Tiger Country

The story of how Nurse Eelavany came to shoot 15 people with a machine gun begins when she was 12. It was 1990 and government artillery shells and helicopter gunships had been pounding her Tamil homeland for seven years. But they had somehow missed her and the people she cared for. She loved school and dreamed of becoming a doctor. Then one day she was playing in the street in front of her home in northeastern Sri Lanka when she saw an army shell blow her neighbor's head clean off. "I remember the hatred building up in me," says Eelavany. "I...