the wyncote foundation. and by the frontline journalism fund, with major support from jon and jo ann hagler, and additional support from chris and lisa kaneb. support for "being mortal" is provided by the john and wauna harman foundation. (sirens blaring) >> atul gawande: i've been a surgeon for more than a decade now. in medicine, your first fear as a doctor is that you're supposed to be able to fix a problem, and our anxieties include wanting to seem competent, and to us competent means "i can fix this." in fact there's often a kind of implicit promise, "i'm going to be able to fix this, i'm going to certainly give you the best shot you can have. nobody could have given you a better shot." and then when things aren't working, part of your anxiety is, was there something i missed, was there anything else i could have done? when i started out in my training in surgery, you discover that all the stuff you learned about in the books in medical school is really just a tiny little bit of what it means to be good

the wyncote foundation. and by the frontline journalism fund, with major support from jon and jo ann hagler. >> narrator: this is a story about business and war. it's a story about a small group of americans and the choices they made many years ago. a story about the cost of operating in a volatile and remote country. its setting is a rubber plantation in africa, owned and operated by the tire giant firestone. >> i am charles bradford pettit, and go by brad. i worked 31 years at firestone. i really kind of felt that we were above this war somehow, and that both sides wanted us there, so that they're gonna leave us alone. >> we were one of the largest, if not the largest, employer in liberia, certainly paying taxes to the government, certainly providing a lot of employment for locals. and we would hope that they would honor that and just leave us alone and let us continue to do what we were doing. unfortunately, that didn't occur. >> we'd been through several coups and nothing changed very much. we just expec