Even the most well-read World War II enthusiast is likely unaware of one major military operation that happened in 1945. It involved Royal Air Force bombers, 24 Sherman tanks, and 36,000 troops—some of them British, the rest Indian and Nepalese Gurkhas under British command. More than 600 of these soldiers died, including a British brigadier general.

Despite the year, the fighting happened after the war ended. It took place in Indonesia. One of the dirty secrets of 1945 is that just as the Allies were speaking loftily of having saved the world from German and Japanese tyranny, they began new battles to regain colonies they had lost in the war: France retook Algeria and Indochina, and the Dutch wanted Indonesia back. With the Netherlands half a world away and devastated by war, the British stepped in to help.

Few Anglophones know either Dutch or Indonesian, and that’s likely one reason we know far less about that archipelago’s long and painful history than, say, about India’s ordeals under the Raj. Yet Indonesia is the world’s fourth-most-populous country, and the one with the largest number of Muslim inhabitants. A single island, Java, has more people than France and Britain combined. David Van Reybrouck’s immensely readable new history of the nation, Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World, fills an important gap.

Van Reybrouck is a Dutch-speaking Belgian best known for his Congo: The Epic History of a People, published in 2014. Although his writing is dazzling, some of us who follow events in that country felt he was a mite too gentle in dealing with Belgian colonial rule, especially the forced-labor system that so enriched the colony’s founder, King Leopold II. But he shows no such reticence when it comes to the Dutch in Indonesia.

How, he asks, did the once-tiny settlement that today is the immense city of Jakarta “ever become a thriving hub of world trade? The answer was simple: by enslaving people.” Between 1600 and 1900, an estimated 600,000 people were traded by the Dutch in Asia. Some 150,000 slaves came from Bali alone. All of this began under the Dutch East India Company, which, like its British counterpart (they were founded a mere two years apart), had its own army. The company ran the colony for two centuries and was the first corporation anywhere to have tradable stock.

The colonial regime brought vast riches to the mother country and much bloodshed to the islands; a single war from 1825 to 1830 cost roughly 200,000 Indonesian lives. Several decades later, slave labor in the archipelago was in some years generating more than half of the total Dutch tax revenue. (Surprisingly, Van Reybrouck does not mention someone who noticed this, Leopold of Belgium. Enviously eyeing these huge profits set the king on a similar path in his new African colony. Forced labor, he declared, was “the only way to civilize and uplift these indolent and corrupt peoples.”) As with many colonial conquests, the resources that first loomed large for the Dutch—spices—were soon eclipsed by others that proved even more lucrative: coffee, tea, tobacco, and sugar. Ultimately, major profits came from feeding an industrializing world’s hunger for coal and, above all, oil.

Although many scattered revolts took place throughout the centuries of Dutch rule, a profusion of local languages and the expanse of the islands (stretching a distance as far as from Ireland to Kazakhstan, Van Reybrouck points out) meant that national consciousness was slow in coming. An official independence movement did not begin until 1912—by coincidence the same year that saw the African National Congress born in South Africa. The charismatic orator Sukarno, the man who became the movement’s often-imprisoned leader, had the ability to knit together its nationalist, Communist, and Islamic strands. When the Japanese occupied the islands during World War II, they imprisoned Dutch officials and professed anti-colonial solidarity with the Indonesians, but before long began seizing natural riches and imposing their own forced-labor system. A mere two days after Japan announced its surrender to the Allies but before the Dutch could again take over, Sukarno saw his chance and issued a declaration of independence, the postwar era’s first.

Then, in response, came the British invasion, the first round of a four-year colonial war as vicious as any in the 20th century. Heavily armed by the United States, the Dutch battled, in vain, to reestablish control over the sprawling territory. Possibly as many as 200,000 Indonesians died in the conflict, as well as more than 4,600 Dutch soldiers.

As in most counter-guerilla wars, captured fighters were routinely tortured to force them to reveal the whereabouts of their comrades. The Dutch soldier Joop Hueting left a chilling memoir, which Van Reybrouck summarizes: “The platitudes in the letters home. ‘Everything still fine here,’ ‘how lovely that Nell has had her baby,’ because why worry them with stories that they, with their crocheted doilies and floral wallpaper and milk bottles on the doorstep, wouldn’t understand … stories about bamboo huts burning so fiercely that the roar of the flames drowns out the screams of the people who lived there, stories about naked fifteen-year-olds writhing on the concrete with electric wires attached to their bodies.”

Hueting went public for the first time in a television interview he gave in 1969, two decades after his return from Indonesia, provoking death threats so severe that he and his family sought police protection. For the rest of his life, he collected testimonies from fellow Dutch veterans, but, Van Reybrouck writes, “it is bewildering that shortly before his death, the NIOD, the Dutch Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, showed no interest … As a result, the legacy of the post-war Netherlands’ most important whistle-blower is languishing in the attic of a private house in Amsterdam.” No country, including our own, reckons easily with such parts of its past; few Americans learn much about the similarly brutal colonial war we waged in the Philippines from 1899 to 1902.

