By CHARLES ALEXANDER /INTERNATIONAL EDITOR

IME correspondents get a great deal of feedback from readers: questions, praise, anger. Last year one of our newest writers, Terry McCarthy, received an earnest plea for help. He had filed a story from Cambodia on efforts to clear that country's deadly minefields, and the vivid reporting prompted a call from Roy Howes. Howes' son Christopher, a former British army officer and demining expert, had disappeared in Cambodia more than a year earlier, apparently abducted by the Khmer Rouge. Frustrated by a lack of solid information, the father asked McCarthy if he knew anything about the son's fate. No, McCarthy replied, but he promised to try to find out something the next time he was in Cambodia. Last week he kept his pledge and heard convincing, chilling testimony from high-ranking Khmer Rouge defectors: Christopher Howes had been killed. Deeply saddened, McCarthy informed the father and sat down to write our story of the death of a young Briton who had only been trying to help the people of another country.

By nature a roving reporter, McCarthy left his native Ireland in the mid-1980s and worked as a journalist in Mexico and London before becoming Southeast Asia Correspondent for the Independent of London in 1987. Moving to the U.S. in 1995, he wrote for the New Yorker and the British satirical magazine Punch. Joining TIME last year, he ranged widely from a New York base, covering the JonBenet Ramsey murder case in Colorado and the Boston nanny murder trial. Since becoming East Asia Correspondent in January, he has interviewed Singapore leader Lee Kuan Yew on Asian values, profiled Indonesia's President Suharto and examined cross-straits relations between Taiwan and China. This week, in addition to the story from Cambodia, he contributed a piece about Indonesia's best-known novelist, Pramoedya Ananta Toer.

McCarthy says that he has been strongly drawn to Cambodia ever since his first visit in 1988. "It is one of the most tragic, cruel stories of Asia," he observes, "and yet the ordinary people have maintained a dignity and grace that takes your heart away, every time. Historian David Chandler once expressed it to me in this way: 'In Cambodia, the dark side is the shadow of their sweetness'." The Christopher Howes story belongs on the dark side, but he is still remembered sweetly by many in Cambodia. As McCarthy's account makes clear, Howes gave up a chance to go free because he wouldn't abandon his Cambodian co-workers. It is a story that would make any father proud.