"What do 'Abu Sindi', 'Timothy Sean McCormack', 'Saro', and 'Commander Avo' all have in common? They were all aliases for Monte Melkonian. But who was Monte Melkonian? In his native California he was once a kid in cut-off jeans, playing baseball and swimming in irrigation canals. Monte turned his back on Oxford University and a promising career as an archaeologist, and headed for the working-class slums of Tehran and the bomb-shattered streets of Beirut. He joined roadside prayers in Afghanistan, stood with rebels in Kurdistan and gritted his teeth through surgery without anesthesia in a Red Brigades safe house. He organized prison strikes, spurned the emissary of President George H.W.

Bush, and marched with a million demonstrators while the Soviet Union collapsed around him. Finally, in Spring 1993 he led a force of 4000 men to victory in the Armenian enclave of Nagomo-Karabagh in an assault that stunned the UN Security Council and provoked generals and politicians in Russia and Turkey to threaten nuclear war. By the time of his death at age thirty-five, government mouthpieces consigned him to hell as a terrorist, while millions of his adopted compatriots revered him quite literally as a warrior-saint."--Jacket.