the fifth century B.C., “In war, truth is the first casualty.”

When Pat Tillman was killed in Afghanistan, his Ranger Regiment responded with a chorus of prevarication and disavowal. A cynical cover-up sanctioned at the highest levels of government, followed by a series of inept official investigations, cast a cloud of bewilderment and shame over the tragedy, compounding the heartbreak of Tillman’s death.

Among the several thousand pages of documents generated by military investigators, some baffling testimony emerged from the Ranger who is believed to have fired the bullets that ended Tillman’s life. In a sworn statement, this soldier explained that while shooting a ten-round burst from his M249 Squad Automatic Weapon (commonly referred to as a SAW gun) at the hillside where Tillman and O’Neal were positioned, he “identified two sets of arms straight up” through the scope of his weapon. “I saw the arms waving,” he acknowledged, “but I didn’t think they were trying to signal a cease-fire.” So he pulled the trigger again and sprayed them with another ten-round burst. How was one supposed to make sense of this?

Or this: in July 2007, the Associated Press published an article reporting that the Navy pathologist who performed Tillman’s autopsy testified that the forensic evidence indicated Tillman had been shot three times in the head from a distance of thirty-five feet or less. The article prompted widespread speculation on the Internet and in the mainstream press that he had been deliberately murdered.

Many other details about the fatal firefight that found their way into the public domain were similarly perplexing. Perhaps the greatest mystery, however, surrounded not the circumstances of Tillman’s death but rather the essential facts of his life. Before he enlisted, Tillman was familiar to sports aficionados as an undersized, overachieving football player whose virtuosity in the defensive backfield was spellbinding. But during the four years he spent in the NFL, Tillman played for the Arizona Cardinals — at the time a mediocre small-market team that was seldom in the limelight — so his name wasn’t recognized beyond the realm of hard-core football fans.

Although it wasn’t Tillman’s intention, when he left the Cardinals to join the Army he was transformed overnight into an icon of post-9/11 patriotism. Seizing the opportunity to capitalize on his celebrity, the Bush administration endeavored to use his name and image to promote what it had christened the Global War on Terror. Tillman abhorred this role. As soon as he decided to enlist, he stopped talking to the press altogether, although his silence did nothing to squelch America’s fascination with the football star who traded the bright lights and riches of the NFL for boot camp and a bad haircut. Following his death on the battlefield, the public’s interest in Tillman shot through the roof. The posthumous media frenzy shed little light on who he really was, however. The intricate mosaic of personal history that defined his existence was obscured by the blizzard of hype.

Unencumbered by biographical insight, people felt emboldened to invent all manner of personae for Tillman after his passing. Most of these renderings were based on little more than rumor and fantasy. The right-wing harridan Ann Coulter claimed him as an exemplar of Republican political values. The left-wing editorial cartoonist Ted Rall denigrated him in a four-panel comic strip as an “idiot” who joined the Army to “kill Arabs.”

Neither Coulter nor Rall had any idea what motivated Pat Tillman. Beyond his family and a small circle of close friends, few people did.

This piece is adapted from the prologue to my book, Where Men Win Glory: The odyssey of Pat Tillman.

After Pat’s death Marie Tillman, his widow, and his closest friends established the Pat Tillman Foundation to honor his remarkable life.

Where Men Win Glory: was originally published in Galleys on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

147 years ago in a tiny Louisiana town, white supremacists committed mass murder. The aftershocks of this despicable crime are still being felt today.

By William Briggs and Jon Krakauer

An hour after sunset on Easter Sunday in 1873, a stern-wheel riverboat put ashore at Colfax, Louisiana, a ramshackle settlement surrounded by cotton plantations on the east bank of the Red River. Rain was falling. As passengers disembarked, they found themselves stumbling in the dark over what turned out to be the lifeless bodies of African-Americans who had been freed from slavery eight years earlier at the conclusion of the Civil War.

Most of the dead were lying facedown in the grass “and had been shot almost to pieces,” according to Charles Lane in his book “The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction.” Others had been bludgeoned or mutilated, and some had burned to death. There were too many corpses to count. Flames rose from the ruins of the parish courthouse. The stench of charred human flesh was inescapable.

As Americans debate the merit of tearing down monuments to founding fathers in city squares, a monument to the men who massacred Black Americans in Colfax 147 years ago stands unopposed and largely unnoticed. Two blocks off Main Street, a 12-foot marble obelisk is the focal point of the Colfax cemetery. An inscription carved into its base declares it was “erected to the memory of the heroes” who “fell in the Colfax Riot fighting for white supremacy.” On the north side of the present-day courthouse, a historical marker reads, “On this site occurred the Colfax Riot in which three white men and 150 negroes were slain” and added that the episode “marked the end of carpetbag misrule in the South.”

These memorials to the perpetrators of mass murder are disturbing enough in their own right. But the impact of the Colfax massacre extended far beyond this flyspeck town. The damage is still felt acutely throughout our entire nation, and the tragedy must not be forgotten.

After the Civil War, Colfax became ensnared in a vicious political melee between abolitionist Republicans who supported Reconstruction and recalcitrant, pro-slavery Democrats determined to redeem the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. The 13th Amendment (ratified in 1865), the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and the 14th Amendment (ratified in 1868) promised to give Black Americans freedom, citizenship and the same protections and privileges as other citizens.

But those promises vanished as Southern states not only refused to enforce these laws, but passed new laws such as the so-called Black Codes intended to derail Reconstruction. The Ku Klux Klan, founded 1865, joined other white terrorist groups devoted to the “better preservation of the white race and to see that white blood was handed down unmixed with the offensive globule of African blood.”

Open season was declared on Blacks throughout the South. According to an investigation by General Philip Sheridan in 1875, “2,141 Negroes had been killed by whites in Louisiana and 2,115 wounded” since the end of the Civil War, yet nobody was punished for these crimes.

The 1872 elections in Louisiana were mockeries — rife with voter intimidation, ballot stuffing and violent obstruction of Black registration. Republicans and Democrats alike claimed victory in the governor’s race, candidates from both parties held inaugurations, and both candidates began making state and parish appointments. In February 1873, a federal judge settled the governor’s race by declaring the Republican candidate the winner.

The election mayhem spilled over into Colfax, seat of Grant Parish, where Republican candidates, sympathetic to Black freedmen, assumed their rightful offices in the parish courthouse. This provoked a homicidal revolt by supporters of the Democratic candidates. Several hundred heavily armed white supremacists from throughout Louisiana traveled to Colfax bent on taking control of the courthouse, prompting local freedmen to gather in the brick building and defend it from attack, even though they were vastly outgunned.

When the white mob advanced, the murderous frenzy of their assault prompted the Blacks to raise a flag of surrender, but the berserk marauders ignored it. They set fire to the courthouse roof and slaughtered almost every freedman who emerged from the flaming building to surrender. Those who remained inside were burned alive. The exact number of victims was never determined.

The Colfax massacre was ghastly, and so was its aftermath. A young, white New York attorney named J.R. Beckwith had recently been appointed U.S. attorney for Louisiana; he got the job of prosecuting the Colfax murders. Beckwith’s 150 pages of indictments listed 32 counts and named 98 defendants. After six months, with no help from the federal government he represented, Beckwith had managed to arrest only seven of the defendants. The first trial, in March of 1874 in New Orleans, featured an eloquent and capable Beckwith doing battle against an all-star team of white-supremacist trial attorneys. It resulted in a hung jury.

In the retrial a few months later, a federal judge found just three defendants guilty of conspiring to violate the civil rights of the victims. The U.S. Supreme Court Justice Joseph P. Bradley, who opposed the abolition of slavery and despised Reconstruction, had participated in the first days of the retrial as a second judge and then departed. But three weeks after the trial was over, he came back to New Orleans and overturned even the minimal conspiracy verdicts. The split decision sent the case, U.S. v. Cruikshank, to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In March 1876, Bradley and his fellow Supreme Court justices decreed that he was correct in rescinding the convictions of William Cruikshank and the other white defendants, ruling that although the 14th Amendment gave the federal government authority to act against violations of civil rights by state governments, it did not apply to acts of racist violence by private citizens against other citizens. Furthermore, the court ludicrously declared, the prosecution failed to show that crimes against the murdered Black freedmen were committed “on account of their race or color.” All 98 defendants escaped accountability, emboldening white supremacists across the land.

The Cruikshank decision reinforced a grotesque judicial precedent that severely limited the federal government’s power to prosecute violent crimes against freed slaves. Given free rein by the Supreme Court, white supremacists continued their coordinated campaign of terror against Black Americans, hastening the demise of Reconstruction. By 1877, every Southern state had been “redeemed,” and they would remain under the control of their white redeemers for decades.

By eviscerating crucial protections of the 14th Amendment, the Cruikshank decision ensured that the most basic constitutional rights of Black citizens would be denied well into the 20th century. The crabbed, inhumane logic of Cruikshank provided legal cover that allowed systemic racism to flourish, and denied civil rights to millions of Americans, perpetuating what John Lewis called a “soul-wrenching, existential struggle.”

A straight line can be drawn from Colfax and Cruikshank to the race riots of East St. Louis in 1917 and in Omaha, Chicago, and other cities two years later; to the abhorrent crimes committed in the 1921 Tulsa race massacre; to the criminal brutality unleashed on African-Americans in Selma and Birmingham in the 1960s; to the present-day instances of police and white nationalist violence in Ferguson and Charlottesville; to the shameful, plain-sight attempts to suppress the Black vote in the 2020 elections. Lest we forget that white supremacy and racial injustice are still endemic in America, we need to remember Colfax and the lasting harm it wrought.

William Briggs is an emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Colorado, Denver, and author of “How America Got Its Guns: A History of Gun Violence in America.” Jon Krakauer is the author of numerous books.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Times on August 28, 2020.

The Colfax Massacre Must Not Be Forgotten was originally published in Galleys on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In November 1997 a book titled The Climb arrived in bookstores — Anatoli Boukreev’s account of the 1996 Everest disaster, written by an American named G. Weston DeWalt. It was fascinating, for me, to read about the events of 1996 from Boukreev’s perspective. Parts of the book were powerfully told, and moved me deeply. Because Boukreev took strong exception to how he was portrayed in Into Thin Air, however, a significant portion of The Climb is devoted to defending Boukreev’s actions on Everest, challenging the accuracy of my account, and calling into question my integrity as a journalist.

Mr. DeWalt — who oversaw research for the book, and has assumed the role of Boukreev’s spokesman — undertook the derogation of Into Thin Air with notable energy and enthusiasm. He has tirelessly expressed his view of my book — and my character — in print and radio interviews, on the Internet, and in personal letters to family members of those who died on the mountain. In the course of this campaign, DeWalt has brandished an article from the July/August 1998 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review with particular relish. Titled “Why Books Err So Often,” and written by a Missouri-based author and instructor of journalism named Steve Weinberg, the article raised doubts about the accuracy of three recent bestsellers. One of the books singled out for criticism was Into Thin Air. DeWalt was delighted with Weinberg’s article, and has cited it frequently.

When pressed, Weinberg sheepishly admitted to me that he based his criticism of Into Thin Air on nothing more than his reading of DeWalt’s book: Weinberg simply echoed DeWalt’s allegations, without bothering to independently check the accuracy of any of those allegations. After his article was published, Weinberg posted the following clarification in the Columbia Journalism Review:

My article distinguishes Krakauer’s book from other bestsellers that have been criticized. Though a small portion of the book has been challenged, none of the critics have proved factual errors.

Into Thin Air was included in my article not to damn it, but rather to question a publishing practice. Book A comes out, Book B challenges it, and the author, editor, and publisher of Book A do nothing to answer, leaving readers confused.

