To Stop a Warlord

by Shannon Sedgwick Davis

  This is when the SOG first experienced the LRA’s effective tactic for retreating from a firefight: a “hasty ambush.” While most of the group fled the scene, five or six combatants were left behind to fire at the attacker to slow their advance, buying more time for senior leadership to escape. Lieutenant Charles’s group hit three hasty ambushes as they attempted to pursue the LRA and were pelted by fire. In the third ambush, one of the SOG soldiers took a shot right to the neck. He died almost instantly, becoming the first SOG casualty.

  Lieutenant Charles’s group dropped their packs, cut through the last hasty ambush, and continued to track the LRA, still without contact from mobile command. The other flanking force, stuck in the marsh, never appeared. But the gunship ordered from Djemah finally arrived overhead. If we’d known then what we know now, the gunship might have won the battle. But from the air they couldn’t tell the LRA from the SOG. They didn’t have enough loiter time to distinguish the good guys from the bad, so they waved off and flew home. In future operations, the SOG soldiers would put bright orange tape called Day-Glo on the top of their hats so they could be identified from the air. Lieutenant Charles’s group continued to track for six hours, but after so long without contact with command, and about to run out of water, they returned.

  More SOG soldiers arrived the next day to help track. By that time the LRA had split into three groups, one heading south, the other two north through the Central African Republic. Later we’d learn that Kony’s group had covered their tracks and headed up to Kafia Kingi. One SOG group tracked south, but by then the LRA trail they were following was already two days old—the LRA had apparently kept walking through the night. The SOG group called for a helo to come pick them up and fly them in front of the LRA’s suspected position. But there were no helicopters available.

  By the end of the contact a few LRA members had been killed and some intelligence—cellphones and satellite phones—had been recovered. But we had missed the biggest opportunity in years to drop a net over the organization.

  31

  CROCODILES AND KILLER BEES

  THE LRA WASN’T the only enemy in the field. The terrain itself was deadly.

  The swamps, the miles of boot-high water, the constant rain—the soldiers and their belongings were always damp. The sun would peek through holes in the canopy, not nearly long enough to dry them while they were walking, and then disappear again behind the thick leaves. Or they’d hit a river and have to walk through it carrying their gear, wet from head to toe again. Some of the men developed debilitating blisters that turned into bone-deep wounds. But they had no choice. They had to keep walking. And every day they had to keep moving through hunger pains. They carried rations for two meals a day: a tin of canned corned beef (called bully beef), canned beans in tomato sauce, dry crackers, or posho and dry beans cooked over a fire.

  One day, Feni, one of the SOG soldiers, wasn’t looking so good. He was pale and out of sorts in the morning, and as the group broke camp he complained of aches and nausea. The other soldiers divided his belongings among them to lighten his load for his march. They progressed for a few hours, walking as they always did through the bush in a single-file line, for security reasons and for ease of movement. Suddenly the long column of men stopped. From the back of the line it was impossible to see what was happening five hundred feet ahead. The men passed hand and arm signals down the column to communicate. Finally, word reached the men at the end of the line that Feni had gone down. He was having seizures. He had malaria, they realized, a parasitic disease that struck fast. Symptoms included incredibly high fevers, vomiting, dehydration, and horrible headaches. In the best cases, it caused complete collapse. In the worst cases, the parasitic infection could enter your brain and kill you. He was cycling through fever and chills and it took constant effort to try to keep him hydrated and cool his body temperature. Ultimately, he survived. But he wasn’t the last to suffer from the illness. Malaria was commonplace among the Ugandan military camps, and Laren would also get malaria close to a dozen times before the mission was through. Malaria prophylaxis medications are only 60 to 70 percent effective—and they aren’t meant to be taken every day for years at a time. I would take preventive meds for my visits, but for Laren, who lived there full-time save for brief and infrequent visits home, it wasn’t really an option.

  The threat of snakes, tarantulas, scorpions, and poisonous centipedes was as present as the inevitable bouts of malaria. There were constrictor snakes up to forty feet long. The venom of smaller snakes—hooded cobras and black and green mambas—could be fatal, and the soldiers had little or no access to antivenom in the field. The only prevention was to wear boots at all times, especially at night.

  Once, an entire SOG camp woke in the night, screaming and yelling, stripping off their clothes. The camp had been swarmed by safari ants. They move in huge colonies, sometimes twenty million strong, and pull flesh up in their strong pincers when they bite. The men discovered thousands of ants in and around each tent, and when they shone light outside there were so many ants it looked like the ground itself was moving. The colony was swarming en masse after a rain, trying to find high ground. In several places the ants had piled on top of each other, ants upon ants, forming towers three feet high. The men had to take cooking fuel and douse the ants and torch them—without accidentally torching their tents.

  Even a creature as small as a bee could be fatal. Central African bees are aggressive and numerous and attracted to the salt in sweat—and in the jungle it didn’t take long for it to build up. Cooking the early evening meal could be an especially dangerous enterprise. When the posho started cooking, the bees would swarm. The men did their best to keep covered—to wear jackets, light scarves over their faces, a hat, tight sunglasses if possible so the bees couldn’t get to their eyes.

