U2: Band on The Run

He remembers it this way. Outside San Salvador, 30 or 40 miles up in the hills, mortars began to hit the village, and bombs cratered the hillside. Run.

That was his first thought. And this was the second: Where? It was open all around. The ground shook. The farmers looked at the traveler from Ireland and smiled and pointed. They tried to be reassuring. "That is over there," they said. "We are over here."

"I felt," says the traveler, thinking back in a safer place, "such a fool in the face of it. Those guys lived with it all their lives,...