THIS WAY TO HEAVEN

A young American soldier lives a nightmare in this brutal story set in war-torn Bosnia. On duty with the UN peace-keeping forces, Lieutenant Robert Jackson commits an essentially decent but drastically illegal act that changes his life forever. He deserts—out of empathy for a people who, he feels, have been betrayed: no weapons, no help of any kind from any source offered the beleaguered Bosnian Muslims, who thus face the marauding Serbs (and "ethnic cleansing"): broomsticks vs. tanks. It's Jackson's meeting with the heroic guerrilla fighter Aleksandar that leads directly to nonstop confrontations with atrocities he can't bear to turn his back on. With Aleksandar's help, he becomes an accomplished gunrunner. Eventually, however, the Serbs catch him and send him to a Dachau-like death camp where escalating horrors are grimly and graphically detailed.

Second-novelist Foley (Measuring Lives, 1996) depicts man's inhumanity to man as so pervasive, so ingrained, that the only viable reactions are disbelief or despair. Too much of a bad thing.