A voice from the grave.

In early April, The New York Times reported that four Salvadoran National Guardsmen who were convicted and jailed for killing three American nuns and a lay worker in December 1980 confirmed they acted on orders from higher-ups.

The outrage over the rape and murder of the churchwomen threatened to derail the Reagan Administration's efforts to arm the Salvadoran military. Secretary of State Alexander Haig claimed the nuns might have tried to run a military roadblock. Jeane Kirkpatrick, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, hinted that as "activist" nuns they could have expected trouble.

But to those of us covering the war in El Salvador at the time, it was clear that Ita Ford, Dorothy Kazel, Maura Clarke, and Jean Donovan were the latest victims of state-sponsored terrorism carried out by El Salvador's military. All you had to do was count the dozen or more mutilated civilian bodies scattered around San Salvador every morning after the army curfew was lifted.

Only this time, the military chose American churchwomen.

I knew Sister Ita Ford. I had interviewed her just a few weeks before her murder.

The night before I met her, I was under fire in the rightwing-controlled town of Arcatao on El Salvador's northern border with Honduras. The guerrillas were firing on the police station.

I was stuck inside with a squad of drunken national guardsmen, who were firing blindly into the street while drinking TicTac cane liquor. During the firefight, the radio inside the police station blared The Wall by Pink Floyd.

Across the cobblestone street was an abandoned convent. Death to communist priests and nuns was scrawled on the building in white paint, along with Be a Patriot, Kill a Priest, and a white hand imprint.

"The colonel of the local regiment said to me the other day that the church is indirectly subversive because it's on the side of the weak," Ita told me. "And I guess maybe in the last ten or twelve years there has been a change in the church .... The church has begun aligning itself, `taking a preferential option for the poor.' The governments find this difficult to handle. It's very contradictory to their National Security ideology."

The church refugee center where we met among the red tile roofs of Chalatenango seemed a place of tranquility and reflection. A thoughtful and attractive woman, small, light-boned, and watchful, Ita was casually dressed in jeans and a cotton blouse.

We sat at a low wooden table on a couple of plastic school chairs drinking tea and fruit punch, as we talked the afternoon away.

Just before visiting her refugee center, I'd run into Jose Napoleon Duarte, a Christian Democratic member of the three-man junta ruling the country at the time. The junta was in Chalatenango City to "show the flag," and he had given me a scoop, telling me President Jimmy Carter was about to deliver the first Huey helicopter gunships to the military. He assured me the United States would not have to supply much more after that, since the left was losing the support of the people. In fact, the United States would provide more than $7 billion in additional military aid and scores of covert military advisers over the next decade in a futile attempt to destroy the insurgents.

I asked Ita how she felt about U.S. support for the junta.

"As a U.S. citizen, I'm highly disappointed and mostly outraged by this type of support," she said. "I think the U.S. is upholding a myth that there's a center ground and a third way, and I think it's just a creation of the State Department. This government doesn't represent anybody at this point. Sending in equipment and that type of thing is reprehensible. Sometimes the United States has to realize it does not own Central America or any other part of the world, that people have a right to shape their own destiny, to choose the type of government they want. We don't lose Cuba, we don't lose Nicaragua because they were never ours to lose. The sooner we accept this, the better."

She talked about the refugees she worked with. Displaced by the fighting, many of them had been unable to plant crops that year, Others who would normally work the cotton and sugar harvests were afraid to travel to the growing regions because of the fighting. I wondered if they felt trapped between two forces they couldn't control.

"I think there are very few people caught in the middle," she told me. "From my own limited experience, I think the majority of the rural people in some way have sympathy if they're not actively collaborating with the popular organiza-tions, the revolutionaries. In the militarized towns this is not true, of course, but the majority feel they're being terribly repressed by the security forces. A death squad will just drive into a town, stake it out, lean against a wall, and there's nothing the people can do. People have identified the cars, seen these men walking out of the National Police stations. Who do you go to to put in a complaint? There's nowhere to go to complain against the death squads."

Several weeks earlier, Ita had been in a Land Rover that overturned in a river while on a mission to save the life of a nineteen-year-old government informer. She and her companion were trying to get him out of a guerrilla-controlled area where he would have been killed. The nun she was traveling with died in the accident.

"Afterwards we got him away and I tried to say, `Look, look at this life that was lost for yours. Life is too precious. You can't just buy and sell it like you've been doing. You have to think what life means.'"

She showed me the smashed-up remains of the Land Rover that had been pulled out of the river and towed back to the refugee center.

"When I got out of the water after the accident and I had to walk for hours through the forest to get to a town, it was so cold. All I could think of was, `Why her, God? Why did you call her and not me?'" She tried to smile. "I don't know. Maybe I've been chosen for another purpose."

I was up in the Alto Plano of Guatemala a short, time later with photographer Stuart Zitin. We'd just interviewed soldiers and Indians in Nebaj, where the army had opened fire on a demonstration in the town square, killing eight Mayans. We were in the back of a pickup truck, catching a ride back to the lowlands, when a newscast on the radio reported that the nuns had been kidnapped and murdered. I was horrified, sad, and angry, but not surprised. I'd been living in Salvador for five months and had gotten used to how the security forces operated.

The Cold War is over now, but few people in Washington seem to have the stomach to take an honest look back at the killing grounds the U.S. government seeded in El Salvador and other war zones of the 1980s. Two of the men who allegedly either covered up or ordered the nuns' executions, former Defense Minister General Jose Guillermo Garcia, and National Guard Director Colonel Carlos Vides Casanova (who once said in a press conference, "If we kill 100,000 now, we won't have to kill 250,000 later on"), have been granted U.S. residency and are living in Florida.

Sister Ita Ford was one of a dozen people I knew, including good friends, who died in Central America. The others--Magdalena, Ariel, Rodolfo, Mark, Ian, Abelardo, Marco, Al, Dial, Richard, and John--were raped and murdered, burned to death, garroted, assassinated at close range, or blown up by mines. Only two were killed in combat.

A full and honest accounting of the past is the least we owe their memory.

David Helvarg is the author of "The War Against the Greens" (Sierra Club Books). He wrote "Full Nets, Empty Seas" in the November 1997 issue.