Upon reading this, I asked Weinberg to elaborate. He explained that he had mistakenly assumed I accepted the validity of DeWalt’s allegations because the first paperback edition of Into Thin Air (which was published in 1998, five months after The Climb) hadn’t included a rebuttal to those allegations. Weinberg then argued — quite persuasively — that whenever an author believes his credibility has been impugned, the author has a professional obligation to publish a rebuttal in a timely manner, lest readers be misled. After hearing Weinberg out, I reconsidered my earlier reluctance to engage in the hurly-burly of a public debate.

When The Climb was initially published, I had made a deliberate decision not to rebut DeWalt’s charges in a public forum. Instead, I documented some of the book’s numerous errors in a series of letters to DeWalt and his editors at St. Martin’s. A spokesman for the publisher indicated that corrections would be made in subsequent editions.

But when St. Martin’s released a paperback edition of The Climb in July 1998, most of the errors I’d pointed out seven months earlier were inexplicably repeated in the new edition. Such apparent disdain for the truth on the part of DeWalt and his publisher troubled me. The new edition and its uncorrected errors came to my attention, coincidentally, a few days after Weinberg had lectured me about the duty of journalists to defend their work. This confluence of circumstances convinced me to end my reticence and stand up for the accuracy and integrity of Into Thin Air. Unfortunately, the only way to do that was to point out some of the misrepresentations in The Climb. I broke my self-imposed silence in the summer of 1998 by talking to Dwight Garner (who at the time was working as a reporter for Salon), and rebutting DeWalt’s charges in an addendum to the illustrated edition of Into Thin Air published in November 1998.

Then, in June 1999, St. Martin’s released an expanded, repackaged edition of The Climb that included a lengthy new chapter assaulting my credibility. It was this latest screed from DeWalt that inspired me to write the postscript that follows.

Of the six professional climbing guides who were caught high on Everest when the storm hit on May 10, 1996, only three survived: Boukreev, Michael Groom, and Neal Beidleman. A scrupulous journalist intent on describing the tragedy accurately, in its full complexity, would presumably have interviewed each of the surviving guides (as I did for Into Thin Air). Decisions made by each of the guides, after all, had immense bearing on the outcome of the disaster. Inexplicably, DeWalt interviewed Boukreev but neglected to interview either Groom or Beidleman.

No less baffling was DeWalt’s failure to contact Lopsang Jangbu, Scott Fischer’s head climbing Sherpa. Lopsang had one of the most pivotal and controversial roles in the disaster. It was he who short-roped Sandy Hill Pittman. He was with Fischer when the Mountain Madness leader collapsed during the descent; Lopsang was the last person to talk to Fischer before he died. Lopsang was also the last person to see Rob Hall, Andy Harris, or Doug Hansen before they died. Yet DeWalt never made any attempt to contact Lopsang, even though the Sherpa spent much of the summer of 1996 in Seattle, and was easy to reach by phone.

Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa perished in an avalanche on Everest in September 1996. DeWalt has insisted that he intended to interview Lopsang, but the Sherpa died before he got around to it. This is a convenient explanation (and perhaps true), but it nevertheless fails to explain why DeWalt didn’t interview any of the other Sherpas who played important roles in the disaster. It also fails to explain why he didn’t interview three of the eight clients on Boukreev’s own team, and several other climbers who played crucial roles in the tragedy and/or ensuing rescue. Perhaps it’s merely coincidence, but most of the people DeWalt chose not to contact have been critical of Boukreev’s actions on Everest.

Among Boukreev’s harshest critics were several Sherpas who played key roles in the disaster. I have not mentioned this in print until now, and I do so presently only because DeWalt first raised the matter himself in the 1999 edition of The Climb.

DeWalt’s new edition reveals that in 1998 I wrote a letter to Galen Rowell, the well-known mountaineer, in which I reported that many Sherpas “blamed the entire tragedy on Boukreev.” DeWalt then pointed out that Rowell (during a trip to Everest Base Camp in 1998) had “found no Sherpa who blamed the tragedy on Boukreev, nor any Sherpa who knew of anyone who did.”

But Rowell never spoke with Lopsang Jangbu or Ang Dorje (the head climbing Sherpa on Rob Hall’s team). On separate occasions, both Lopsang and Ang Dorje told me, in very strong terms, that they (and virtually all the other Sherpas on their respective teams) did indeed blame Boukreev for the disaster. Their views are documented in notes, recorded interviews, and correspondence.

DeWalt, however, omitted a crucial detail that renders this entire issue moot. He neglected to mention that my letter to Rowell included these two important sentences: “First of all, let me say that I think the Sherpas are absolutely wrong to blame Anatoli, which is why I didn’t mention their point of view in my book. It seemed unfair and inflammatory to even bring it up.” DeWalt’s decision to raise this issue in his book — when no mention of it had been made in mine — is therefore hard to fathom.

DeWalt has argued that he tried to interview two of the aforementioned principals, but was rebuffed. In the case of Klev Schoening, at least, this is accurate. But DeWalt has taken pains not to mention that he didn’t ask Schoening for an interview until after The Climb had been published. “I find it puzzling that you should contact me now,” Schoening wrote to DeWalt upon receiving a request for an interview after the book was already on the shelves of his local bookstore. “You were obviously pursuing your own objectives, which from my perspective did not make a priority of the truth, the facts, acknowledgment or reconciliation.”

Whatever the reason for DeWalt’s reportorial lapses, the result is a badly compromised book. Perhaps it is related to the fact that DeWalt — an amateur filmmaker who first made Boukreev’s acquaintance immediately after the Everest disaster — had no prior knowledge of mountaineering, and has never visited the mountains of Nepal. In any case, Beidleman was sufficiently disenchanted with the book that in December 1997 he wrote a letter to DeWalt stating, “I think that The Climb is a dishonest account of the May tragedy…. [N]either you nor your associates once called to fact-check a single detail with me.”

Owing to DeWalt’s haphazard research, errors abound in The Climb. To cite but one example: Andy Harris’s ice ax — the location of which provides an important clue about how Harris might have died — was not found where DeWalt reported that it was found. This was one of the many errors I pointed out to DeWalt and his editors upon publication of the first edition of The Climb in November 1997, yet it was still incorrect in the paperback edition published some seven months later. Astoundingly, this error remains uncorrected in the new, extensively revised paperback edition published in July 1999 — despite DeWalt’s printed assurances to the contrary. Such indifference is vexing to those of us who were transformed by the disaster, and are still consumed with trying to sort out what really happened up there. Andy Harris’s family certainly does not consider the matter of where his ice ax was found to be an inconsequential detail.

Sadly, some of the errors in The Climb do not appear to be the product of mere carelessness, but rather to be deliberate distortions of the truth intended to discredit my reporting in Into Thin Air. For instance, DeWalt reports in The Climb that important details in my Outside magazine article weren’t fact-checked, even though he was aware that an Outside editor named John Alderman met with Boukreev at length and in person at the magazine’s offices in Santa Fe specifically to confirm the accuracy of my entire manuscript before publication of the magazine. Additionally, I, personally, had several conversations over a period of two months with Boukreev in which I made every effort to discern the truth.

The Boukreev/DeWalt version of events does indeed differ from the version that I found to be true, but Outside published what the editors and I determined to be the factual version, rather than Boukreev’s version. Over the course of my numerous interviews with Anatoli, I discovered that his account of important events changed significantly from one telling to the next, forcing me to doubt the accuracy of his memory. And Anatoli’s versions of certain events were subsequently proven to be untrue by other witnesses, most notably Dale Kruse, Klev Schoening, Lopsang Jangbu, Martin Adams, and Neal Beidleman (among whom DeWalt interviewed only Adams). In short, I found many of Anatoli’s recollections to be singularly unreliable.

In The Climb and elsewhere, DeWalt has suggested that in writing Into Thin Air my intent was to destroy Anatoli Boukreev’s good name. To support this despicable imputation, DeWalt relies on two complaints: 1) I didn’t mention a purported conversation above the Hillary Step between Boukreev and Scott Fischer in which Fischer allegedly gave Boukreev permission to descend ahead of his clients; and 2) I refused to acknowledge that Fischer supposedly had a predetermined plan in place for Boukreev to descend ahead of his clients.

Regarding the first of these complaints, this is what I know to be true about the conversation between Fischer and Boukreev atop the Hillary Step: Boukreev, Martin Adams, Andy Harris, and I were waiting together above the Step when an obviously ailing Fischer arrived on his way to the summit. Fischer first exchanged a few words with Adams, and then had an even shorter conversation with Boukreev. As Adams remembers this latter conversation, Boukreev told Fischer, “I am going down with Martin,” and said nothing more. These six words comprised the full extent of their discussion, after which Fischer spoke briefly with me, then turned his back on all of us and resumed his plod toward the summit. Boukreev later insisted that after Harris, Adams, and I had left the scene, he and Fischer had a second conversation in which Fischer gave him permission to descend ahead of his clients in order to make tea for them and provide “support below.”

In the weeks and months immediately following the Everest disaster, Adams — Boukreev’s close friend and one of his fiercest defenders — told me, Neal Beidleman, and others that he doubted that this second conversation actually occurred. Since then he has revised his position somewhat: Adams’ latest stance it that he has no idea whether or not there was a second conversation between Fischer and Boukreev, because he wasn’t present when it was alleged to have taken place.

Obviously, I wasn’t present, either. So why do I doubt Anatoli’s memory of a second conversation? Partly because the first time Boukreev told me about having a long discussion in which Fischer encouraged him to descend ahead of his clients, Boukreev clearly stated that it occurred when Fischer first arrived atop the Hillary Step — when Adams, Harris, and I were present. Later, after I pointed out that Adams remembered this conversation very differently, Anatoli changed his story: Now he said he’d had a second conversation with Fischer after Adams, Harris, and I had descended.

My main reason for doubting the second conversation, however, comes from what I saw as I began heading down the Hillary Step: As I looked up one last time to check the rappel anchors before descending, I noticed that Fischer had already moved well above the small staging area where Harris, Adams, Boukreev, and I had congregated to clip into the rappel ropes. Am I certain that Boukreev didn’t climb back up to Fischer and have a second conversation with him? No. But Anatoli, like the rest of us, was very cold and tired, and exceedingly anxious to get down. As I rappelled over the lip of the Step, Anatoli was shivering impatiently on the narrow ridge crest immediately above me; it’s hard for me to conceive of what would have prompted him to climb back up and have another discussion with Fischer.

Thus I have reason to be skeptical that a second conversation between Fischer and Boukreev occurred. Nevertheless, in retrospect, to be fair to Boukreev I should have reported his recollection of a second conversation and then explained why I doubted it, rather than making no mention of it at all in my book. I regret the hard feelings and sharp words that have resulted.

I am puzzled, however, as to why DeWalt has expressed such outrage over my decision not to report this disputed second conversation, while at the same time he saw no reason, in The Climb, to report the first conversation between Fischer and Boukreev — a conversation about which there is absolutely no argument: Boukreev told Fischer he was “going down with Martin.” Although Adams has expressed the view that I wasn’t in a position to overhear these words when they were spoken, he has never disputed that this brief declaration is precisely what Anatoli said. But in the version of events presented by DeWalt in The Climb, this conversation simply didn’t occur. It should be noted, moreover, that Boukreev’s failure to stay with Adams during the descent, as he told Fischer he would, nearly cost Adams his life.

In his book, Sheer Will, Michael Groom described the moment when he, Yasuko Namba, and I encountered Adams as we made our way down toward the Balcony at 27,600 feet. Adams, according to Groom, “was in an uncontrolled tumble off to our left. From where I stood he looked out of control and in no hurry to regain it.” Groom met up with Adams again lower down, after his tumble had somehow ended. Adams was

only just getting to his feet… veering dangerously close to the wrong side of the mountain in a series of drunken flops into the snow, one of which could end up over the edge in Tibet. I detoured off my path to get close enough to speak with him. I could see that his oxygen mask had slipped off beneath his chin and clumps of ice hung from his eyebrows and chin. Lying half-buried in the snow, he was giggling — — the result of oxygen debt to the brain. I told him to pull his oxygen mask over his mouth. In a fatherly sort of manner I then coaxed him closer and closer to the ridge crest…. ‘Now, see those two climbers down there in red? Just follow them,’ I said pointing to Jon and Yasuko still visible in the gully below.

