The stories about Marla Ruzicka, the young activist who was killed in Iraq recently, have been haunting me of late. You see, while we can shake our heads about what a sorry mess our country has made of Iraq, and point to the fact that we voted for the other guy, very few of us can actually say we've done something to repent for our country's sins.

For 13 years, I've been sitting on that novel that I've always intended to write, the one that, really, when I think about it, got me interested in novel writing to begin with. In 1993, I spent two months in the country of El Salvador, which had just had it's first peaceful elections after ten years of civil war. I went to a village called Santa Marta, which had just been resettled by Salvadoran refugees returning from Honduras. The project that I worked on was precisely the project that Marla was working on in Iraq, to count the dead. I went door-to-door and asked people about their family members who had died in the U.S.-funded war against the Salvadoran guerrilas.

I'm not patting my back about this. I was young and naive; and I didn't have the pluck or the organizational skills of someone like Marla. My count turned into a comedy (or tragedy, I should say) of errors, and nothing came of it. But I've always felt that this was the novel that got away, the one that I just didn't have the tenacity to write.

I suppose there's still time. The dead--may we never forget the one's who were brave and true.