A big part of moving (for me, anyway) is a triage operation, rapidly editing all the accumulated paper in my paperless office. Some of it's enjoyable, finally getting shot of that dumb Authorware manual written for the Mac, which is completely useless for an IBM user. Ditto phone books, office supply catalogs, and terrible detective novels vanity-published and warmly autographed by a well-meaning but deranged neighbor lady.

However, leaving town also means leaving people we trust and admire. John and Janice have been real pals, smiling across the cultural divide, welcoming us into their home like soulmates automatically do, without thinking about it. They took the news better than most, saying it's a small world and we'll see each other again, knowing both to be unlikely. In reality, we're sad to call it quits, soon to be separated by twelve time zones and a crowded lifestyle of kids and neighbors and the business of living. Queenie and I have an address book full of people we've loved and laughed with and never saw again. Is this the ultimate truth, the basic and inescapable human condition, to say goodbye?

And how do you say goodbye to a man in body armor, calling by satellite phone from Bosnia?

I helped Chris North to desktop publish his book of poetry, not the best poetry ever written, but important nonetheless. Chris is 36 years old. I met his wife and two kids on a pier last summer, where a bunch of us silly authors set up a canvas tent to hawk self-published booklets about freedom and love. She said her husband wrote poetry in the evenings after work, when the nights are long and his homesickness is often overwhelming. He works in Bosnia, clearing landmines from farmhouses and fields, gets to come home for two weeks every three months -- and poetry seemed to come naturally to him in Bosnia, putting his love and faraway thoughts into amateur verse.

Personally, I detest "posey" rhyming, and I therefore bravely set my teeth in preparation for a painful experience when she hauled a manuscript out of her purse that day on the pier and handed it to me for inspection. (Do all women carry poetry manuscripts around with them, in case they bump into small press publishers? -- apparently so, because I was accosted by eight of them that day.) The evil thing came into my hands and did its work.

Chris North told me the story of landmines.

Here I will say briefly as much as I know.

100 million antipersonnel mines have been deployed. 99 million are still in the ground -- in Cambodia, Angola, lots of places, including Bosnia, where Christopher North leads a team of thirty men who have been sent to pick up a couple hundred thousand of them. It takes a full day for a man to clear an area of ground roughly the size of your living room. It will take Chris and his team of bomb disposal experts about 1000 years to clear their particular patch of rolling countryside in Bosnia. They are not the only team, but Bosnia has 1.2 million landmines to be located and disarmed, so the arithmetic is hopeless, no matter how many teams are trained and equipped. Huge chunks of farmland and forest are, and probably always will be, roped off with yellow tape and red skull-and-crossbones multilingual signs. Fields have been mined twice, three times, by armies who kept confusing records or none at all. The grass grows tall and thick in Bosnia, concealing trip wires and booby traps quite excellently.

His poems told me about children who die on the way to school in the morning, farmers who don't come back from plowing their fields, burials postponed until a team of men in body armor can clear the cemetery.

Deminers are a careful, thoughtful breed. Most of what Chris wrote was a work of simple genius, telling us about the experience of laying flat on the ground, wet with dew, prying up a thing that was designed never to be pried up without skewering its assailant.

Under the circumstances, I was compelled to publish his collection of poetry, no more choice than helping a lost child find its parent. Please understand that I did not enjoy the work of typesetting and layout.

I do not like to cry, not even for the beauty of our humanity, expressed by a gentle heart.

Never think ill of soldiers, dear reader. Many of them are like Chris North, hoping to save life, rather than take it. They weep for the innocent, as we do -- and they see horror close up, the better to know its misery.

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Anyway, his poetry book became very important to me. I hope it has a long life and that our little desktop edition is taken over by a trade publisher. Since I'm off on a new adventure, I've made arrangements with someone else to print more copies for Chris and his pals at Handicap International.

Please God, watch over this good and decent man.

That's my recurring thought, an uncomfortable and useless plea to no one in particular -- and I certainly couldn't say such a thing to Chris in person.

He's full of enthusiasm and cheerful self-mockery and warmth. His wife and children are wonderful. He says that his work is just a job. Okay, Chris. It's just a job, the kind of job that makes sense for a retired British Army NCO, whose kids need a comfortable, clean home in Scotland, while Dad risks his life picking up landmines seven days a week, ten months a year, a thousand miles away.

None of this sits well in my awareness now -- made worse by a phone call this morning. I thought the matter was closed after emailing a long letter to Chris, explaining that "Lock 'Em Up" Joe (a retired chief inspector of police, whose perfect honesty and dilligence outweigh a less-than-perfect track record in solving crime) will be printing the next batch of poetry books.

Chris called me from Bosnia via satellite phone, a handheld thing that he uses to summon help when one of his men is hurt on the job. He said he was between two houses -- meaning two deathtraps that have to be cleared painstakingly and twice, just to make absolutely sure they didn't miss anything. I could picture the scene in fair detail. Body armor is heavy and hot. The helmet weighs a ton, constraining vision to a little arc about the size of a 14" screen.

He was all excited, yelling like a kid about the book manuscript I had written and given him a copy to read on the plane to Zimbabwe, where Handicap is setting up another team that Chris will have to supervise in his spare time.

"It's brilliant!" he gushed, "Absolutely brilliant! I didn't even eat on the plane, because I couldn't stop reading it!"

As you can imagine, his encouragement was welcome, since I've had nothing but hell trying to get the damn thing published. If you want to volunteer for some extra agony in your life, write a sci-fi novel in which all of the characters are recognizably human and have normal names like Harry and Laura. (Note: Mars Shall Thunder is posted at www.wolfdevoon.com if you want to read what all the fuss is about.)

Chris stayed on the line until it cracked up and fizzled out, like satellite phones often do. Probably birds, or maybe a NATO jet on its way to bomb something in Corsovo or Serbia.

And this is how I'm coming home, spiritually flattened, because a poet in body armor called -- not to discuss arrangements for printing his book elsewhere, since I'm shirking the task -- but to exclaim repeatedly and at length how much he enjoyed a story about a lawyer on Mars.

In truth, I know nothing about mankind, for we are a race of open-hearted and generous souls. We work in the most miserable circumstances, usually an evil of someone else's making, and somehow we find time to love from afar -- which is how I'm leaving my friends in Europe, praying stupidly for their unlikely safety and happiness after I'm gone.