To their credit, some Dutch people were uneasy about the war. Although 120,000 draftees were sent to Indonesia, a remarkable 6,000 refused to board the ships, many of them sentenced to prison as a result. An unknown number of others, foreshadowing our own war resisters during the Vietnam years, concocted medical or psychiatric ailments or quietly slipped out of the country. Among those who did go to Indonesia, at least two—echoing a handful of Black American troops in the Philippines a half century earlier—switched sides.

The best-known of them, Poncke Princen, had been jailed in Holland and Germany by the Nazis, then joined the Dutch army after liberation. Sent to Indonesia, he deserted and took up arms with the rebels. He remained after independence, becoming a member of the Indonesian Parliament and an outspoken human-rights advocate. Those activities won him lengthy prison terms under both Sukarno and his successor, Suharto; sadly, postindependence Indonesia saw long periods of repression.

Many voices we hear in Revolusi are of people whom Van Reybrouck himself talked with. Another Dutch deserter who went over to the rebels was 90 years old when the author tracked him down, in the Dutch city of Assen. With astounding energy, Van Reybrouck found dozens of other elderly eyewitnesses in huts, apartments, and nursing homes all over the world—in Holland, Indonesia, Japan (veterans of the World War II occupation force), and Nepal (Ghurkas from the British army). And even when all the participants involved in a particular event are now dead, he often manages to find a daughter or grandson with a story to tell. Van Reybrouck has visited just about every place that figures in Indonesia’s history, and evokes them with a narrative zest all too rare among historians. When approached from the air, for example, a pair of islands look “like two emerald-green cufflinks on the sleeve of the Pacific.”

That 1945–49 war saw scenes of appalling savagery. One notorious Dutch commander, Raymond Westerling, would have “his men surround a suspicious kampong in the early morning … Anyone who tried to escape … was gunned down … After searching the houses, Westerling addressed the silent crowd and went through his list of suspects … One after the other, the suspects were forced to squat.” If he thought someone had information he wasn’t yielding, Westerling would begin firing bullets.

“The first one shot was Regge, a cousin of mine,” a woman told Van Reybrouck. “They shot him six times. In his right foot, his left foot, his right knee, his left knee … It was Westerling himself who shot him. He didn’t say anything. He drank a soft drink, threw the bottle in the air and shot it.” Westerling claimed to have personally killed 563 people. After the war, he ran a secondhand bookstore in Amsterdam, took opera lessons, and ended up as a swimming-pool lifeguard.

Many things make colonial wars particularly brutal: the colonizers’ lust for wealth; their fear that their enemies might be anywhere, instead of behind a clearly defined front line; their belief that the colonized people belong to an inferior race. But in the case of the Dutch in Indonesia—as of the French in Algeria, who also practiced torture and murder on a huge scale—was there an additional factor as well?

Immediately before its war against Indonesian independence fighters, the Netherlands itself emerged from five years of ruthless German occupation. The country had been plundered. The massive bombing of Rotterdam had leveled the city’s medieval core and left nearly 80,000 people homeless. The occupiers had banned all political parties except a pro-Nazi one. Those suspected of being in the resistance had been jailed and tortured; many of them had been killed. In the winter of 1944–45, the Germans had cut off heating fuel and food for much of the country, and some 20,000 people had starved to death. More than 200,000 Dutch men, women and children had died of causes related to the war, just over half of them Jews who’d perished in the Holocaust. As a percentage of the population, this was the highest death rate of any country in Western Europe. And more than half a million Dutch citizens had been impressed as forced laborers for the Nazis, usually working in war factories that were the targets of Allied bombers.

When victims become perpetrators, are they unconsciously taking revenge? Many conflicts, including those raging today—think of Gaza, for instance—have this underlying subtext. The whistleblower soldier Joop Hueting reported a haunting piece of graffiti he saw as Dutch troops advanced in Java, which answered the question definitively: “Don’t do to us what the Germans did to you!”             

My mom died six years ago, a few hours after I sat on the edge of her bed at her nursing home in Georgia and talked with her for the last time. My wife, Alix, and I were staying with my brother and his wife, who lived just down the road. My brother got the phone call not long after midnight. He woke me up, and we went down to the nursing home and walked the dim, quiet hallway to her room. She was in her bed, cold and still. I touched her face. But I didn’t cry.

