The laST TiMe i SaW BUDiarDjo, we shared a meal at his favorite Chinese restaurant near Piccadilly Circus in London. He told me a little about the evening classes he was taking and his time as a political prisoner. But mostly we talked about the changes that were then unfolding in Indonesia and his hope that he might finally be able to go home after more than fifteen years. He looked weary, and as always the London cold was getting to him, but otherwise he seemed in good spirits. A few months later, I learned that he had died— ten thousand miles from home, an exile from the country he had served and whose independence he had fought for. Budiardjo’s experience was not unusual. In fact, in many ways, his is the story of millions of Indonesian nationalists and leftists, from all walks of life, who were caught up in the awful juggernaut of arbitrary detention, interrogation, torture, mass killing, and political exile that followed an alleged left- wing coup attempt on the morning of October 1, 1965. Blaming the attempt on the Indonesian Communist Party, the army organized a campaign of violence intended to destroy the party and its affiliates and to drive the popular left- nationalist President Sukarno from power. That campaign was aided and abetted by the United States and its allies. By the time the violence ended, an estimated half a million real or alleged Communists had been killed, and another million or so had been arbitrarily detained. Budiardjo was among them; imprisoned without charge or trial for fourteen years, on his release he fled the country of his birth. If I mention him here, then, it is not because his experience was exceptional but because it was so common, and to make the point that the story I tell in this book is about hundreds of thousands of real people, just like him— husbands and wives, friends and lovers, whose lives were torn apart by the violence and can never again be made whole.