He stepped off the ridge in such a haphazard manner, I wondered whether he cared if he lived or died. Concerned about his judgment, I decided to stick with him.

If Groom hadn’t happened upon Adams — who was completely disoriented after being left behind by Boukreev — it seems likely that Adams would have continued down the wrong side of the mountain and died. Yet none of this is reported in The Climb.

Perhaps the most disturbing misrepresentation in The Climb concerns a conversation between Scott Fischer and Jane Bromet (Fischer’s publicist and confidant, who accompanied him to Base Camp). Bromet, offering her memory of this conversation, is quoted by DeWalt in a manner intended to convince readers that Fischer had a predetermined plan in place for Boukreev to descend quickly after reaching the summit, ahead of his clients. This edited quote forms the basis of DeWalt’s second major allegation: that my failure to mention the purported plan in Into Thin Air was a nefarious “assassination of character for which, after the fact, I do not believe there is a justifiable defense.”

Actually, I didn’t mention this so-called plan because I found compelling evidence that no such plan existed. Beidleman — who is widely respected for his quiet humility, his honesty, and his strength and experience as a mountaineer — told me that if such a plan were in place, he definitely wasn’t aware of it when the Mountain Madness team went to the summit on May 10, and he is certain that Boukreev wasn’t aware of it either. During the year immediately following the tragedy, Boukreev explained his decision to descend ahead of his clients numerous times — on television, on the Internet, in magazine and newspaper interviews. Yet never during any of those opportunities did he ever indicate that he had followed a pre-determined plan. Indeed, in the summer of 1996, Boukreev himself stated during a videotaped interview for ABC News that there was no plan. As he explained to correspondent Forrest Sawyer, until arriving on the summit, Boukreev “didn’t know how, what is my plan. I need to see the situation and then make…. Because we didn’t make this plan.”

Apparently failing to comprehend Boukreev, a minute later Sawyer asked, “So your plan, then, once you passed everybody, was, you were waiting on the summit for everybody to come up as a group.”

Boukreev scoffed, and reiterated that nothing had been determined ahead of time: “It, it wasn’t exactly a plan. We didn’t make plan. But I need to see the situation. Then I will make my plan.”

In the 1999 edition of The Climb even DeWalt admits, belatedly, “Boukreev has never said that he knew of Fischer’s plan in advance of summit day.” DeWalt also admits that the only evidence to support his conjecture about a predetermined plan was Bromet’s recollection of a single conversation with Fischer. Yet Bromet emphasized to both DeWalt and me before publication of our respective books that it would be wrong to assume that Fischer’s comments indicated that he had anything resembling an actual plan in place. In 1997, immediately before The Climb was published, Bromet sent a letter to DeWalt and St. Martin’s Press complaining that DeWalt had edited her quote in a way that significantly changed its meaning. She pointed out that he doctored her words in order to make it appear as though the relevant conversation between Bromet and Fischer had occurred several days before the summit assault, when in fact it occurred more than three weeks before the summit assault. This is not a minor discrepancy.

As Bromet stated in her letter to DeWalt and his publisher, the edited version of her quote that appears in The Climb is

absolutely wrong! The distortion will mislead readers into a false conclusion concerning many of the most important factors that led to the accident. Because of the distortion… the reader may be misled into believing that Boukreev’s descent [ahead of his clients] was a firm plan….

As this quote is written, it runs the risk of coming across as [part of] a calculated and distorted analysis of the accident whose sole purpose is to absolve Anatoli Boukreev of fault by attempting to lay blame on others….

Too much credit was given to this quote in constructing the events of the accident…. Scott never once mentioned this plan again. Moreover, Scott was a very communicative person. If it were Scott’s ‘plan’ he would have talked it over with Neal and Anatoli. (In subsequent conversations with Neal, he told me that Scott communicated no such plan). I feel this quotation as stated is grossly misleading.

DeWalt wrote in the 1999 edition of The Climb, “I was not concerned about specifying an exact date, because I felt that Fischer’s statement to Bromet would not have been any less significant or relevant if it had been made on March 25 in Kathmandu or on April 2 during the trek to the Everest Base Camp.”

But Fischer’s opinion of Boukreev underwent a profound and well-documented transformation over the latter weeks of the expedition. The notorious conversation betwen Bromet and Fischer occurred on or around April 15, barely a week after Fischer’s team arrived at Base Camp. At that time, Fischer still had nothing but praise for his chief guide. Three weeks later, however, by the time the Mountain Madness team launched their summit assault, Fischer had grown extremely disenchanted with Boukreev’s guiding methods, and was frequently angry with him. The actual date of Fischer’s conversation with Bromet — and DeWalt’s attempt in The Climb to fudge that date by three weeks — is thus extremely relevant. For many days immediately preceding his team’s summit assault, Fischer had complained bitterly to his closest confidant that, despite his repeated admonishments to Boukreev, he couldn’t persuade Boukreev to stay close to his clients. It therefore strains belief to suggest that on May 10, upon reaching the summit ridge, Fischer decided that he wanted Boukreev to descend alone, ahead of everybody.

As the squabble between DeWalt and me hardened into something resembling trench warfare, he desperately tried to explain away the clear, unambiguous meaning of the letter cited above — primarily through prodigious feats of obfuscation, and by intricately parsing Bromet’s quotes. Throughout the ongoing dispute, however, Bromet has unflinchingly stood her ground. “It’s ridiculous for DeWalt to say that he knows my mind better than I do,” she explains. “The letter I sent to him in October 1997 accurately states how I feel, despite his attempts to twist my words and claim that it doesn’t.”

When Bromet steadfastly refused to back down about the accuracy of her letter, DeWalt attacked her credibility in the 1999 edition of his book. Which is a curious tactic, because he constructed his theory about Fischer’s so-called plan entirely from his interpretation of Bromet’s statements, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. If DeWalt doesn’t think Bromet is believable, I’m not sure what he is left with.

Boukreev’s extraordinary strength, courage, and experience were highly valued by Fischer — nobody disputes this. Nor does anybody dispute that, in the end, Fischer’s confidence in Boukreev’s abilities turned out to be warranted: Anatoli saved two lives that most certainly would have been lost otherwise. But for DeWalt to insist that Fischer planned for Boukreev to descend from the summit ahead of his clients on May 10 is manifestly not supported by the facts. And it is outrageous for DeWalt to further insist that I tried to assassinate Anatoli’s character by declining to mention a plan that did not exist.

The matter of whether or not Fischer gave Boukreev permission to descend ahead of his clients was obviously very important to Anatoli after the fact. But the debate raging over this tangential question has flared beyond all proportion, obscuring the larger issue: the prudence of guiding Everest without supplemental oxygen. And nobody — not even DeWalt — has ever disputed the crucial facts underlying this larger issue: Anatoli elected not to use supplemental oxygen on summit day, and after reaching the summit he went down alone many hours ahead of his clients, defying the standard practices of professional mountain guides the world over. What has largely been lost amid the bickering over whether Boukreev acted with or without Fischer’s approval is that the moment Anatoli decided, early in the expedition, to guide without bottled oxygen, it probably preordained his subsequent decision to leave his clients on the summit ridge and descend quickly. Having elected to climb without gas, Anatoli had painted himself into a corner. Lacking bottled oxygen, his only reasonable choice was to get down fast on summit day — whatever Fischer did or didn’t give him permission to do.

The crux of the matter wasn’t fatigue, moreover: it was the cold. The importance of bottled oxygen in warding off exhaustion, altitude sickness, and murky thinking at extreme altitudes is generally understood. What is much less widely known is that oxygen plays an equally important role in staving off the crippling effects of cold at high altitude.

By the time Anatoli began his descent from the South Summit ahead of everybody else on May 10, he’d spent between three and four hours above 28,700 feet without breathing supplemental oxygen. For much of that time he was sitting and waiting in a bitter sub-zero wind, growing increasingly cold, as any climber would in his situation. As Anatoli himself explained to Men’s Journal, in a quote he approved before publication,

I stayed [on the summit] for about an hour….. It is very cold, naturally, it takes your strength….. My position was that I would not be good if I stood around freezing, waiting….. If you are immobile at that altitude you lose strength in the cold, and then you are unable to do anything.

Becoming dangerously chilled, courting frostbite and hypothermia, Boukreev was compelled to descend not by fatigue, but by the profound cold.

For perspective on how the deadly wind-chill at high altitude is exacerbated when a climber isn’t using supplemental oxygen, consider what happened to Ed Viesturs thirteen days after the 1996 disaster, when Viesturs summitted with the IMAX team.

Viesturs departed from Camp Four for the summit early on May 23, some twenty or thirty minutes ahead of his teammates. He left camp ahead of everyone else because like Boukreev he was not using gas (Viesturs was starring in the IMAX film that year instead of guiding), and he was concerned this would prevent him from keeping up with the film crew — all of whom were using bottled oxygen.

Viesturs was so strong, however, that nobody could come close to matching his pace, even though he was out in front breaking trail through thigh-deep snow. Because he knew that it was crucial for David Breashears to get footage of him during the summit push, every so often Viesturs stopped and waited as long as possible for the film crew to catch up to him. But whenever he stopped moving he immediately felt the effects of the debilitating cold — even though May 23 was a much warmer day than May 10 had been. Afraid of getting frostbite or worse, on each occasion he was forced to resume his ascent before his teammates were able to get close enough to film him. “Ed is at least as strong as Anatoli,” explains Breashears, “yet without gas, whenever he stopped to wait for us he got cold.” As a result, Breashears ended up with no IMAX footage of Viesturs above Camp Four (the “summit day” footage of Viesturs that appears in the movie was actually shot at a later date). The point I’m trying to make here is that Boukreev had to keep moving for the same reason Viesturs did: to keep from freezing.

Breashears insists,

I’m sorry, but it was incredibly irresponsible for Anatoli to climb without gas. No matter how strong you are, you are right at your limit when you climb Everest without oxygen. You aren’t in a position to help your clients. Anatoli is dissembling when he says the reason he went down is that Scott sent him down to make tea. There were Sherpas waiting at the South Col to make tea. The only place an Everest guide should be is either with his clients or right behind them, breathing bottled oxygen, ready to provide assistance.

Make no mistake: There is a strong consensus among the most respected high-altitude guides, as well as the preeminent experts in the esoteric field of high-altitude medicine/physiology, that it is exceedingly risky for a guide to lead clients on Everest without using bottled oxygen. As it happens, while researching his book, DeWalt instructed an assistant to call Peter Hackett M.D., one of the world’s foremost authorities on the debilitating effects of extreme altitude, in order to solicit the doctor’s professional opinion about the oxygen issue. Dr. Hackett — who reached the summit of Everest with a medical research expedition in 1981 — replied unequivocally that in his view it was dangerous and ill advised to guide Everest without using oxygen, even for someone as strong as Boukreev. Significantly, after seeking and receiving Hackett’s opinion, DeWalt deliberately made no mention of it in The Climb, and has continued to insist that not using bottled oxygen somehow made Boukreev a more capable guide in 1996.

On numerous occasions while promoting their book, Boukreev and DeWalt asserted that Reinhold Messner — the most accomplished and respected mountaineer of the modern era — endorsed Boukreev’s actions on Everest, including his decision not to use bottled oxygen. In a face-to-face conversation I had with Anatoli in November 1997, he told me, “Messner says I did right thing on Everest.” In The Climb, referring to my criticisms of his behavior on Everest, DeWalt quotes Boukreev as saying,

I felt fairly well maligned by the few voices that had captured the imagination of the American press. Had it not been for the support of European colleagues like… Reinhold Messner, I would have been depressed by the American perspective of what I had to offer my profession.

