To Stop a Warlord

by Shannon Sedgwick Davis

  “I’ve been a soldier all my life,” he said. “This is what I enjoy doing, what I’m fairly good at. It’s my job. But I also like to know that I’m part of doing the right thing. When I fly to Uganda tomorrow, and every day I’m there, I will know that this is the right thing to do.”

  24

  FLIGHT MANIFEST

  “WEAR PLAIN CLOTHES,” Eeben ordered. “Blend in. At the airport, act like you don’t know each other.” A former covert operative for special forces in the South African army, he was chronically suspicious. Not wanting to call any attention to the deployment, he insisted we take different vehicles to the airport the next morning.

  Laren and I arrived three hours early for our flight to Entebbe. We tried to keep busy and look inconspicuous, but everywhere we went, from the coffee shop to the newsstand, we kept running into the trainers. In order not to compromise us or the mission in any way, Eeben had told us we were supposed to pretend not to know them. It was awkward to keep my face blank, to dart my eyes away.

  “I’d make a terrible spy,” I whispered to Laren.

  With still more time to burn and an overwhelming reserve of nervous energy, we finally deposited ourselves in the chair-massage booth. I knew I wouldn’t be able to relax. I just needed a safe place to sit for thirty minutes where I didn’t have to worry about accidentally making forbidden eye contact with a private military contractor.

  We didn’t realize until too late that the massages had taken so long. By the time we reached our gate we were among the last passengers in line to board. We could see Eeben and his men interspersed ahead of us, but it was hard to pick them out because almost every person in line ahead of us seemed to be a buff man with a crew cut, wearing desert tan pants and a T-shirt, G-Shock watch cinched around his thick wrist.

  “Is there a private military convention in Kampala?” Laren joked under his breath. “I’ve never seen this many private soldier–looking dudes in one place.”

  I felt as if I was the only female passenger on the entire flight.

  On the tarmac, my rolling suitcase rattled, making my arm vibrate. I never check my bags when I’m flying overseas. It’s not worth the risk of losing baggage and time trying to replace essentials in a remote area. Now I was headed for a training camp where we’d stay in tents without electricity or running water, much less a store where I could get a toothbrush or underwear.

  Just as we reached the stairs to the airplane, the gate agent stopped me. “That bag won’t fit in the overhead,” he said. “It has to go under, ma’am.”

  “It will fit,” I said. “I fly a lot, and I know how to pack for small overhead bins.”

  “We’re low on bin space,” he said. “I’ll be happy to gate check it for you.”

  “Thanks, but I’ll take it on board with me.” I was imagining what instructions I’d have to give on the lost luggage form. I wasn’t even sure exactly where I was going.

  “Ma’am, it’s too big, it won’t fit.”

  “It will fit. It came all the way from San Antonio, Texas, in an overhead bin. I know it will fit.” I looked at Laren to back me up, but he rolled his eyes at me. He was clearly thinking I should just check it. But I was too mad and frustrated to back down. “I’m bringing this bag on board with me.”

  “No, that is impossible,” he said. “The bag must be checked.”

  I don’t know what possessed me, but I began to empty the bag, toiletries, clothes, computer cords, journal, into Laren’s arms. “Go ahead and check it,” I said, handing the flight attendant the empty bag.

  Eeben later joked that Laren looked like a supermarket when he boarded the plane, his arms full of my belongings. I walked on behind him, still on a tirade, looking into the open overhead bins. “There’s bin space here, there’s bin space here,” I said, jabbing my finger at the numerous places where my bag would have fit. I was so indignant over the bag situation that I didn’t notice Laren had frozen ahead of me in the aisle until I bumped into him.

  “Lar-en!” a stranger in an aisle seat called out.

  “Shannon,” Laren said, turning back to me, his eyes wide. “I’d like you to meet someone. This is Lafras Luitingh. Lafras, this is Shannon Sedgwick Davis.”

  Lafras Luitingh was Eeben’s ex–business partner in Executive Outcomes. His security company, Saracen International, was one of the candidates Laren had investigated when we were looking for someone to conduct the training mission. Since hiring Eeben, we’d learned that the two had had a major disagreement and had stopped talking to each other. Completely by chance, we were flying to Uganda with Lafras and his band of private contractors.

  Lafras flashed me a genial smile, showing his large, even white teeth. “It’s a pleasure, Ms. Davis. From the looks of it your little project is going well and you’ve hired the A-team to do it, eh?”

  I managed a polite smile before proceeding down the aisle and squeezing into my center seat between Laren and a man built like a linebacker. All around us were men whose shoulders were so broad they took up a seat and a half, their necks as massive as trees. We would learn from a New York Times article that Lafras’s group, four times the size of Eeben’s, was deploying on a mission commissioned by Erik Prince—America’s most notorious private military contractor—to intervene against Somali pirates. Almost immediately after landing they would be sent home.

