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One afternoon I found Bill Haglund fast asleep with his small, soiled hands folded across his chest on a green canvas cot next to a refrigerator container. Workers in blue overalls and elbow-length rubber gloves would pass by with stretchers and unload another corpse into the container. Fifty yards away, next to the pit, a backhoe ground its gears as it struggled to gain traction in the red mud. An hour earlier, Haglund had climbed out of the pit utterly exhausted and collapsed on the cot. Grave muck covered nearly every inch of his clothing, from his rubber boots to his wire-rim glasses, and his hair and beard bristled with mud. Without thinking, I leaned over and pulled a smoldering cigar butt from between his fingers and threw it away. I couldn’t help but think that Haglund had stared too long into the abyss and it had finally overpowered him.