  One day, a group was tracking through an especially thick part of the bush. Central Africa is largely flat, but every few miles or so the land dips down to a small river and then the elevation goes up another couple hundred feet to a dry stretch, and then it drops back down into another river. Down by the rivers the bush is thickest. The point man at the front of the column, who also served as lookout and tracker, was responsible for hacking the trail for the rest of the men to follow. On this day, he managed to hack himself into a large bees’ nest. The furious bees attacked. It was like being caught in an ambush. The stings were incredibly painful, and the men were stuck in a single-file line, carrying forty or fifty pounds of gear on their backs, with nowhere to run, some stung so badly they fell ill.

  At night, the soldiers would string their ponchos up with sticks, elevate the makeshift tents, and put grass underneath for sleeping. Setting up near a tree added extra protection from the rain. But one night lightning struck the tree where a private from northern Uganda was sleeping. The lightning blasted through his body, coming out his legs and into the ground, killing him instantly. His fellow soldiers wrapped him in an orange body bag to prepare him to be sent home.

  Another evening a different SOG squad was preparing to cross the Vovodo River and sent three soldiers to reconnaissance the other side and make sure there were no hostile forces waiting on the other shore. The three men crossed the river, found that the other side was safe, and were crossing back, when a crocodile rose up out of the water and clipped one of the men in the leg. The man escaped the clutches of the crocodile by sticking his fingers in its eyes. But the Ugandan military couldn’t fly him to get medical treatment because they didn’t have access to a plane or helicopter that was rated to fly at night. He had to spend the night in the bush with a mutilated leg—yet another reminder that battle wasn’t the only danger. The land and its creatures, even the weather, could be deadly. Every close call, every terrible death, drove home our dire need for better air support. It was more than Bridgeway could afford, and I didn’t know where else to turn for help.

  PEACE CLUB

  David Ocittir />
  DAVID SAT ON a hard wooden stool in front of the sparse classroom, so nervous his knees shook. He watched as groups of students passed by in the hall, some peering in at him for a moment before hurrying on. Just before his meeting was to begin, a few students, two boys and a girl about his age, ventured in the door. He took a breath to introduce himself, and a few more students trickled in, sitting anxiously on the edges of their chairs. Then a few more. The room was far from full, but it was no longer empty.

  “Welcome to Peace Club,” David began. “All of us in this room have one thing in common. In fact, every single person in this school shares this trait with us: all of us have been affected in some way by the LRA. Maybe we know someone who was killed. Maybe even someone in our own family was murdered or abducted. Maybe we ourselves were kidnapped by the rebels and held captive.

  “And yet, this conflict that unites us, that has affected everyone in northern Uganda, divides us, too. The LRA is taboo. We are discouraged from talking openly about the conflict. And that’s what motivated me to start the Peace Club. I was captured by the LRA and forced into their ranks for six months. The way that I’ve been treated here at school since my return has pushed me to break the silence. To close the gap between me and you. To advocate for my fellow survivors. And to bridge the distrust and misunderstanding that separate all of us who in fact share the same pain.

  “I almost dropped out of school. But I decided that I wasn’t going to let the stigma define me. Instead of running away from the past or from others’ judgment, I want to create awareness of what it’s like to be abducted. So, tell me. Who is the LRA?”

  “Rebels,” a boy called out.

  “Killers,” someone else said.

  “They say Joseph Kony is a demon, that he runs so fast that his feet leave the ground. They say his eyes glow red,” the youngest student in the room said.

  Those gathered began trading myths about Kony’s supernatural powers. Into the noise, a single voice cut through.

  “No.” It was a tall, thin boy who had been sitting silently at the back of the room. “If you want to know who is the LRA, I’ll tell you. The LRA is us.”

  * * *

  —

  By the time David graduated from high school, there were Peace Clubs all across northern Uganda. The clubs led sensitization activities on how to build trust in communities and how to treat returnees; organized debates on topics such as defection and forgiveness; performed charity work, cleaning camps for displaced persons and distributing water cans and basins; and engaged in civic education, learning about peaceful ways to bring about political change. As the Peace Club movement grew, more and more survivors came forward—others who had been abducted and managed to escape, who had been in hiding, not wanting to identify as returnees. Even the boy who had confronted David at school, blaming David for his father’s death, joined Peace Club. “We are the same,” he told David. “I am lucky, I wasn’t taken. But we share the same path.” That was the message for hope and change rippling through communities in northern Uganda: we are all victims of the LRA, and together, we can repair the wound of war and rebuild our communities.

  32

  FATHER, DAUGHTER

  IN OCTOBER, A month into the second SOG training, I got a text from Ben Keesey. Call me, good news! he wrote.

  On the phone, he told me that President Obama had decided on a course of action in response to the LRA disarmament bill that he’d signed over a year ago. In a letter to John Boehner, Speaker of the House of Representatives, he had announced the deployment of approximately one hundred US Special Operations forces—including Green Berets—to the region to “provide information, advice and assistance to select partner nation forces” and be “a significant contribution toward counter-LRA efforts.”