Two years earlier, the veterinarian had come to our house in Charlotte, North Carolina, to see our old dog, Fred. He was a yellow Lab mix I had found as a puppy in the ditch in front of our house. We had him for 14 and a half years, until he got a tumor on his liver. He was too old for surgery to make any sense. Alix and I held him in our laps as the vet gave him two shots, one to make him sleep, the other to make him still. All three of us cried as he eased away in our arms.

By any measure, I loved my mom more than our dog. If I could bring one back, I’d pick her 100 times out of 100. So why, in the moment of their passing, did I cry for him but not for her?

That was one of the many questions in the back of my mind as I began to explore a fascinating subculture in the dog world: the dog-show circuit that culminates in the biggest event of all, the Westminster Dog Show. I wanted to understand the dogs and their human caretakers, the bond between them, and, more broadly, why the loss of a dog can hit so hard—harder, sometimes, than the loss of a person.

I spent three years on the road with show dogs, handlers, judges, and other dog people who roam the country like Deadheads with hair spray. I came to think of the world of dog shows as a traveling theme park called Dogland. It has its own rules, its own language, its own blend of sights and sounds and scents. It is generally a pleasant place. But it is built on a foundation of loss. Because everybody involved knows the cruel math built into loving a pet: Chances are, it will die before you do.

[Read: Pets can really be like human family]

At a show near my home in Charlotte, I met a dog breeder and handler named Michelle Parris. Parris shows Italian greyhounds, known in Dogland as “IGs” or “iggies.” If a standard greyhound is a Dodge Charger, and a whippet is a Mustang, an iggie is a Mini Cooper. Regular greyhounds run 60 to 70 pounds, but a standard iggie weighs about 10. Parris loves iggies’ delicacy, their playfulness, the gorgeous S curves of their hind legs and back and belly. She used to show them frequently—even got one of her dogs into Westminster.

But in 2019, her life began to crumble. It started when she and her longtime partner, Mike, broke up. They split on good terms—he continued to back her dog-show dreams, emotionally and financially—but she decided to step away from the ring for a while.

In early 2020, COVID hit, and dog shows were canceled all over the United States. That fall, Mike died of heart failure. And the following March, one of Parris’s favorite dogs, Sky Guy, got sick. She drove him to a vet in West Virginia who is known in Dogland as an IG expert. He told her that Sky Guy had an incurable autoimmune disease. IGs usually live for 14 or 15 years. Sky Guy was not quite six.

Mike’s death had hurt Parris. But Sky Guy’s death nearly broke her. She had panic attacks. Friends came to help take care of her other dogs. Months passed before she was able to feel stable again. She told me this story in the middle of an arena lobby, with the general chaos of a dog show flowing all around us. It was a long, tearful conversation. But every so often, she would pause our chat to point out an especially beautiful dog walking by.

“We’re very passionate about our dogs,” she said.

Dogland is an odd place in that way. On the one hand, the dogs there are commodities—purebreds designed to draw top dollar for their “show quality,” the physical excellence and charisma required to become a champion show dog. The best of the best make money for their owners by delivering litters of other potential champions, or providing sperm that can be frozen indefinitely to create a lineage decades down the road. (A company called Infinity Canine sets up a tent at some big shows to collect semen from promising males. Their slogan: “Dogs love to come to us!”)

But dogs aren’t widgets. The people I met in Dogland had genuine affection for their animals, even when they were handlers who might be juggling 15 or 20 dogs at a single show. Most of the top handlers don’t own their dogs. The owners send them off to the handlers like parents might send a child who has a booming forehand off to a tennis academy. A show dog’s peak is four or five years at most. And then the handler, after bonding deeply with that dog, has to give it back to its owners. It is a rehearsal of sorts for the permanent parting.

Maybe the best way to illustrate the idea that people sometimes mourn harder for dogs than for humans is to tell the story of one grieving middle-aged retiree.

His wife, Helen, died after a long illness. Her death knocked him sideways. She left him a final gift and a note to go with it: John, I’m sorry I can’t be there for you. But you still need something, someone, to love, so start with this. John wept as he put down the note and looked at the crate that came with it. Inside was a beagle puppy named Daisy. John and Daisy bonded.

[Read: Too many people own dogs]

One day John was at a gas station, filling up his Mustang—a car his wife had bought him. Another car pulled up to the pumps. The men in the car turned out to be Russian-mob thugs. One of them, the mob boss’s son, admired John’s car. He asked John to name a price for it. John said it was not for sale. This upset the son.

That night, the thugs broke into John’s house, beat him senseless, and stole the car. During the beating, Daisy ran through the room whimpering. The mob boss’s son told one of the thugs to shut her up.

When John regained consciousness, he saw a trail of blood on the floor. Daisy had crawled to him and died by his side.

And that was the moment John Wick decided to come out of retirement and return to his life as the world’s most feared assassin.

