THESE ARE THE FOLKS JOHN KERRY WANTS TO TRUST OUR SECURITY TO?:

The jaded, seamy side of peace: For the three authors of a graphic memoir, U.N. work was an exercise in futility. (Maggie Farley, 10/17/04, LA Times)

Andrew Thomson, a doctor, wanted to save lives. Kenneth Cain, a human rights lawyer, wanted to save the world. Heidi Postlewait, a secretary, just wanted to save some money and leave her broken marriage behind.

The three U.N. staffers came together at a rooftop party in Phnom Penh in 1993, during the heady days when the world body was organizing democratic elections in Cambodia. Fired up by a marijuana and rum combo called the space shuttle, they began to think maybe the U.N. really could change the world.

But amid the euphoria were glimpses of the chaos ahead. First came the wild contingent of peacekeepers from Bulgaria, allegedly recruited from prisons and mental hospitals to fill the U.N. quota. "A battalion of criminal lunatics arrive in a lawless land," Cain observes in a book the three have written on their experiences. "They're drunk as sailors, rape vulnerable Cambodian women and crash their U.N. Land Cruisers with remarkable frequency."

Six years later, after stints in Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda and Liberia, the three came to believe that not only is the U.N. unable to keep pace with its grand ideals in the new world order, it actually allowed two genocides. They cope by immersing themselves in their work, alcohol, faith and "emergency sex."

Thomson, who spent two years pulling bodies out of mass graves in Rwanda and the Bosnian town of Srebrenica — corpses of people who had sought safety with the U.N. — concludes: "If blue-helmeted U.N. peacekeepers show up in your town or village and offer to protect you, run. Or else get weapons. Your lives are worth so much less than theirs."

The three chronicled their precipitous slide from buoyant idealism to hard-bitten cynicism in "Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures," a bestseller published this summer by Miramax that has outraged U.N. officials and nearly cost Thomson and Postlewait their jobs. (Cain had already quit.)