THE CHILDREN OF FREETOWN.(amputation atrocities in Sierra Leone's civil war)(Interview)(Critical Essay)

Every day, Americans are confronted with news of horrors throughout the world which seem both vividly intimate and impossibly distant; helpless outrage is a characteristic emotion of the global age. On an October afternoon three years ago, a New Yorker named Matthew Mirones was glancing through the Times' Week in Review section when he came upon a photo essay on war amputees in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, on the West African coast. A boy, his right arm gone to the shoulder, was being bathed by his mother. A man, missing both hands, was trying to write his name with the hook of an artificial arm. A teen-age girl, also a double amputee, was lying at the water's edge with her stumps glistening in the surf. Mirones, who had never heard of this war--and had barely heard of Sierra Leone--felt the hair on his arms stand up.

Amputation has been the signature atrocity of Sierra Leone's civil war, which went on for eleven years and ended last January. The most credible estimates of the number of war amputees which I heard ranged from two thousand to four thousand, with perhaps twice that many dead from their wounds. (The Western press usually puts the number of war amputees at twenty thousand.) Whatever the number, reports and photographs of civilians--many of them children--missing ears, lips, legs, and hands finally drew international attention to the long-neglected war and played a role in bringing it to an end.

As Mirones read, he felt acute shame, and a rising excitement. Mirones is a prosthetist--he makes artificial limbs. "I said, 'This is my profession, and I'm not aware of this--that people are being disfigured?' " he told me recently. "Before I even finished the article, in my mind I said, 'I've got to try to do something here. I mean, I know I could help these people.' "

Mirones, a small man with a highly mobile face dominated by a black mustache, is a forty-six-year-old bachelor. Though he now lives on Staten Island, his speech and manner remain in Brooklyn, the borough where he was born, grew up, and has his main office, on a lively, seedy downtown street, next to a wig shop advertising "100% Human Hair."

Mirones's grandfather was a village cobbler on the Greek island of Chios. Mirones's father, Aristotle, immigrated to Brooklyn after the Second World War and set up a small prosthetics company called Arimed, below the apartment on Atlantic Avenue where Mirones spent his early years, three blocks from the firm's current headquarters. Mirones grew up in the business; by the age of seven, he was making deliveries around downtown Brooklyn, holding shopping bags at shoulder level to keep them from dragging on the pavement. When older kids surrounded him and tried to steal the leg braces and shoe inserts, he would talk his way out of trouble in the quick, ingratiating, street-smart manner that he still uses.

When Mirones speaks of his patients, a nervous physical empathy takes over, and his face and body get involved in the exaggerated way of a mime: his eyes narrow in pain, his mouth stretches out and down, his torso collapses against the desk as his whole arm up to the shoulder is pulled into a recycling machine; his ankle buckles and he slips into the jolting hobble of a diabetic who has lost sensation in his feet.

Mirones trained at New York University, and is an American board-certified prosthetist, a qualification that enabled him to greatly expand Arimed's operations and increase its sophistication. Yet he still can't help using the word "stump." "We call it a residual, not a stump," he corrects himself, for my benefit, but a minute later he uses the word again. "This is Mr. Montoya," he says, picking up the plaster model of a stump lying on a worktable in Arimed's second-floor lab. (Mr. Montoya's lower right leg was shot off by narcotics traffickers in the Medellin, Colombia, airport.) The lab looks like the studio of a sculptor in the grip of a macabre vision of the lower extremities.