Lamentably, like other assertions in The Climb, the Boukreev/DeWalt claim about Messner’s endorsement has turned out to be untrue.

In February 1998, during a meeting with me in New York, Messner stated into a tape recorder, without equivocation, that he thought Anatoli was wrong to descend ahead of his clients. Messner speculated on the record that had Anatoli remained with his clients the outcome of the tragedy might have been quite different. Messner declared that “No one should guide Everest without using bottled oxygen,” and that Anatoli was mistaken if he thought Messner endorsed Anatoli’s actions on Everest.

Messner isn’t the only respected mountaineer whose views have been misrepresented by DeWalt in his efforts to discredit me. He has also quoted David Breashears, who, in an interview published in 1997 in The Improper Bostonian, took issue with my portrayal of Sandy Hill Pittman, a close friend of his. I admire Breashears’ loyalty to Pittman. Breashears is known for speaking his mind in a sometimes brutally honest fashion, and I admire that quality, too, even when his criticisms are directed at me. It turns out that Breashears has also been very frank in his assessments of DeWalt and The Climb. The following is an excerpt from an e-mail Breashears sent me, unsolicited, in July 1998:

In my opinion [DeWalt] has no real credibility having been 10,000 miles away from the event. I’m sure you agree that you could never have accurately written about high altitude without having been there, despite all your years of climbing experience. Contrary to what DeWalt states regarding climbing without oxygen, most experienced high-altitude climbers disagree with his conclusion… ALL evidence and all logic (oxygen = fuel = energy = warmth, strength, etc.) firmly dispute DeWalt’s claims…. Anatoli descended allegedly to be in position to provide assistance. But he never did find his clients, they were freezing to death across the Col. It was up to them to stagger into camp with the information so vital to their rescue…. Anatoli was sitting in his tent unable to assist anyone, until informed of the lost climbers’ position. Enough! It’s a pity Anatoli isn’t here to continue the dialogue. I stand by my conviction that he descended because he was cold and weary and couldn’t possibly remain (relatively motionless) on the summit waiting for clients…. Finally, why the continued debate about your book? Where’s the outrage about the real issues?… You just had the guts to put it all in writing.

Many of us who were on Everest in 1996 made mistakes. As I indicated earlier in these pages, my own actions may have contributed to the deaths of two of my teammates. I have no doubt that Boukreev’s intentions were good on summit day. I am absolutely certain that he meant well. What disturbs me, though, was Anatoli’s refusal to acknowledge the possibility that he made even a single poor decision.

DeWalt has written that my criticisms of Boukreev in Into Thin Air were motivated by my “desire to keep the spotlight from settling on a question that began to loom in the weeks after the Everest tragedy of 1996: Did Krakauer’s presence on the Adventure Consultants expedition [as a writer for Outside magazine] contribute to the tragedy that unfolded?” In truth, I remain quite troubled by the possibility that my presence as a journalist, and Sandy Hill Pittman’s, may indeed have directly contributed to the disaster. Contrary to DeWalt’s cynical assertion, however, I have never tried to steer the debate away from this topic. Indeed, I’ve raised the subject myself in numerous interviews, and I explictly discuss my culpability in my book. I have not shied away from admitting the errors I made on Everest, however painful it has been to do so. I only wish that others had presented their versions of the calamity with equal candor.

Even though I have written critically about some of Anatoli’s actions, I have always emphasized that he performed heroically when disaster struck in the pre-dawn hours of May 11. There is no question that Anatoli saved the lives of Sandy Hill Pittman and Charlotte Fox, at considerable personal risk — I have said as much on many occasions, in many places. I admire Anatoli immensely for going out alone in the storm, when the rest of us were lying helpless in our tents, and bringing in the lost climbers. But some of the decisions he made earlier in the day and earlier in the expedition are nevertheless troubling, and simply could not be ignored by a journalist committed to writing a full and honest account of the disaster.

As it happens, much of what I witnessed on Everest was troubling, and would have been troubling even if there had been no calamity. I was sent to Nepal by Outside magazine specifically to write about guided expeditions on the world’s highest mountain. My assignment was to assess the qualifications of the guides and clients, and to provide the reading public with a discriminating, first-hand look at the reality of how guided Everest climbs are conducted.

I also believe quite strongly that I had a duty — to the other survivors, to the grieving families, to the historical record, and to my companions who did not come home — to provide a full report of what happened on Everest in 1996, regardless of how that report would be received. And that’s what I did, relying on my extensive experience as a journalist and a mountaineer to provide the most accurate, honest account possible.

The debate over what happened on Everest in 1996 took a terrible turn on Christmas Day 1997, six weeks after publication of The Climb, when Anatoli Nikoliavich Boukreev was killed in an avalanche on Annapurna, the world’s tenth highest mountain. His loss was mourned around the world. Thirty-nine at the time of his death, he was a magnificent athlete who possessed tremendous courage. By all accounts he was a remarkable, very complicated man.

Boukreev had been raised in a dirt-poor mining town in the southern Ural Mountains of the Soviet Union. According to British journalist Peter Gillman, writing in the London Mail on Sunday,

when Anatoli was a boy his father had eked out a living making shoes and mending watches. There were five children, in a cramped wooden house with no plumbing…. Boukreev was dreaming of escaping. The mountains gave him his chance.

Boukreev learned to climb as a nine-year-old, and his uncommon physical gifts quickly came to the fore. At 16 he earned a coveted slot at a Soviet mountaineering camp in the Tian Shan mountains of Kazakhstan. At 24 he was selected to become a member of the elite national climbing team, which brought him a financial stipend, great prestige, and other benefits both tangible and intangible. In 1989 he climbed Kanchenjunga, the world’s third-highest peak, as part of a Soviet expedition, and upon returning to his home in Almaty, Kazakhstan, was honored as a Soviet Master of Sport by President Mikhail Gorbachev.

Due to the upheavals that accompanied the New World Order, this rosy situation was not to last long, however. As Gillman explains,

The Soviet Union was breaking up. Two years later Gorbachev quit, and Boukreev — who had recently completed his own ascent of Everest — found his status and privileges vanishing. ‘There was nothing,’ he told [Linda] Wylie [his American girlfriend]. ‘No money — you were in bread lines.’… Boukreev resolved not to succumb. If the communist order had disappeared, he must adapt to the new world of private enterprise, using his assets of a mountaineer’s skills and determination.

In a remembrance of Anatoli posted on the Internet in early 1997, his friend Fran Distefano-Arsentiev recalled,

Those were desperate times [for Boukreev]; just to be able to pay for food was a luxury…. [T]he only chance a Soviet climber had to go to the Himalaya was to compete within the system and win that privilege.

Having the freedom to just go to the Himalaya, whether or not you are competent enough as a climber, was never an option. It was a dream…. Before Buka became famous there was a time when nothing came easily for him. But he pursued his dreams tenaciously with a vigor unlike anyone I have ever known.

Boukreev became something of a global nomad in pursuit of both mountains and money to make ends meet. In order to scrape together a living, he hired on as a guide in the Himalaya, Alaska, and Kazakhstan; gave slide shows in American climbing shops; and occasionally resorted to common labor. But all the while he continued to tally an extraordinary record of high-altitude ascents.

Although he loved climbing, and loved being in the mountains, Boukreev never pretended to enjoy guiding. In The Climb he spoke very candidly about this:

I wish with all my power there were other opportunities for me to make a living…. It is too late for me to find another way to finance my personal objectives; yet it is with great reservation that I work to bring inexperienced men and women into this world [of dangerous high-altitude mountaineering].

Thus he continued to take novice climbers to the high peaks, even after experiencing the horrors and controversies of the 1996 disaster.

In the spring of 1997, one year later, Boukreev agreed to lead a team of Indonesian Army officers hoping to become the first members of their island nation to climb Everest — despite the fact that none of the Indonesians had any prior mountaineering experience, or, indeed, had even seen snow before. To assist him with his neophyte clients, Boukreev employed two highly accomplished Russian mountaineers, Vladimir Bashkirov and Evgeny Vinogradski, and Apa Sherpa, who had climbed Everest seven times. Moreover, in 1997, unlike in ’96, everyone on the team relied on bottled oxygen for the summit assault, including Boukreev — notwithstanding his insistence that it was safer for him “to climb without oxygen in order to avoid the sudden loss of acclimatization that occurs when supplementary oxygen supplies are depleted.” In 1997, it also bears noting, Anatoli was never more than a few paces from his Indonesian clients on summit day.

The team departed the South Col for the top just after midnight on April 26. Around noon Apa Sherpa, in the lead, arrived at the Hillary Step, where he encountered the body of Bruce Herrod dangling from an old fixed rope. Clambering over the deceased British photographer, Apa, Anatoli, and the rest of the Indonesian team labored slowly toward the summit.

It was already 3:30 P.M. when the first Indonesian, Asmujiono Prajurit, followed Boukreev to the top. They stayed on the summit only ten minutes before heading down, whereupon Boukreev compelled the two other Indonesians to turn around, even though one of them was within 100 feet of the top. The team made it down only as far as the Balcony that night, where they endured a miserable bivouac at 27,600 feet, but thanks to Boukreev’s leadership and a rare night without wind, everyone descended safely to the South Col on April 27. “We were lucky,” Anatoli allowed.

Boukreev and Vinogradski paused during their descent to Camp Four to cover Scott Fischer’s body with rocks and snow at 27,200 feet. “This last respect was for a man I feel was the best and brightest expression of the American persona,” Boukreev mused in The Climb. “I think often of his brilliant smile and positive manner. I am a difficult man and I hope to remember him always by living a little more by his example.” A day later Boukreev traveled across the South Col to the edge of the Kangshung Face, where he located the body of Yasuko Namba, covered her with stones as best he could, and collected some of her possessions to give to her family.

A month after climbing Everest with the Indonesians, Boukreev attempted a speed traverse of Lhotse and Everest with a brilliant 30-year-old Italian climber named Simone Moro. Boukreev and Moro set out for the top of Lhotse on May 26. That same day, eight members of a separate Russian team — including Boukreev’s friend Vladimir Bashkirov, who had helped guide the Indonesians up Everest — also started up Lhotse. None of the ten climbers was using supplemental oxygen.

Moro reached the summit at 1 P.M. Boukreev arrived twenty-five minutes later, but he was feeling ill and started down after spending only a few minutes on top. Moro stayed on the summit for perhaps another forty minutes, and then headed down himself. During his descent he encountered Bashkirov, who was also feeling sick but nevertheless still pushing upward. Late that afternoon Bashkirov and the rest of the Russians reached the summit.

Not long after the last of the Russians topped out, Moro and Boukreev arrived back at their tent and went to sleep. Upon waking the next morning, Moro turned on his radio and happened to overhear a transmission from some Italian friends who were in the process of ascending Lhotse. The Italians reported with alarm that, high on the peak, they had encountered the body of a climber dressed in a green down suit and yellow boots. “In that moment,” Moro says, “I realized that it could be Bashkirov.” He immediately woke Boukreev, who made a radio call to the Russian team. The Russians reported that Bashkirov had indeed died during the night from an altitude-related illness on his way down from the summit.

Although Boukreev had lost yet one more friend to the heights, he did not let it dampen his passion for climbing the world’s highest mountains. On July 7, 1997, six weeks after Bashkirov perished, Boukreev made a solo ascent of Broad Peak in Pakistan. And exactly one week later he completed a speed ascent of nearby Gasherbrum II. Although Moro says that climbing all fourteen of the 8,000-meter peaks wasn’t particularly important to Boukreev, he had now ascended eleven of the fourteen: only Nanga Parbat, Hidden Peak, and Annapurna I remained.

