CNN -- Michael Chea can't forget what they did to him. Though he is standing in the morning sunlight, surrounded by giggling teenagers and chirping birds, his face is twisted by grief. American John Etherton talks to a Liberian about his country's violent past. He is reliving the moment when he escaped death in the "land of blood and tears." "In 1990, I was a very small, and I saw so many things," he said. "The war took us away in the forest, and we started running. They killed my grandmother. They killed my grandfather. They killed my auntie." Chea could have easily become just another anonymous victim of war in Liberia. At least 200,000 Liberians were killed in a series of conflicts between 1989 and 2003 that transformed the tiny nation on the west coast of Africa into a wasteland.
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Liberia is emerging from 14-year war that turned country into wasteland
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New effort to collect stories from war survivors is under way
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Liberia is still reeling from horrors of war
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American in Liberia: 'It's really feels like the Wild West'
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But when freed slaves arrived in Liberia, many recreated the slave-master relationships they experienced in @placeholder, historians say.