By the time I arrived there in the summer of '93 [it was] a pretty smooth-running operation, inasmuch as it could handle the volume and the complexities of the problems. There was a good attitude; the atmosphere was positive … But the whole organization was scrunched into small areas where people were literally sitting on printers because they didn't have enough room to print; they had to move furniture to do it. … We had a corner of a conference room with a couple of boxes and we were thrown out whenever there was a conference. We didn't have a dedicated phone, had absolutely no dedicated secretarial staff at all. We were starting, literally, from scratch.

Up until the mid-80s … it was a very small operation; there were only six officers there. It was of no great influence in any of the decision-making. However, with the end of the Cold War and the "new world disorder," the demand for more missions moves exponentially from a couple to sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, in less than a year. …

As I write in my book at times, I'm wondering whether or not I was salivating for this command. Imagine you are a fireman or a fire chief who spent his whole career in prevention, you'd say, "Well he did a good job, there was no fires." But imagine retiring without having gone to put out one fire, or a dentist who never pulled a tooth. We had just finished forty-five years of peace time soldiering in northwest Europe… and that had just all crashed, because of the end of the Cold War. … I had generals senior to me who retired without going into conflict, [or] coming close to it even. … And then all of a sudden this mission appears. … It was like God had given me finally a real challenge for my skills. I just lapped it up. I couldn't get enough of it. And of course when you do get it and so many of your colleagues don't, it creates jealousy and things like that. But also what it does is, there are so few commands like that, you're just not allowed to fail. …

He commanded the U.N. force sent to Rwanda in 1993 to help enforce the peace. In this interview, he chronicles his time there - from the "gloom that came in" soon after arriving and sensing trouble coming, to the sudden collapse of his mission once the killing began, to the moral burden of the life and death choices he confronted trying to save lives with a few ill-equipped troops. He also talks about the world's attitude toward dirt-poor African nations like Rwanda, the heroism of a few people, and how he looked straight into "evil" as he forced himself to negotiate with the genocide leaders. Finally, Dallaire describes how Rwanda will never leave him. "My soul is in those hills, my spirit with the spirits of all those people who were slaughtered. … Lots of those eyes still haunt me, angry eyes, or innocent eyes. But the worst eyes that haunt me are the eyes of those people who were totally bewildered. They're looking at me with my blue beret and saying, 'What in the hell happened?'" This interview was conducted over four days in the fall of 2003.