- There was a young boy perhaps nine years old herding cattle in Kenya. There was no school.
- I saw another boy, this one begging on a street corner in Pattaya, Thailand. This child's head was grotesquely swollen with what looked like hydro-encephalitis. I suspect he had not long to live. I realized later that I did not even try to find a doctor to help him, and that I could have. I could have!
- A young sailor's careless mistake led to a major fire on my ship. Ten good men died, and we were dead in the water for most of a day. The young sailor – I knew him – was not punished, but he had to live with it. He didn't take it well.
- I met a Tibetan girl at an exhibition in Shenzen, China. We talked pleasantly; she was well-educated and had the most beautiful eyes I've ever seen – think Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's, but with even kinder eyes. I was about to go, and on impulse told her that we in the States hear about how China is destroying the Tibetan culture and asked if that was true. She instantly became very nervous, agitated, looking all around to see if there was anyone listening. She saw no one, turned back to me, nodded quickly, and walked away as if she'd never seen me.
- A bar girl sat down across from me in a bar called "The Stoned Crow" in Olongapo City in the Philippines. She pleasantly asked me what I was writing, and I said that I was writing about what I saw. "What do you see?" she asked, and I replied that the people smiled, but they didn't really seem happy. She was quiet for a moment, then her face changed, became covered with hurt and desperation and not a little hate. "Tell them this is hell! Tell them that!" She left, and I did not see her again.
- I saw a shadow on an old wall in Nagasaki, in the outline of an adult human. I also saw what was in the eyes of a few old Japanese men whom I walked by on my way to Ground Zero.
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