Later that summer Anatoli invited Reinhold Messner to join him in the Tian Shan for some recreational climbing. During Messner’s visit, Boukreev asked the legendary Italian alpinist for advice about his climbing career. Since first visiting the Himalaya in 1989, Boukreev had accumulated an amazing record of high-altitude ascents. All but two of these climbs, however, had followed traditional, relatively oft-traveled routes with few technical challenges. Messner pointed out that if Boukreev wanted to be considered among the world’s truly great mountaineers, he would need to shift his focus to steeper, very difficult, previously unclimbed lines.

Anatoli took this advice to heart. In fact, even before consulting with Messner, Boukreev and Moro had decided to attempt Annapurna I via a notoriously difficult route on the mountain’s immense south face that had been climbed by a strong Anglo-American team in 1970. And to increase the challenge, Boukreev and Moro decided to make their attempt on Annapurna in winter. It would be an exceedingly ambitious and dangerous undertaking, involving extreme technical climbing at high altitude in unimaginable wind and cold. Even when ascended by its easiest aspects, Annapurna — 26,454 feet high — is regarded as one of the deadliest mountains in the world: for every two climbers who have reached its summit, one has died. If Boukreev and Moro were to succeed, it would be one of the boldest ascents in the history of Himalayan mountaineering.

In late November 1997, soon after publication of The Climb, Boukreev and Moro traveled to Nepal and helicoptered to Annapurna Base Camp, accompanied by a Kazakh cinematographer named Dimitri Sobolev. It had been an unusually early winter, however. They were hit by frequent storms that dumped prodigious quantities of snow and sent giant avalanches thundering down their intended route. As a consequence, a month into the expedition they decided to abandon their original plan and instead attempt a different route at the eastern margin of Annapurna’s south face. It was a route that had been attempted several times by accomplished climbers, without success. The difficulties would be extreme — Boukreev’s team would have to ascend a formidable satellite peak called the Fang on their way to the summit — but the avalanche danger appeared to be significantly lower on this new route.

Having erected Camp One at 17,000 feet below the first of the new route’s steep terrain, Boukreev, Moro, and Sobolev embarked from their tent at sunrise on Christmas Day, intending to establish a line of fixed ropes up a broad gully to a ridge that towered some 2,700 feet above their camp. Moro, in the lead, had climbed to within 200 feet of the ridge crest by noon. At 12:27 P.M., as he stopped to pull something from his backpack, he heard a sharp boom. When he looked up he saw an avalanche of massive ice blocks hurtling directly toward him. He managed to scream out a warning to Boukreev and Sobolev, who were ascending the gully some 700 feet below, just before the wall of snow and ice plowed him from his stance and carried him down the mountain.

For a moment Moro tried to arrest his slide by clutching the fixed rope, burning deep gouges into his fingers and palms, but it was to no avail. He tumbled approximately 2,600 feet with the cascading ice and was knocked cold. When the mass of frozen rubble came to rest on a gentle slope slightly above Camp One, however, by chance Moro happened to be on top of the avalanche debris. Upon regaining consciousness he looked frantically for his companions, but could find no trace of them. Searches by air and ground over the ensuing week proved futile. Boukreev and Sobolev were presumed to be dead.

After meeting Boukreev in 1997, Moro had become one of his closest friends. “I loved and love (like friend, of course) Anatoli Boukreev so much,” Moro told me, “that after I met him I changed my life, my projects, my dreams. Probably only his mother and his girlfriend, Linda, loved him more.” Moro emphatically disagrees with my portrayal of Boukreev in this book. “You didn’t understand who Anatoli really was,” Moro explained:

You are American; he was Russian. You were new to 8000-meter peaks; he was the best of all time at these altitudes (nobody else had climbed 21 times to a summit over 8000 meters). You are a normal alpinist; he was a fantastic athlete and survival’s animal. You are economically sure; he knew hunger…. In my opinion you are like a man who, after reading a book about medicine, pretends to teach one of the world’s most famous and capable surgeons how to be a doctor…. When judging the decisions made by Anatoli in 1996 you must remember this: no clients on his team died.

News of Anatoli’s death was greeted with shock and disbelief on several continents. He traveled prodigiously and had friends around the world. Many, many people were devastated by his passing, not least of them being the woman with whom he’d been sharing his life, Linda Wylie of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Anatoli’s death was extremely upsetting to me, as well, for a host of complicated reasons. In the wake of the accident on Annapurna, the debate over what happened on Everest in 1996 took on a different light. I pondered how things between Anatoli and me had come to such a state. Because both of us were stubborn and proud and loath to back down from a fight, our disagreement had escalated vastly out of proportion, diminishing both of us in the process. And if I’m being honest with myself, I have to accept as much responsibility for this as Boukreev.

So do I wish I had portrayed Anatoli differently in writing this book? No, I don’t think so. Nothing I’ve learned since the publication of Into Thin Air or The Climb leads me to believe I got things wrong. What I do wish, perhaps, is that I’d been a little less strident in a notorious exchange of letters between Anatoli and me that was posted on the Internet shortly after my original Everest article was published in Outside magazine in September 1996. This online spat established an unfortunate tone that intensified over the following months and thoroughly polarized the discussion.

Although the criticisms I leveled at Boukreev in my Outside article and in my book were measured, and balanced by sincere praise, Anatoli was nevertheless hurt and outraged by them. He and DeWalt responded by attacking my character, and presenting some disingenuous interpretations of the facts. To defend my honesty, I was forced to present some damaging material that I had previously withheld to avoid hurting Boukreev unnecessarily. Boukreev, DeWalt, and St. Martin’s Press responded by intensifying their ad hominem attacks on me, and the tenor of the discussion only deteriorated over the period that followed. Perhaps, as DeWalt wrote in The Climb, there “is an advantage to an open and ongoing debate” over what happened on Everest in 1996. It has certainly helped sell copies of his book — and mine, no doubt. But for all the bitterness that’s flowed, I’m not sure much of lasting importance has been illuminated.

The dispute reached its nadir in early November 1997 at the annual Banff Mountain Book Festival. Boukreev was a panelist at a forum of eminent mountaineers. I had declined an invitation to participate as a panelist, fearing that the event might turn into a shouting match, but I made the mistake of attending as a member of the audience. When it was Anatoli’s turn to speak, he had Linda Wylie (acting as his interpreter) read a prepared statement that began with a declaration that most of what had written about him was “bullshit.” The upshot was that I rose to Anatoli’s bait and some ill-advised, very heated words were exchanged across the crowded auditorium.

I regretted my outburst immediately. After the forum concluded and the crowd dispersed I hurried outside, searched for Anatoli, and found him walking with Wylie across the grounds of the Banff Centre. I told them that I thought we needed to have a few words together in private and attempt to clear the air. Initially Anatoli balked at this suggestion, protesting that he was late to another Book Festival event. But I persisted, and eventually he agreed to grant me a few minutes. For the next half-hour he and Wylie and I stood outside in the cold Canadian morning and spoke frankly but calmly about our differences.

At one point Anatoli put his hand on my shoulder and said, “I am not angry with you, Jon, but you do not understand.” By the time the discussion ended and we went our separate ways, we had come to the conclusion that both Anatoli and I needed to make an effort to moderate the tone of the debate. We concurred that there was no need for the atmosphere between us to be so emotionally charged and confrontational. We agreed to disagree about certain points — primarily the wisdom of guiding Everest without bottled oxygen, and what was said between Boukreev and Fischer during their final conversation atop the Hillary Step — but both of us came to realize that we saw eye to eye on almost everything else of importance.

Although Boukreev’s co-author, Mr. DeWalt (who wasn’t present during the aforementioned meeting), continued to fan the flames of the dispute with gusto, I came away from my encounter with Anatoli in Banff somewhat hopeful of patching things up with him. Perhaps I was being overly optimistic, but I foresaw an end to the imbroglio. Seven weeks later, however, Anatoli was killed on Annapurna, and I realized that I’d begun my conciliatory efforts much too late.

This piece was originally published in 1999 as a postscript to the second paperback edition of Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster.

A Postscript to “Into Thin Air” was originally published in Galleys on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I was sitting at my desk in Seattle, struggling to write a crappy magazine article that would enable me to make an overdue mortgage payment, when the phone rang. The call was from Mark Bryant, the editor of Outside. His voice was animated. Skipping the small talk, he said he’d just read an odd snippet in The New York Times titled “Dying in the Wild, a Hiker Recorded the Terror.” It had been published the previous day — September 13, 1992 — and Bryant couldn’t stop thinking about it. On September 6, according to the Times piece,

a young hiker, stranded by an injury, was found dead at a remote camp in the Alaskan interior. No one is yet certain who he was. But his diary and two notes found at the camp tell a wrenching story of his desperate and progressively futile efforts to survive.

The diary indicates that the man, believed to be an American in his late 20’s or early 30’s, might have been injured in a fall and that he was then stranded at the camp for more than three months. It tells how he tried to save himself by hunting game and eating wild plants while nonetheless getting weaker.

One of his two notes is a plea for help, addressed to anyone who might come upon the camp while the hiker searched the surrounding area for food. The second note bids the world goodbye.

An autopsy at the state coroner’s office in Fairbanks this week found that the man had died of starvation, probably in late July. The authorities discovered among the man’s possessions a name that they believe is his. But they have so far been unable to confirm his identity and, until they do, have declined to disclose the name.

Although the short article raised more questions than it answered, Bryant was captivated by its handful of poignant details. He asked if I’d be willing to investigate the tragedy, write a meaty article about it for Outside, and complete it quickly.

Already behind schedule on other writing assignments, I was stressed-out and feeling overextended. Committing to yet another project — a challenging one, on an exceedingly tight deadline — would add considerably to my misery. But the story about the Alaskan “hiker” resonated for me on a deeply personal level. I agreed to put my other projects on hold and look into it.

The deceased man turned out to be 24-year-old Christopher McCandless, who’d grown up in a Washington D.C. suburb and graduated from Emory University with honors. It quickly became apparent that walking alone into the Alaska wilderness with minimal food and gear had been a very deliberate act — the culmination of a serious quest Chris had been planning for a long time. He wanted to test his inner resources in a meaningful way, without a safety net, in order to gain a better perspective on such weighty matters as authenticity and purpose and his place in the world.

I called Mark Bryant and told him I was all in: I would accept the assignment and do whatever necessary to write an 8,000-word piece by October 21.

Hoping to benefit from whatever insights about Chris’ personality that his family might be able to offer, on October 5, 1992, I mailed a letter to the McCandless’ attorney, in which I explained,

When I was 23 (I’m 38 at present) I, too, set off alone into the Alaskan wilderness for an extended sojourn that baffled and frightened many of my friends and family (I was seeking challenge, I suppose, and some sort of inner peace, and answers to Big Questions) so I identify with Chris to a great extent, and feel like I might know something about why he felt compelled to test himself in such a wild and unforgiving piece of country…. If any of the McCandless family would be willing to chat with me I’d be extremely grateful.

My letter led to an invitation from Chris’ parents, Walt and Billie McCandless, to visit them at their home in Chesapeake Beach, Maryland. When I showed up on their doorstep a few days later, the intensity of their grief gutted me. Despite the weight of their loss, however, they graciously answered all of my many questions.

Walt and Billie hadn’t seen Chris since May 12, 1990, when they’d driven down to Atlanta to attend his graduation from Emory. Following the ceremony, Chris mentioned he would probably spend that summer traveling, and then enroll in law school. Five weeks later, he mailed his parents a copy of his final grades, accompanied by a note thanking them for some graduation gifts. “Not much else is happening, but it’s starting to get real hot and humid down here,” he wrote at the end of the missive. “Say Hi to everyone for me.” These were the last words anyone in the McCandless family would ever receive from him.