  An L.A. Times article soon reported that the Special Forces would “help track the movements of the guerrillas and share intelligence from communications intercepts and satellite imagery” and “help deliver communications gear to villagers.” While emphasizing the limited scope of the intervention—Special Forces wouldn’t engage in combat with the LRA unless it was necessary for self-defense—the article underscored the significance of the deployment, suggesting that it could be “an exception to traditional American foreign policy of avoiding military involvement in sub-Saharan Africa, a region where the United States is generally thought to have humanitarian but not strategic interests.”

  Not in our interests. I thought of the meetings with legislators at Muneer’s home, their support of our work but the disappointing outcome. Now Special Forces were on the way, bringing skills, resources, technology. My mind raced with possibility: air support, satellite imagery. It felt like the tide was truly turning.

  Ben later told me one of the things that had moved Obama to do something about the violence: his daughter Malia had seen an Invisible Children film about the LRA crisis on Facebook and had asked him over dinner what the United States was doing about it. I’d heard it rumored that something similar had happened with Jenna Bush and her father—that she had been the one to convince President Bush to participate in Operation Lightning Thunder. These tender stories stoked my hope for a better human future. A daughter took her father’s hand and pointed to a wound in the world. Her father listened. It gave me such faith in young people, in their awareness and strong hearts, in their power to reach the older generation and build a better world.

  33

  JAMALED

  LAREN SHARED LITTLE of my optimism about the US Special Forces deployment. He said that the buzz and excitement far exceeded the reality of what they’d likely accomplish on the ground. More than half of the hundred uniformed US military personnel would be based in Entebbe, Uganda, far from the LRA presence—with only thirty-six Special Forces split between forward bases in Congo, the Central African Republic, and South Sudan. There was no plan to embed US Special Forces into the Ugandan military tracking teams, or get them in the field in a meaningful way.

  He agreed that the deployment had the potential to be a tipping point against the LRA, but he cautioned that it was going to require a lot of political noise demanding tangible results.

  “If there’s no heat to deliver results, we’re just going to be swimming in an endless status quo bog,” he said.

  But I wasn’t willing or able to abandon my hope that the deployment signaled a unique opportunity to share resources and efforts toward a common goal, and my high spirits continued as I prepped for a trip to Uganda: to Camp Bondo, where I would check in on Eeben’s second SOG training; and to Entebbe, to meet with the first-deployed Green Berets.

  * * *

  —

  Eeben had decided to expand his team for the second training. The trainers were building on lessons learned the first time around, and the new SOG soldiers were proving to be extremely proficient. But the vulnerabilities in personalities were beginning to show. The trainers frequently complained about food and conditions, and threatened to quit. Some of the trainers lost a significant amount of weight—over thirty pounds in two months—due to poor nutrition. They sometimes bought food out of their own salaries, and blamed Eeben for not insisting on better conditions. Eeben told them, “Suck it up. We’re not here to waste money.”

  I realized on my visit that a lot of the change in morale had one simple cause: the heat. It was excruciating. Laren saw me looking miserable one afternoon, trying to take cover from the heat by scrunching as much of my body as possible under the scant shade of a tree, and he walked over to give me a pep talk. “Hey, boss,” he said, “just so you know, everyone here looks forward to your visits because you always encourage and inspire them. You’ve got to power through and do your thing.” He was right. Without my realizing it, my expression had morphed into a near-constant scowl. It was over one hundred degrees, with no reprieve.

  Laren was steady and stoic through all of it—so much so that he didn’t te
ll me about a truly dangerous incident that occurred early in the second training. Perhaps as a way to laugh their way through tough conditions, or to fight back against circumstances they found unfair, many of the South African trainers would play tricks on people in the camp, falling out of their chairs laughing when someone had been had. One day, Laren was the butt of their prank, one they had pulled on others in the past—and the joke went way too far. A few of the trainers conspired to put jamalgota seeds in Laren’s beans and posho. The jamalgota seeds, dubbed “jamal beans” by the trainers, are a potent laxative, causing severe intestinal inflammation and abdominal cramps. The night Laren was “jamaled,” he became violently ill. Apparently, a number of the trainers were also jamaled at one point or another during the training: one for being too slow in producing an intelligence product, another for being too grumpy. Even Eeben himself was jamaled, for being too strict. Although it was meant as a prank, an overdose of jamalgota can be lethal. I didn’t realize until much later how vulnerable Laren had been.

  And although I understood the weight and challenge of his responsibilities, I lacked a full understanding of what his role as the ground coordinator for the mission required of him. When he shared stories of camp life, they were most often experiences of camaraderie, not conflict. He’d been out in the field once on a training mission with Eeben and some of the Ugandan troops, and after a long and difficult day in the bush, they’d been setting up camp for the night, telling stories, shooting the breeze, when one of the Ugandan soldiers had said, “We’re like brothers, but we are strangers to each other.” It was true. They had completely divergent backgrounds, came from different countries and cultures and circumstances—and yet they had the same goal, believed in the same thing. As Laren said, they were bound in a strange brotherhood.