By April 28, 1987, the Reagan administration’s training, funding, and arming of counterrevolutionary forces known as the contras in Nicaragua had claimed many victims: thousands of people murdered by death squads, thousands of others who were kidnapped and the tortured, and the still thousands more who lost their livelihoods when they were forced to abandon their homes.

Ben Linder’s death was slightly different. Up until Linder, these casualties had mostly been Nicaraguans — peasants, educators, medical personnel, and other civilians who had the misfortune to live in a part of the world that Reagan considered part a US sphere of influence and thus where human life was expendable. Linder was the first American killed by the same paramilitary forces who were furnished by taxpayer dollars paid by himself and his family, friends, and fellow countrymen.

More to the point, Linder was not just any American. He wasn’t a CIA officer or a soldier or a thrill-seeking young tourist. He was an idealistic, twenty-seven-year old engineer who, ironically, had been trying to do what the Reagan administration had told the public was its goal: lift up a poorer nation from squalor and poverty. Except instead of using guns, Ben Linder’s tool was the basic infrastructure that rural, isolated parts of Nicaragua lacked.