Walt and Billie were desperate to learn everything they could about Chris’ activities from the moment he performed his vanishing act until his emaciated remains were discovered in Alaska. Where had he traveled and whom had he met? What had he been thinking? What had he been feeling? Hoping that I might be able to find answers to such questions, they allowed me to examine all the documents and photos that had been recovered after his death. They also urged me to track down anyone he’d met whom I could locate from these materials, and to interview individuals who were important to Chris before his disappearance — especially his 21-year-old sister, Carine, with whom he had an uncommonly close bond.

When I phoned Carine, she was wary, but talked to me for twenty minutes or so. Before she hung up, she provided me with important information for the 8,400-word article I wrote about Chris, titled “Death of an Innocent,” that was published as the cover story in the January 1993 issue of Outside. Although it was well received, the article left me feeling unsatisfied.

In order to meet my deadline, I had to deliver it to the magazine before I’d had time to investigate some tantalizing leads. Important aspects of the mystery remained unresolved, including the cause of Chris’ death, and his reasons for so assiduously avoiding contact with his family after he departed Atlanta in the summer of 1990. I spent the next year conducting further research to fill in these blanks in order to write a book, which was published in January 1996 as Into the Wild.

From my short initial phone conversation with Carine, it had been obvious that she understood Chris better than anyone, perhaps even better than Chris had understood himself. So when I began the research for my book I phoned her again to ask if she would talk to me at greater length. Highly protective of her absent brother, she remained skeptical, but agreed to let me interview her for a couple of hours at her home near Virginia Beach.

Once we started to talk, it turned out there was a lot Carine wanted to tell me, and the allotted two hours stretched into the next day. After deciding she could trust me, she asked me to read some excruciatingly candid letters Chris had written to her — letters she had never shown to anyone, not even her husband or closest friends. As I began to read them I was filled with sadness and admiration for both Chris and Carine. The letters were harrowing. They left little doubt about what drove him to sever his ties with his family. When I eventually got on a plane to fly home to Seattle, I was reeling from what I had learned.

Before Carine shared the letters with me, she asked me not to write about any of the painful family secrets revealed by the letters. I promised that I would abide by her wishes.

It’s not uncommon for sources to ask journalists to keep certain pieces of information confidential or “off the record.” I’d agreed to such requests on several previous occasions. In this instance, my willingness to do so was bolstered by the fact that I shared Carine’s desire to avoid hurting Walt, Billie, and Carine’s six half-siblings from Walt’s first marriage. I thought, moreover, that I could convey what I’d learned from the letters obliquely, between the lines, without violating Carine’s trust. I was confident I could provide enough indirect clues for readers to understand, to no small degree, that Chris’ seemingly inexplicable behavior during the final years of his life was in fact explained by the volatile dynamics of the McCandless family while he was growing up.

Many readers did understand this, as it turned out. But many did not. A lot of people came away from reading Into the Wild without grasping why Chris did what he did. Lacking explicit facts, they concluded that he was self-absorbed, unforgivably cruel to Carine and his parents, mentally ill, and/or suicidal.

These mistaken assumptions troubled Carine. Two decades after her brother’s death, she decided it was time to tell the entire story of his relationship with their parents, plainly and directly, without concealing any of the heartbreaking particulars. Even the most toxic secrets, she’d come to believe, could be robbed of their malevolent power by dragging them from the shadows and exposing them to the light of day.

Thus did Carine decide to write The Wild Truth, which was published in November 2014. It was a courageous act that provides crucial insights about what motivated Chris McCandless to embark upon his fatal Alaskan adventure. I urge anyone who wants to gain a more complete understanding of this perplexing young man to read Carine’s book.

An independent bookseller, AFK Books & Records in Virginia Beach, Virginia (Carine McCandless’ home town), has copies of The Wild Truth signed and/or personalized by Carine for sale online

This post was adapted from the foreword I wrote to The Wild Truth

Into the Wild Light of Day was originally published in Galleys on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

News item: The producers of the proposed Broadway adaptation of “To Kill a Mockingbird” are being sued by the Harper Lee estate. A chief dispute is the updated portrayal of Atticus Finch, who in the first act is presented as a confused, elderly racist.

Scene 1:

Atticus, Scout, and Jem are sitting on the front porch. Atticus wears a hat that says, “Make Maycomb Great Again.”

Scout looks at her father. “Atticus, are you a racist?”

Atticus looks concerned. He takes his glasses off and cleans them with a handkerchief. “I am the least racist person you know! Who told you that?”

Scout shrugs. “Some kids at school said you was defending Bob Ewell in that big trial that’s coming up.”

“The Ewells….” says Atticus. “Incredible people. The things they do with denim. So stylish.”

“I think Mayella’s hot!” says Jem.

“Attaboy,” says Atticus.

“But Atticus, aren’t the Ewells neo-Nazis? I seen them marching all around with them big ol’ tiki torches.”

“They are some very fine people.”

“What about Tom Robinson, Atticus? Isn’t he some very fine people, too?”

“Peeping Tom! He’s only got one working arm. Got it caught in a cotton gin. Sad. Like this — -” (he imitates Tom Robinson’s disability).

“But Atticus,” protests Scout. “Didn’t you tell us it was a sin? To mock a — -”

“Scout,” says Atticus. “Don’t you have an old tire or something to play with?”

Scene 2: The family is gathered around the supper table.

Atticus: “Who’s this?”

Scout: “This here is our new friend, Dill. He’s precocious!”

Dill: “Salutations, Mr. Finch. It is indeed a pleasure to make your storied acquaintance!”

Atticus, darkening: “I don’t want this kid serving in the military.”

Scout: “In the — what? Cause why, you think he’s one a them — -”

Atticus: “Transgenders. Sorry. Our military must be focused on victory!”

Scout: “Attticus, he’s way too young to know if he’s a — ”

Dill: “Actually — -”

Scene 3: Scout is getting ready for sleep.

Scout: “Atticus, do you think Robert Mueller really comes and looks in my window at night? This afternoon when we were over by the FBI building Jem testified that-”

“Why don’t we talk about something to help you get to sleep, Scout? Like the plastic surgery you’re going to have. ”

“Atticus I don’t want no stupid ol’plastic surgery. I’m only six years old!”

“Don’t put yourself down, Scout. When you put on your little overalls, I’m like, rrrarrrow!”

Scout looks thoughtful.

There is a knock on the door. “Hel-lo-oo?” A woman enters the room.

“Hello, Stormy!” says Atticus. “Say hello to Stormy, Scout.”

“Hello Miss Daniels.”

“Why hello, Miss Jean Louise. Atticus, there’s — -uh — a rabid dawg outside I need you to shoot!”

Atticus heads outside with Stormy and an assault rifle. “Hate dogs,” he says.

Scene 4: The courthouse.

Chuck Schumer is cross-examining Atticus in the witness stand.

“Mr. Finch,” he says. “According to your testimony, you had a meeting with the Russians in order to — what was it again?”

“To bust up a chifferobe,” says Atticus.

“I see. And what exactly is a chifferobe?”

“Furniture. Incredible furniture. Also makes great firewood. It’s fantastic.”

Schumer rolls his eyes, hard. “I have no further use for this witness. Mr. Finch, you are impeached. I mean, excused.”

Atticus goes back to his seat. Schumer looks at the Republican members of the House.

“Gentlemen,” he says. “I am confident that you will review without passion the evidence you have heard, come to a decision, and restore this country to normal. In the name of God, do your duty.”

(Republican House members laugh, like they have just heard something very funny.)

Scene 5: a creepy wooded area.

Scout and Jem are walking through a dark forest. Scout is dressed like a ham.

Scout (voice over): “This night my mind was filled with Inauguration Day — there was to be a pageant representing our father’s favorite foods.

“Thus began our longest journey together.”

Scout: “I sure feel like a big ol’ fool wearing this ham costume!”

Jem stops and looks back. He says, “I thought I heard something.”

Scout: “I didn’t hear anyth — -”

A shadowy figure jumps out of the dark. Jem screams. Scout has a hard time seeing what’s going on through the mustard on her costume.

Then someone is carrying Jem back to the house.

Scene 6: Finch house.

Jeff Sessions is trying to figure out what happened. “Can you identify the person who saved you, Miss Jean Louise?”

“Why there he is,” she says, pointing to a figure standing behind the door. “Hey Moo.”

Robert Mueller looks a little pale from the many months he has spent deprived of sunlight. But he sits down with Scout.

Scout: “Moo was our neighbor. He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a knife. And our country back. One time, Atticus said, you never really knew a man until you played golf with him on one of his properties. Just reading all the indictments at the Muller porch was enough.

“The investigation that had begun so long ago had ended. And Robert Mueller had come out! I was to think of these days many times. Of Sean Spicer, and Omarosa, and the Mooch, and Tillerson, and Sloppy Steve.

“And Atticus. He would be in Stormy Daniel’s room all night. And he was there when Stormy Daniels waked up in the morning.”

To Mock a Trumpingbird was originally published in Galleys on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“Some people live to see other people fail, and that’s sad,” the young man wrote. “Find some joy, folks.”

He is DeRay McKesson, civil rights activist, a force in the Black Lives Matter movement, and the founder of Campaign Zero, an initiative to end police violence.

“That’s painfully true,” the older woman tweeted in response. “I guess joy just takes more vulnerability than cruelty.”

She’s Brene Brown, research professor at the University of Houston, a social worker and author.

That initial Twitter exchange, which took place in August of 2016, swiftly evolved into a complex (and viral) conversation about race, vulnerability and privilege between two strangers: a young black man, a middle-aged white woman.

On February first of this year — the first day of Black History Month — they met in person for the first time in the nave of the Riverside Church, on the exact spot where 50 years earlier the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had delivered his “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” speech. 2100 audience members listened in, along with over 10,000 others streaming the event live. The evening, called “The Courage to Show Up,” addressed the emotionally charged — and necessary — question: can white and black people learn how to talk to each other in the current atmosphere of distrust? More importantly, how can we learn how to listen — really listen — to one another?

Here are a few takeaways from this remarkable evening:

• Pessimism is seductive. Online, and in real life, the easiest — and frequently, the most obvious — response to the world we now live in is cynicism. It’s not hard to look around and find cause for pessimism: there are times when it’s all we can do not to stare at the television, or our devices, with an expression of slack-jawed despair. Tearing other people down has become our default mode — whether it’s because we believe that others’ actions are evil, or perhaps just because we feel they are trying to do good ineptly. “Feeling joy,” said Brown, “demands vulnerability. Pessimism is safe.” But how brave, she asked, is it to be cynical? Is not holding joy in the face of despair an act of courage?

• People who have privilege are often blind to it. The very word “privilege” triggers defensiveness among white people — and conversations about privilege can swiftly morph into a speech about striving and hard work, about how, in the words of Richard Nixon, “I worked for every penny I’ve got.” White people discount the role that whiteness may have played in their success. It is deeply awkward to admit that one’s own hard work — as noble or innovative as it may have been — was not the only element in one’s success story. But how do we get people to see a thing that is invisible to them? How do we get people to participate in a process that can feel like an invitation to shame?

• Shame and guilt are different things. Guilt means “I did something bad.” Shame means “I am something bad.” When confronted with evidence of racism’s pervasion, white people are swift to note that they themselves, for instance, never owned any slaves, seeing this as proof that, as our President claims, “I am the least racist person you will ever meet.”

But white people can (and must) accept their complicity in the system of injustice that slavery engendered. And we can (and must) also understand that we can work to undo that injustice. White America may be guilty of the original sin of slavery, but the proper response to this legacy is not shame, but engagement, and work, and a dedication to creating change.

• The antidote to shame is empathy. When people — white and black — speak of their pain or struggle, the proper response is to listen respectfully. “We need to ask better questions,” Brown said, “and to spend more time listening than talking.” This, instead of swiftly reacting with dismissal, or argument, or defensiveness.