  * * *

  —

  We later learned through a contact at State that within twelve hours of our flight, the US State Department received a cable about a suspicious plane manifest: a flight from Johannesburg to Entebbe that included both Eeben Barlow’s and Lafras Luitingh’s private military groups, plus two American citizens, Laren Poole and Shannon Sedgwick Davis. Lucky for us the cable came across a friend’s desk at the State Department. If he’d been off that day, or if the cable had been delivered to someone else, he wouldn’t have been able to ease concerns within the diplomatic community. Fortunately, he reassured State that he knew what we were up to and we traveled on to the training site without incident.

  IT WAS YOU

  David Ocitti

  AT LUNCH ONE day, a boy approached David in the schoolyard. David’s heart leapt. Someone was daring to reach across the divide that kept him isolated. His face opened into a grateful smile.

  But his schoolmate didn’t return the smile. “I saw you,” he said, his voice ragged, as though holding back the desire to cry. “You were in the group of LRA who killed my dad.”

  David felt a terrible pinching in his chest. He began to sweat. His mouth went dry.

  “I saw you,” the boy said again. “I saw your face. It was you.”

  In the six months of David’s captivity, there had been countless raids and attacks. It was LRA protocol to push the young recruits to the forefront during an attack—to put them on the front lines of danger, but also to ensure that their faces would be seen, that the communities would identify children as perpetrators. It was part of the strategy to sever the kids’ ties with home, to make them feel they could never return. On the worst days, memories of that terrible night intruded: Odhiambo with his machete raised, yelling, “You better call out, ‘Save me!’ ”

  “It was you, I saw you,” the boy repeated. His face was gaunt, dark circles under fierce eyes. “You killed my father.”

  David wanted to run—from this boy’s pain, a mirror of his own, from the bitter taste in his mouth, the images he couldn’t stop in which he was the one holding the stick. He was a victim, he knew. But to his classmate, he was a perpetrator. He wasn’t another child who had lost a father. He was the enemy.

  “If you saw me, I must have been there,” David said, the words barely escaping his tight throat. “But it wasn’t my wish.”

  The boy lunged closer, as though he was about to hit David, or throw him to the ground. But he stopped short, pulled back. “I saw you!” he screamed again as he
fled.

  * * *

  —

  Some days it was David who recognized someone’s face from an attack. He would remember on what day the attack had occurred, at what time, what weapons had been used against the person’s family members. Many days, he broke into tears while at school, the onslaught of grief and remorse so intense that he had to ask the headmaster for permission to leave school for the rest of the day to hide in the dim quiet of his mother’s home.

  Doubt battered him. What have I done? he thought. Do I even deserve to be here? As much as David wanted to run from the past, he knew that the only way forward was to admit, yes, it happened; to remember, it’s not happening now; and then to ask, What can I do now?

  25

  FALSE RIDGE

  A LATE FEBRUARY attack on Bamangana, a village near a small Congolese military camp, made the need for the training more urgent. Every household in the community was attacked, food and goods stolen, and thirty residents kidnapped. Six Congolese soldiers were killed, their camp burned. A number of civilians were dead, including a village elder, a woman who was burned alive in front of the community, and a fourteen-year-old girl who was shot in the chest.

  Despite the necessity of taking action to curb the escalating crisis, there were still risks to mitigate. There’s always a danger, not just in military training, but in any kind of development work, to come into a foreign country and say, “Here, let me teach you what I learned someplace else, because it’s the only thing I’ve seen work.” But importing strategies from other situations, applying them in new contexts, isn’t always effective. The Ugandan military had received training from foreign armies in the past, and the Ugandans had been responsive and disciplined about incorporating new tools and strategies. But they’d sometimes been given the wrong tools, strategies effective for European contexts that didn’t work against the LRA. Eeben’s men were extremely experienced; they’d operated with armies from diverse African countries, in diverse conflicts. They’d dealt in the past with LRA-type organizations. Along with the irreplaceable credibility of having done it many times themselves they had the flexibility to tailor their previous experiences to fit the current needs. This is a critical reason why we had picked them to conduct the training. And this is why the Ugandans accepted them, too. For someone in the UPDF who’d been in active combat for a decade, the training was no good if it was purely theoretical. Eeben’s team was the most experienced and effective option to navigate the terrain and conflict.

  * * *

  —

  As many as 1,200 Ugandan soldiers applied to participate in the training, and the 280 most promising were brought to Bondo to undergo a selection process for the four-month program that would cover all aspects of hostage release in a rural environment, including: operational design; tactics, techniques, and procedures; patrols and reconnaissance; tracking; rigorous physical training; and, most important, target discrimination to avoid at all costs harming captives and civilians.

  Out of the 280 Ugandan troops brought to Bondo, fewer than half would pass the selection to complete the training. On the first day, each soldier was given a hundred-pound backpack filled with sandbags and told to run. “Be the first one back, don’t be last!” the trainer yelled. The course was seven miles long and went up a mountain with a seven-hundred-foot elevation gain. When the men came to the end of the course, sweating and panting, relieved to have completed the first arduous task, they were told to run it again. They ran three rounds in all.

