Wyoming author Alexandra Fuller follows up her best-selling memoir, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, with a beautifully written story of friendship and war.

Returning to her childhood home in Zambia a few years ago, Fuller formed an unlikely bond with a lonely Rhodesian War veteran, a white man who she only identifies as "K." He "looked like his own self-sufficient, debt-free, little nation," she writes. ". . . As if he owned the ground beneath his feet, and as if the sky balanced with ease on his shoulders. He looked cathedral."

In a quest to understand what made K who he was, Fuller convinced him to return with her to Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) and Mozambique, the battlefields of his troubled past. She then documented their strange journey in Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier.

Fuller is at her prosaic best here. Her rich and distinct dialect resonates from the first page of this book, as does the hardship of the African people.

"Because it is the land that grew me, and because they are my people, I sometimes forget to be astonished by Africans," the author writes.

"But I was astonished, almost to death, when I met K. For a start, K was not what I expected to see here. Not here, where the elevation rises just a few feet above ennui and where even the Goba people - the people who are indigenous to this area - look displaced by their own homes, like refugees who are trying to flee their place of refuge. And where the Tonga people - the nation that was shifted here in the 1950s, when the colonial government flooded them out of their ancestral valley to create Lake Kariba - look unrequitedly vengeful and correspondingly despondent. And where everyone else looks like refugee workers; sweat-drained, drunk, malarial, hungover, tragic, recently assaulted."

In addition to the brutal nature of the land, this part of Africa has been ravaged by man-made bloodshed for decades. Yet few in the U.S. recall the horrific details of the Rhodesian War, which raged from 1972 to 1979.

During the conflict, white-led government forces, for which K fought, battled black guerrillas. Fuller explains that the blacks were fighting for the "freedom to vote, to own land, to receive a good and equitable education, and to walk the streets of their own country without fear."

Both sides were guilty of atrocities, and by the time a truce was called, an estimated 20,350 war-related deaths had been documented.

K did his share of the killing and was "still tortured, angry, aggressive and lost" because of it. When the local barkeep notes that K doesn't drink, someone else points out that it's a good thing, since the man with such a domineering presence is "a violent enough teetotaler."

However, it wasn't just the war that created K and others like him. As Fuller notes, "K is what happened when you grew a child from the African soil, taught him an attitude of superiority, persecution, and paranoia, and then gave him a gun and sent him to war in a world he thought of as his own to defend. And when the cease-fire was called and suddenly K was remaindered, there was no way to undo him. And there was no way to undo the vow of every soldier who had knelt on this soil and let his tears mix with the spilled blood of his comrade and who had promised that he would never forget to hate the man - and every man who looked like him - who took the life of his brother."

Although K claims to love all people now, his prejudices are still evident in the derogatory terms he uses to describe those who are not like him. He also says he did what he had to during the war to stay alive.

"Look, the life I've lived . . . I wouldn't be here . . . you might not be here - a lot of people might not be here - if I, if we, couldn't (kill) people faster than they could (kill) us," K tells Fuller early in their friendship. "I was good at what I did. . . . It was my job. I did it . . . I'm sorry."

K, a born-again Christian, seems sorry about many of his choices during the war, despite his attempts to justify his actions.

While describing in great detail how he forced a woman to tell him where rebel fighters were hiding by pouring hot porridge into her genitals, K becomes overwhelmed by the savagery he committed.

"Why? Why did I have to do that? I had the knowledge and the skills and the ability to find the gooks," he says. "I could have smelled them out. All I had to do is walk out of that village and start walking in ever increasing circles and I would have found them . . . That's what I should have done. I should have walked away from her . . . I didn't need to do that to her. I was an animal."

This walk down memory lane uncovers old, festering wounds for both K and Fuller, who was a child living in Rhodesia during the fighting. Both physically and emotionally it was a dangerous path to take.

"I own this now," Fuller admits after hearing K's gruesome tale of torture that eventually led to his victim's death.

"This was my war too. I was a small, smug white girl shouting, 'We are all Rhodesians and we'll fight through thickandthin.' I am every bit that woman's murderer . . . I said (to K), 'I had no idea . . .' But I did. I knew, without really being told out loud, what happened in the war and I knew it was as brutal and indefensible as what I had just heard from K. I just hadn't wanted to know."

As much as Scribbling the Cat focuses on K and Fuller, the importance of this book lies in the messages it delivers about the evils of war.

"What is important isn't K himself, or me myself, or . . . the whole chaotic, poetic mess of people that turned this journey of curiosity into an exploration of life and death and the fear of living and dying and the difficulty of separating love and judgment from passion and duty," Fuller explains in her author's note.

"What is important is the story. Because when we are all dust and teeth and kicked-up bits of skins - when we're dancing with our own skeletons - our words might be all that's left of us."

Karen Algeo Krizman is a freelance writer living in Littleton.

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