I should probably be clear right here that John Wick is the fictional hero of the massively popular movie franchise starring Keanu Reeves. Just roll with the character for a moment. John Wick loved his wife more than anything. But the death of his dog released something deep inside him. He grieved hard. So damn hard. And the anger it released was a renewable resource: According to online body counts, during the course of four movies, John Wick kills more than 400 people—including those Russian-mob thugs.

At one point in the first movie, after Daisy is killed and John sets out to avenge her, the mob boss captures John and prepares to have him executed. The mob boss makes the fatal mistake of so many movie villains: First, he wants to talk. He has something to say: “It was just a fucking car. Just a fucking dog.”

“Just a dog,” John says, and lowers his head.

He goes on: “When Helen died, I lost everything, until that dog arrived on my doorstep. A final gift from my wife. In that moment, I received some semblance of hope. An opportunity to grieve unalone.”

Moments later, he escapes his captors and resumes his trail of vengeance.

You already know this story if you are one of the millions of people who have watched the John Wick movies. But some people know only one detail. Because, before deciding whether to see John Wick, they looked the movie up on a website created to answer a particular question about any movie. The question is embedded in the site’s name: doesthedogdie.com.

There, they discovered the answer was yes. And they decided they could not watch.

Of course, it’s not just the members of the Dogland road show or characters in movies who mourn their dogs deeply. One of the people I interviewed for the book was Scott Van Pelt, the anchor of the late-night SportsCenter broadcast on ESPN. In 2022, he gave a moving on-air eulogy for his family’s Rhodesian ridgeback, Otis. Van Pelt heard from thousands of viewers all over the world. I talked with him not long after about why Otis meant so much.

“There have been a couple of moments after he died that you just come in and sit there and know that he’s not coming and it’s just—”

“That absence, right?” I said.

This article has been adapted from Tomlinson’s new book, Dogland: Passion, Glory, and Lots of Slobber at the Westminster Dog Show.

“Oh God, it’s so heavy,” he said. “I’ve lost people. I’ve lost my dad and I’ve lost grandparents and it’s not comparative, but the difference is that this animal was with us every day of our life and in all ways of our life and was here every moment of our children’s lives. He’s the corner puzzle piece. So many things connect to that. You could put your whole puzzle together, and there’s that one corner that’s missing.”

[Read: What can having pets teach you about parenting?]

Van Pelt was pointing to a couple of the reasons I think the death of a pet can hit harder, in the moment, than the death of a human loved one. The simplest reason is that, as he said, a pet is around you all the time. Most people don’t spend as many continuous hours around their parents, other family members, friends, even their grown kids. In many cases, a pet lives with its owner nearly every minute of its life, from wriggling puppyhood to final sleep. Its absence is profound.

The deeper reason is that our relationships with humans are far more complicated. We argue even with the people we love, and sometimes the conflicts crack us wide open. Every birthday, every Thanksgiving, builds upon a long and sometimes fraught history. There are things we can’t forget, though they might be long forgiven. Loving another human being can leave bruises and scars, even if every single one is worth it.

Loving a pet is simpler. Dogs, especially, live to please us. It is the way they have made themselves essential to our lives. Dogs don’t fight at the dinner table or have obnoxious political viewpoints. They don’t slam the door when they leave the house. They don’t ask why you’re not married yet.

When we mourn a dog, we mourn a life we often witnessed in full, and a source of something close to an unadulterated good.

When we mourn a human, even one we love deeply, our emotions are messier. That does not make our grief lesser. It just makes it part of a bigger experience, like an egg mixed into batter. At some point, you can no longer separate it out.

After spending all that time in Dogland, I came to think of it this way: When a loved one dies, it matters more. But when a dog dies, sometimes we feel it more.

Why did I cry in the moment for my dog and not my mom? Maybe for all the reasons I’ve already talked about. But also, maybe, because I had cried for her, and with her, so many times already. I cried in her arms when I was a boy and fell in a patch of sandspurs. I cried on the phone when I got fired from my internship and had to slink back home. I cried when we argued about her smoking and my eating. I cried laughing when she would tell the story about the time the neighbor’s python got loose. I cried when we moved her out of her house and we both knew she was never coming back. I cried at her bedside in her final days when we said we loved each other. My grief for her was paid in full.

[Tommy Tomlinson: The weight I carry]

A dog might be able to sense those moments, but all we really have to go on is our own feelings. As close as humans are to dogs—a connection formed over thousands of years—parts of their world are still unknowable to us. That space between feeling and knowing—that’s where the tears live. But the people you love, if the connection is deep enough, become knowable in every dimension. And if you love someone enough, the tears don’t wait for death. They’re an essential part of life.

This article has been adapted from Tomlinson’s new book, Dogland: Passion, Glory, and Lots of Slobber at the Westminster Dog Show.