  The selection course was physically demanding to the extreme. But the challenge was also psychological. “Out there in the bush there are lots of false ridges,” Eeben explained. He meant the terrain, and also the metaphoric false ridges of hardship, hunger, thirst, exhaustion, and threat. “You keep thinking you’re about to reach the top but then there’s another ridge ahead of you. You have to have the physical capacity to keep going. You have to have the heart and eagerness, too.”

  After the selection process, a tight training schedule followed: GPS navigational system training, pseudo ops, human rights, and contact drills that ran all day long. The soldiers learned how to cross a road while covering their own tracks, move together in formation, move during live fire, track in the rain, make contact during an advance, and establish a cache of medicine and food at strategic locations. They also learned how to be comfortable and confident with their teammates, to believe in each other—and themselves. Since many of the soldiers did not have adequate basic training skills, Eeben had to stretch an already time-pressured program to incorporate basic training with the advanced training curriculum.

  One of the most important lessons was in operating pseudo groups, small units that would mimic nomadic traders or the LRA themselves in their dress, grooming, habits, and language. In disguise, pseudo groups could operate discreetly in LRA-controlled areas. This tactic required a higher level of training and discipline, because pseudo groups have to operate in remote areas without Ugandan military support. If a soldier is hurt or if the group runs out of food, they can’t call for help; they have to fend for themselves and maintain their cover.

  * * *

  —

  Training began smoothly. Then, in early March, terrible news came in from northern Uganda. Colonel Walter Ochora was dead.

  He was only fifty-four years old. It had been an election year and his doctors said that the stress of the election cycle—raising money, canvassing, his constant string of commitments—had taken a toll on his already poor health. He’d been grossly overweight, he drank more than anyone I’d ever met, he’d been suffering for years from lung disease, but I’d only seen his lively and jolly side, his abundant smiles against the backdrop of his endlessly chiming cellphones. His vibrancy and steadfast commitment to peace had launched us on our path, and it was hard to accept that he was gone. I had already allowed myself to fantasize about calling him with the news of Kony’s capture. I’d imagined him saying, We did it, Iron Lady! and bursting into his rolling laugh. Although he had no role in the actual operations of the training mission, I had still viewed him as one of our guardians. We would never have undertaken it without his support and advocacy, and his sad death made our precarious cause feel even more vulnerable.

  26

  CAMP BONDO

  TO GET TO Camp Bondo, the Ugandan military training facility in northwestern Uganda, you drive seven to ten hours, grappling with inevitable flat tires and watching elephants swagger by on the side of the road. Or you charter a flight from Entebbe to Arua and take a four-by-four to the training site, a small clearing in the dense trees.

  The camp consisted of a few barracks structures with metal roofs, terrible in the intense heat, where the Ugandan army troops slept; an operations tent that also served as the camp kitchen; a cluster of ground tents where the trainers and Laren and I slept; a pit latrine; and several camp showers, where thatched grass served as a curtain around big plastic bags filled with water that would warm up during the day under the hot sun. Around the camp stood rolling hills, green and lush during Uganda’s two rainy seasons, and huge trees where black mambas and at least one jungle viper lived.

  I’d come into camp regularly, staying for a week or two at a time. I’d always check in with Laren first. We’d take a walk in the blazing heat and he’d give me the lay of the land, and I’d try to read between the lines for the things he left unsaid. There was no way he could bring me up to speed on every single detail of the training. He had to be selective about what he shared. And so I listened carefully to his reports, trying to hear in what he said the realities that were unspoken.

  There was no road map for our intervention. We were essentially building the airplane as it flew. Laren was stationed at Bondo for the four months of training. He was my eyes and ears, taking copious notes, documenting daily life and training regimens. And he was an invaluable go-between, helping the Ugandans and South Africans communicate their needs and d
ifferences. As much as I relied on him, and as hard as I knew he was working, I could also see that he was in an impossible position. There were constant bumps and challenges to navigate: equipment shortages, and a scant supply of essentials—food, water, even toilet paper. By April several instructors had fallen ill. A number got sick from untreated water and poor food preparation hygiene—enough that Eeben put his team’s medic in charge of the kitchen. One trainer contracted malaria and had to be medevaced.

  Laren was the peacemaker and go-between, communicating the trainers’ grievances to the Ugandan higher-ups when the camp ran short on provisions. But many of the trainers were suspicious of him, by nature wary of outsiders, and unwilling to take direction from someone they saw as a tenderfoot. I didn’t know until later the extent to which some of the South Africans ostracized him. Somehow, in the tangle of relationships and cultures, Laren was able to remain singularly focused. In the many years that he’d been involved in the LRA conflict he had met so many people deeply impacted by the violence, and he was so driven to make a difference that he put up with a lot.

  * * *

  —

  I’d wake in the morning to the sound of roosters crowing and someone sweeping the dirt in front of the tents. I’d walk to the pit latrine and see the morning crew checking around the perimeter of the camp for jungle vipers or other animals that might have come near in the night.