Several years ago, in Sierra Leone, a rebel group calling itself the Revolutionary United Front launched an offensive that overran most of the country in a matter of days. The RUF was backed by Charles Taylor's rogue government in Liberia and funded by illegal diamond mining in the eastern part of the country—a story I'd been sent to cover for an American magazine.

At the time I was up-country in the government-held town of Kenema, with no way to get out. Fortunately, I was stranded with dozens of Lebanese expatriates who lived in Kenema but held U.K. passports, and the British government had no choice but to rescue us. Two Chinook helicopters filled with British paratroopers landed outside Kenema, gathered us all up and flew back to the capital, Freetown. I decided to skip an evacuation flight out of the country and stayed on in the capital to see what would happen next.

The last time the RUF had occupied Freetown, in 1999, they'd massacred thousands of civilians and set up checkpoints where they methodically chopped the arms off of everyone they chose not to kill. It looked like the horror show was about to happen again, and the population was in a panic.

I got a ride out to the front lines in a pickup truck filled with bare-chested native fighters called Kamajors. They had ammo belts draped across their chests, and many were strung with amulets and jungle fetishes and little leather packages that were meant to protect them from bullets. We arrived in the small town of Masiaka, which had fallen to a government counterattack hours earlier, and groups of Kamajors were rattling off clips into the watery-blue sky in celebration. After a while an argument broke out between two commanders, and every fighter in the plaza cocked his machine gun and backed up for a firefight that would have killed half of them. I dropped into a drainage ditch and waited for the shooting to start, but miraculously nothing happened...