i was working with a version of git that had a bug in add_cache_entry() 
that introduced a sorting error in my index.

[cel@dexter main]$ stg refresh -f
Refreshing patch "git-switch-branch"...AUTHORS: unmerged 
(098c1d3e9fe5c39b859ccff6c7d36d2c193d1b62)
AUTHORS: unmerged (098c1d3e9fe5c39b859ccff6c7d36d2c193d1b62)
COPYING: unmerged (d60c31a97a544b53039088d14fe9114583c0efc3)
COPYING: unmerged (d60c31a97a544b53039088d14fe9114583c0efc3)
INSTALL: unmerged (8d2bebd9d1824f1b7af5cfe6fbd11f9cbfde6d74)
INSTALL: unmerged (8d2bebd9d1824f1b7af5cfe6fbd11f9cbfde6d74)
MANIFEST.in: unmerged (581d0be2a5fb3569b06681b7d559f1279aa4104b)
MANIFEST.in: unmerged (581d0be2a5fb3569b06681b7d559f1279aa4104b)
README: unmerged (184ded8e08cb92a14b79c79f9919469ba352ab70)
README: unmerged (184ded8e08cb92a14b79c79f9919469ba352ab70)
...
fatal: git-write-tree: verify_merged: not able to write tree
stg refresh: git-write-tree failed

[cel@dexter main]$


how do i recover?