This journey through the Central American wars of the 1980s is seen through the eyes of a young American who worked on both sides of insurgency in the region: in El Salvador he supported efforts to defeat insurgents; with Nicaraguans he worked to keep an insurgency alive. Bill Meara started out as a teacher at a Catholic school in Guatemala, but went on to become one of the fifty-five U.S. military advisors assisting the Salvadorans in their fight against communism. By the end of the decade, he was in the U.S. Foreign Service working as a liaison officer to the Nicaraguan contras. One of very...