• And finally, shame is not a tool for justice. The rage that so many of us — black and white — feel right now is a great catalyst for change, but, as Brown said, “it makes for a lousy life companion.” But the opposite of rage — joy — is hard to sustain, not only because the world around us is so abundant with injustice, but also because to be joyful means, in the same moment, to fear its loss. “We’re fighting not only for the absence of oppression,” Mckesson observed, “but also for the presence of justice and joy.”

The conversation, originally slated for an hour and a half, went on for nearly two — and even after the event, there were Mckesson and Brown still on stage talking quietly to each other. It struck me, as I headed out into the cold night, how incredibly thirsty we are for these conversations, how terribly frustrated we are that we have lost our ability to understand one another.

But we can do it. How? By acknowledging privilege; by finding the courage to express our joy, in all its vulnerability; and by cultivating the skill to listen with the same passion with which we hope to be heard.

The Courage to Show Up was originally published in Galleys on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Ralph James Savarese is the author of Reasonable People: A Memoir of Autism and Adoption. He lives in Grinnell, Iowa, where he is associate professor of English at Grinnell College. This conversation with Jennifer Finney Boylan took place in 2011 as part of Jenny’s book on the diversity of families, Stuck in the Middle with You.

Jennifer Finney Boylan: Your son is one of the first nonspeaking autistic people to go to college — Oberlin, in fact. Tell me the story of how he took the SATs.

Ralph James Savarese: It was the ACTs, actually. Because he’s a nonspeaking person with autism whose senses are poorly integrated, a person who can’t always locate his body in space and who has great difficulty with fine motor activities, we had to negotiate with the testing service to have each multiple-choice answer bank enlarged so that he could point independently and unambiguously at the answer.

He consumed two-thirds of the extended test time besieged by anxiety; he knew that the test would have a great impact on his future. When at last he stopped fidgeting and compulsively sharpening pencils, he moved through the questions rapidly. By February of the following year, he was accepted early decision at Oberlin College.

So love your kid. Make it a little bit less about you, and you’ll be able to relax about who he or she is.

JFB: So let’s back up ten or twelve years. How did DJ come into your family? How did you come to adopt him?

RJS: My wife, Emily, was the assistant director of the Center for Autism and Related Disabilities at the University of Florida. In that capacity, she had begun to work with DJ. One night he and his sister were found on the street looking for food. DJ was about three and a half years old, his sister four and a half. The kids were taken from their mother, who had serious drug and alcohol issues. The sister went to live with their mother’s sister, and DJ, who was already in a five-day residency program at the hospital, went to live with a foster parent on the weekends.

A few weeks into his foster placement, Emily asked if I would play with him. He really wasn’t doing well, she said.

The first time I met my son, he grabbed the pointer finger of my right hand, took me to the couch, and started banging his head against my head — not hard, but not soft either. In the background Emily was mouthing, “Go with it,” because she’d never seen him reach out to somebody.

We performed this bighorn ritual for twenty or thirty minutes.

Years later, when he was literate, DJ explained, “Dad, I was trying to say hello.” The pressure of his head on my forehead had allowed him to take me in.

The sensory stuff in his kind of autism is just overwhelming. After the adoption, I remember trying to wash his hair. He screamed at the top of his lungs. His scalp was incredibly hypersensitive. And yet he could swallow Tabasco sauce as if it were water.

The notion that I would father an autistic child, I mean, fatherhood? Are you kidding me?

JFB: So how did you go from a moment where you’re first encountering this child to thinking, We should make DJ part of our lives; we should be his parents?

RJS: One night — it was Emily’s birthday — we received a call from the Department of Children and Families saying that DJ had been terribly injured. DJ’s caseworker asked if we could come to the hospital because they weren’t legally allowed to ask the birth mother to the hospital, and the foster mother was under investigation.

I should say that Emily and I had just taught DJ his first communicative gesture: the American Sign Language sign for more. I would tickle him, make the sign for more by bringing the first three fingers on each hand together, and wait to see if he could copy me. One day, after much repetition, he did. He thought it was hilarious that by putting his fingers together he could get me to tickle him.

So we went to the emergency room and there’s this little boy, unbelievably bruised. His ear had been kicked inside his head; his ribs were black and blue. Somebody had savagely attacked him.

He looked up — he was making high-pitched gerbil sounds that I don’t ever want to hear again — and, seeing me, he made the sign for more. He wanted to be tickled. He wanted, I think, some kind of normalcy in the midst of his horror, and he wouldn’t calm down until I tickled him. Later, I realized that he wanted more of us, indeed more from us.

A month shy of his sixth birthday, DJ came to live with Emily and me.

JFB: Now I know this is a painful question, but could you talk about what DJ’s life was like before the age of three?

RJS: His birth mom was very poor. Her husband had left her. She had very serious drug and alcohol problems, was perpetually homeless or living in very, very subpar housing and was working on and off as a prostitute. I mean it’s difficult to speak about because — when DJ was attacked in foster care, it later became apparent that he had been sexually abused as well.

JFB: Had you always wanted to be a father? Or had you decided — long before that moment when DJ banged his forehead against yours — that being a parent was not for you?

RJS: I had, and still have, a terrible relationship with my own father. I was pretty convinced that I didn’t want to have children. The notion that I would father an autistic child, I mean, fatherhood? Are you kidding me?

JFB: And yet suddenly you’re the father of a severely autistic boy. How did you figure out what to do?

RJS: First of all, my wife is absolutely amazing. She knows a ton about autism, but more than that, she’s got a kind of Buddhist, still-water-runs-deep kind of calm. Having her model a way to act with DJ was really, really important.

Let me be clear: this is the hardest thing I have ever done. It’s been incredibly demanding; it’s involved enormous sacrifices. But it’s also been the richest thing.

DJ has had a life, and that life sustains us.

JFB: He’s had a life because of you.

RJS: I don’t want to sound like some sort of super-good person; I’m radically imperfect. But sometimes I think about where DJ would be now if we hadn’t adopted him. I think about all of the kids our society writes off as having no potential or as being unworthy of love.

Last June my son graduated with highest honors from Grinnell High School and is now off to Oberlin; at six he had been labeled profoundly retarded.

JFB: How did you teach him language?

RJS: Imagine a sentence in which every word has Velcro on the back and a word bank to the right of the sentence. Emily would start very, very simply with a picture of a car — a yellow car — whose caption read, “The man got into the _________ car.” The word bank would contain the words yellow, red, and green. Emily would pick up the word yellow and place it in the blank, pointing at the photograph and modeling both the cognitive and motor actions. She would then have DJ do this. Every object in our house had a photograph, a computer icon, an American Sign Language sign, and a word attached to it. We wanted to immerse DJ in a signifying universe. To say that it was slow going would be an understatement.

But when he finally cracked the code of reading in the third grade, he moved like lightning. Later, he said that the feeling of picking up the Velcro-backed word and palpably putting it into the sentence helped him.

JFB: Could you tell the story of the trampoline?

RJS: We began to sense the degree to which DJ seemed to learn more quickly if he was in motion. I convinced Emily to buy a fourteen-foot trampoline with a netted enclosure. First and foremost, it was a way to wordlessly bond with him and, frankly, to tire him out so that he would sleep at night. Later, we would tie words to the netted enclosure and really make the jumping an affect-laden, cognitive learning activity.

I ended up building an indoor trampoline house after we moved to Iowa, where the trampoline is level with the floor. It’s a six-hundred-square-foot building heated by a woodstove. We jumped every single day, all through the winter.

There’s a karaoke machine, which of course has words on it, and we would sing the songs while jumping and try to get DJ at least to hum them. To this day, he talks of how important that was.

Something about the regular rhythmic bouncing, the proprioceptive input the trampoline gives his body, stabilizes or calms the sensory distortion. It’s as if he were catching a performance-enhancing ride — a taxi — with rhythm.

JFB: So tell me about when DJ began to use the computer to type out words and to express himself that way.

RJS: The first real breakthrough came when he was reading Jack and the Beanstalk at school. DJ had a label-making machine that he used for worksheets, and on this worksheet he encountered an open-ended question about the story’s conclusion: “What are Jack and his mother thinking?” To our everlasting shock, he typed, Where a Dad?

He was clearly using the story to ask a profound question about his birth family. And then he started getting the hang of grammar, of word choice — all of those things.

I remember DJ’s answer to the question “What is a pyramid?” A sand triangle, he typed. “What is a mausoleum?” Dead people live there.

Later, text-to-speech software gave him a sense of empowerment. He could now contribute to class discussions. It empowered him to say, “Maybe I can learn to speak.”

JFB: And he did it simply by typing with one finger, right?

RJS: One finger. Interestingly enough, I typed the book that I wrote about DJ, Reasonable People, with one finger — all 496 pages of it! I just sensed that I’d be closer to his way of seeing the world.

JFB: One of DJ’s favorite expressions is easy breathing, which reminds me of a line from Keats, from that poem “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.” That phrase came out of a stressful situation, if I remember right?

RJS: He loves the phrase easy breathing because he has lots and lots of anxiety — in part from his autism and in part from his childhood trauma. And, I must say, in part from living in a terribly stigmatizing world. It’s a big deal to try to stay calm.

His philosophy of life can be summed up by a memorable line from the sixth grade: “Reasonable people promote very, very easy breathing.” He’s sort of like an anxiety seismograph.

I remember at one point he was having some dental work done, and he had been anesthetized. He seemed to wake up very, very slowly and it was making me nervous. When he was half or three-quarters awake, he typed out on the labeler, “Easy breathing forever.” It took being anesthetized for this boy to feel at peace!

JFB: How will your life change when DJ goes to college?

RJS: I don’t think I fully appreciated until now how much I enjoy hanging out with him, conversing with him, hearing his little autistic chorus in the background. I am going to miss him terribly. We’re very close.

DJ loved the fact that Oberlin admitted the first female and African-American students in the U.S. He wanted to be its first nonspeaking student — and the first nonspeaking student anywhere to live in the dorms. He worked like crazy to get into this school, and so we said, let’s figure out how to do it.

Look at what this kid has shown is possible.

When Dr. Sanjay Gupta asked him in an interview on CNN, “Should autism be treated?” DJ had the presence of mind, and media savvy, to type out, “Yes, treated with respect.”

JFB: What advice would you give to dads out there in the broad world? What do you know now that you wish you had known before?

RJS: Love your kid for who he or she is. Build self-esteem.

It’s pretty common for the parents of newly diagnosed autistic kids to go through a grieving process. I tell them: Don’t waste time. Your culture has taught you to believe that autism is devastating and that you’ll never get the love you want as a parent.

For Father’s Day some ten years ago — I still have the card on my desk — DJ typed:

Dear Dad,

You are the dad I awesomely try to be loved by. Please don’t hear my years of hurt. Until you yearned to be my dad, playing was treated as too hard. Until you loved me, I loved only myself. You taught me how to play. You taught me how to love. I love you.

Your Son, DJ Savarese

If I had remained attached to normalcy, I would have missed the richness that comes in another form. So love your kid. Make it a little bit less about you, and you’ll be able to relax about who he or she is.

And have easy breathing forever.

Easy Breathing: How my Autistic Son Taught Me How to Live was originally published in Galleys on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Later on, in graduate school, I read an anthropological paper on corporal discipline in different societies. The theory of the paper was that warlike societies punished children violently, and this in itself made them both more violent and more suited to a life where physical combat was probable. What I considered child abuse was in fact preparation for a life I could barely imagine.

This fascinated me, this idea that something our society might consider abhorrent would be considered normal, and even necessary, in another culture. I happened upon another, older article describing how young boys in an African tribe were expected to sexually service the older boys, and that this was considered beneficial for both. My professor discussed a South Pacific society where fathers were expected to have intercourse with their daughters, to “prepare them for their husbands.”

I began wondering what it would be like to grow up experiencing culturally sanctioned abuse. What would the children be like? How would they tolerate this abuse, especially given the fact that all of their peers were tolerating it too? What reactions are so ingrained in our consciousness — that no matter our cultural upbringing — that a certain type of adverse childhood experience would lead to similar human responses?

What happens when the unthinkable becomes the everyday?

The below is an excerpt from Jennie Melamed’s debut novel, Gather the Daughters (on sale July 25, 2017).

Chapter twenty-five

Caitlin

At night, Caitlin has trouble finding a comfortable place to rest. The summer bruises are fading but still sore, and the autumn bruises — finger-sized, handprints, straight-out blows — are blossoming like rot- ten ivy across her body. She knows Father doesn’t really beat her, he’s just getting rid of all the tension that built up over the summer, but she wishes he’d let her sleep more. Mother gives him a double serving of pungent mash-wine every night at dinner, and Caitlin knows she’s trying to make him slumber through the night. A small part of her glows at this exhibition of love.

She’s dozing off after an exhausting evening when she hears tap- ping on her window. Jerking awake, Caitlin thinks for a moment that it’s spring, almost summer, and Rosie is tossing pebbles at her window. She blinks, and it’s autumn again and she has no clue why anyone out- side would want her, but the thought of Father waking fills her with panic. Rushing to the window, Caitlin opens it quietly. There’s Rosie, perched on her roof.

Caitlin scoots down toward her across the dry, flaking shingle. “Rosie. What is it?”

“We’re all supposed to meet at the church.”

Caitlin stares at her, trying to decide if she’s dreaming. She looks upward to a clear, cold sky striped with alabaster stars.

“Well?” says Rosie. “Do you want to go together?”

“Why would we go to the church?” asks Caitlin carefully, as if Rosie is raving.

Rosie shrugs. “Linda told me about it. Janey wants us all there at midnight.”

“Who’s us?” “The girls. The older ones, anyway.” “Why?” “Do I look like Mary? I don’t know why Janey does what she does.” “Well, I don’t have a clock in my room. The only one is

downstairs.” Rosie rolls her eyes. “Go watch it, then. I’ll watch mine too. I’ll

wait for you a little before midnight.” “Do you know what time it is now?” “About eleven.” “Okay,” says Caitlin slowly. “Are you playing a trick on me?” Rosie’s face darkens. “That would be a stupid trick!” Caitlin can’t

tell if Rosie is offended at being accused of lying or of playing an infe- rior prank.

“Well, I’ll try to get downstairs. If Mother or Father wakes up, I won’t be able to go.”

“I was scared your father was in there with you. He’s so scary. Lots of girls won’t be able to go. Make sure he doesn’t come to your room and find you missing.”

“How do I do that?” Caitlin asks.

“I don’t know. I don’t know everything. Why don’t you just sit there and count out fifty minutes by seconds.”

And so Caitlin goes back into her bedroom, kneels on her scratchy bed, and does just that. She counts too fast; when she creeps down- stairs to look at the clock, it’s only eleven thirty-five. She sits, ner- vously staring at the clock, watching the hand slowly creep toward midnight, worried that Father forgot to wind it and she’ll miss the whole thing. Eventually she can’t take it anymore, and she rushes out- side. Rosie is waiting in the cold, shifting her weight from foot to foot on the frosty ground. It’s a full moon, and Caitlin can see the outline of Rosie’s thin body through her illuminated nightgown.

“You’re late,” says Rosie. “We have to hurry.” She reaches out and grabs Caitlin’s hand. Surprised and pleased by the strong hand grip- ping hers, Caitlin starts running with Rosie beside her. Their panting breath fogs, and Caitlin giggles at how cold her feet are on the stiff mud and wet, shining grass. Rosie remembered shoes, but they’re too big, and she keeps losing one and then rushing back to claim it.

They hear other footsteps and slow down to see three girls jogging toward them.

“Do you know what’s going on?” Natalie Saul hisses. “I heard Janey wants us in the church.”

“I don’t know,” says Rosie, and Caitlin shrugs in agreement.

“This is all a trick,” says Linda Gideon as they hurry along together. “There’s going to be a bunch of boys there, and they’re going to laugh at us.”

“I don’t think so,” says Alma Joseph. “Janey would find out and beat them up.”

When they arrive at the church, there’s a small group of girls gath- ered around the entrance who hail the newcomers with relief, hoping vainly for further intelligence.

“I’m not going into that dark church,” says Letty firmly. “Me either,” says Rosie. “Something might be in there.” “What if there’s something waiting to eat us?” pipes up Joanne

Balthazar, who’s only five. Her sister brought her along. “We’re not going into the dark,” says Rosie decisively. “We can

wait here for a while and then leave if nothing happens.” “My toes feel like they’re going to fall off,” says Violet Balthazar. “We can throw them down the stairs for the monster,” giggles

Letty, and the rest of the group laughs nervously. “Look,” says Ophelia Adam, pointing, but they all see it at the

same time. There’s a faint tawny glow coming from inside the church, illuminating the windows and seeping out through the door.

“There’s somebody in there,” says Linda.

“Or something,” replies Natalie. The glow grows brighter. There are more girls gathered around the doorway now.

“Someone’s lighting candles,” says Nina Joseph. “I can see them through that window.”

Rosie pokes Caitlin in the side. “You go first.” Caitlin shakes her head rapidly, backing up a little in case Rosie decides to push her down the stairs.

“I’ll go,” says Vanessa Adam, looking annoyed. Playing with the end of her braid, she peers into the doorway and then takes a few hes- itant steps down. “It’s all right. It’s Mary and Janey,” she calls back. “Nina’s right. They’re lighting candles.”

Confident that Janey and Mary wouldn’t be lighting candles if they were fighting a monster, the girls tumble down the steps and into the church. Empty and shadowed, it looks cavernous compared to its famil- iar state, replete with worshippers and dim daylight. The orange glow of the candles lends light to the room, if not warmth. Mary is sitting calmly next to the altar, her shimmering dark hair loose around her shoulders. At her feet is Janey, looking impatient and twisting her fingers together.

“What is it?” cries Gina Abraham excitedly. “What are we doing?”

“I wanted to talk about…important things,” Janey says. “Forbid- den things. I didn’t know how else to get us together without some adult looking on.”

The girls glance around at one another as the silence lengthens and they wait for her to say more. Then Mary says, “Go on, get behind the altar.”

Janey rolls her eyes. “I’m not Pastor Saul,” she says.

“What?” calls a girl from the back, and then more softly, “What did she say?”

“See,” says Mary. “We’ll hear you better if you’re higher up.” “But it’s stupid,” says Janey. “If you have something to say,” says Vanessa, “and you want us all to hear it…”

Janey unfolds her spindly body and walks up to the altar, almost as tall as the pastor but slender as a blade of grass. When she speaks from behind the podium, her faint voice is suddenly strong and echo- ing. With a start, Caitlin wonders if Pastor Saul’s sermons are really deep and thundering, his voice driven by otherworldly power, or if it’s simply a result of the way the church is structured. Janey coughs. “I . . . thank you for coming here. I just wanted to — I was talking with someone before she died. And she was talking about leaving the is- land. Maybe going to the wastelands, but I thought, maybe there’s another island. Another island to go to.”

A voice whispers, “What does she mean?”

“What I mean is what if we’re not the only one? If you can go on an island and avoid the scourge, surely others did too.”

Caitlin thinks of another island, perhaps with a similar church, perhaps with a red-haired girl admonishing the others at midnight.

“I mean, the world is big, right?” Janey asks. Caitlin sees Vanessa, who knows all about the world, nodding.

“Mr. Abraham showed us on a map,” says Letty. “He said the is- land wasn’t on it, but told us where we were.”

“And for all we know, there’s more world, not even on that map.”

There’s silence as everyone ponders this uncharted world. The lit- tlest girls, already bored, have started a game to see who can jump the farthest. Cheers and whoops carry from one corner of the room, pro- viding a jarring score to Janey’s words.

“But Pastor Saul says that everyone else got stuck in the war,” pipes up Wendy Balthazar.

“Well, what if he doesn’t know everything about the entire world?” snaps Janey. “He’s a pastor, not an ancestor. Or God.”

Wendy shakes her head at her sister to indicate her disapproval of Janey’s comment.

“Why would we be the only ones to escape the war?” Janey con- tinues. “What’s so special about us?”

“The ancestors,” Nina says. “They had foresight.”

“Well, maybe other people’s ancestors had foresight.”

There’s a collective gasp, and then a mutter. The ancestors aren’t just ancestors, they’re the ancestors, chosen by God to start a new so- ciety. Janey slams her fist into the altar so hard that Caitlin wonders if she’s dented it. “Are you seriously saying it couldn’t ever happen anywhere else?” she asks. “That it’s impossible anyone else might have survived?”

“She’s right,” says Vanessa. The others quiet and turn to her. “There must be pockets of people somewhere, on islands, in valleys…places where the scourge didn’t reach, or didn’t reach as badly. I mean, we can’t be sure, but it wouldn’t make sense for us to be the only ones.” Caitlin isn’t sure what a valley is, but she trusts Vanessa.

“It doesn’t have to make sense,” says Paula Abraham nastily. “It’s the ancestors. And God.”

“Other islands,” continues Vanessa as if Paula hadn’t spoken, “and they might be completely different.”

“What do you mean?” asks Fiona. “Different how?”

“However you like,” says Vanessa thoughtfully. “It depends on where they are. Different plants and animals and weather. Hotter, colder. Different trees, or no trees.”

“What do they carve out of, then?” demands Paula.

“I don’t know, I don’t live there,” Vanessa replies, and everyone laughs.

“What if on that island, it never gets warm enough for a summer?” asks Letty, and someone else says, “What if there aren’t any dogs or cats?”

“What if women wear pants and men wear dresses?” says Fiona, and everyone laughs louder.

“What if nobody ever gets married, or knows who their father is?” says Millie Abraham.

“What if there aren’t any men at all?” says Wendy. “Then there’d be no babies,” answers another voice. “What if,” says Lana Aaron, who is only six but more alert than her shrieking, tumbling counterparts, “what if the children are head of the family, and the parents have to do what they say?”

“What if they’re all defectives, and they all live in one big defective family?”

“This isn’t time for storytelling,” insists Janey, although the ideas keep whizzing through the air, each girl eager to add her own. “This is a time to ask serious questions.” Her voice becomes louder. “If there are other islands, where things are done differently, can we go there? Or can we change things here?”

There is a blank silence. “Change what?” ventures Nina.

“Change anything. Not just dogs and dresses. Change things that matter.”

Another silence, and then a few girls turn to mutter to one an- other. “Like what?” asks Nina again.

Janey sighs. “If you could change anything about the island, what would it be?”

There’s a pause. “More cookies,” someone whispers, and a trail of giggles blows through the group like wind on grass.

“Think about it,” says Janey, slamming her hand into the altar again. “What if we didn’t have to get married? What if we didn’t have to obey our fathers?” A spark in her eyes. “What if we could make it like summer all the time? Wouldn’t you like that?”

The silence this time is full of doubt. “But,” says Fiona, “what about the ancestors?” “What about them?” demands Janey. “Well,” says Fiona, as if explaining something to a very small child,

“we live this way because the ancestors tell us to. So we don’t fall to the darkness below.”

“But then,” says Vanessa, over another girl who is trying to speak, “what’s the use of thinking about it? What if we didn’t have to obey our fathers? That would be nice, but the truth is that we have fathers and they make us obey them — with their fists if they need to.” Caitlin can feel everyone’s eyes on her and wishes she would shrink into the ground.

This excerpt is provided by Little, Brown and Company. Copyright © 2017 by Jennie Melamed. All rights reserved.

Exploring a Cultish Culture: the behind-the-book story of Gather the Daughters, by Jennie Melamed was originally published in Galleys on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.