To Stop a Warlord

by Shannon Sedgwick Davis

  “I want to go raise money,” David said. “I have a story to tell about my captivity, and I want to help my friends go to school. Can you send me there?”

  She warned him that it wasn’t an easy life, that it was cold, that the food was terrible. She said it was hard sleeping in a van. That he’d get homesick.

  But David already knew that the hard way was the best way, that the world didn’t change unless you cut the path. “How soon can I go?” he asked.

  36

  COINED

  A MONTH AFTER I had the fortune of meeting Howard Buffett, I was invited to meet Admiral Brian Losey, the former commander of SEAL Team 6 and now the special operations commander of the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM). He was responsible for all the US Special Operations Forces deployed in Africa. I was to visit his office in Stuttgart, Germany, to discuss our mission. But when I arrived on a cold February morning, I was surprised to discover that this wasn’t the one-on-one meeting I’d anticipated. There were at least half a dozen other people in the room, all strangers to me, their roles unknown. I’d been prepared to have a private and specific discussion with Admiral Losey about operations in the field, but now I had a large audience of strangers. I felt nervous, my guard up. Admiral Losey, fit and polished, his face held in a constant smile, invited me to begin by describing our work.

  After a few formal pleasantries, everyone except Admiral Losey and the State Department representative stood to leave. Now the meeting I’d been prepared for could begin. And it went well. As we talked, I felt Losey’s polish break down a bit. I could sense the person, not just the role. We agreed to coordinate our efforts, laying the foundation for what he called “full operational cooperation,” but we also set some parameters and distinctions for information sharing so as not to compromise Defense or State Department security. I was well aware of the uniqueness of the partnership that entailed unusual coordination between the State Department and Department of Defense. I anticipated there would be differences to negotiate along the way.

  While the meeting highlighted yet another bridge of trust I’d need to build and navigate, I also felt optimistic that our collaboration was about to become more powerful. With Bridgeway’s new air support capabilities arriving soon, and an agreed-on plan to coordinate efforts with Special Operations Forces, we seemed in a good position to follow the trail of the simsim seed and try to find Kony’s suspected camp in Kafia Kingi.

  At the end of the meeting Admiral Losey rose to walk me to the door. “Ms. Sedgwick Davis,” he said sincerely, “we are so grateful for your efforts and I look forward to working with you.” He shook my hand in both of his.

  Within his firm grip I felt something hard and round against my palm. Some kind of disk, a little bigger and thicker than a silver dollar. It was cold on my skin. He was passing it to me in secret. I felt a wave of nervousness and tried to be discreet as I hid the object in my purse. What could he be sharing with me that he didn’t want others to see? And would I know what to do with it or its contents?

  Later, I examined what Admiral Losey had given me. It was a large coin with an engraving of the African continent on each side, surrounded by crests and seals and a ring of African nations’ flags. Presented by the Commander, Special Operations Command Africa, the script read. Procedimus Una. We go together. I suddenly felt like an idiot. Admiral Losey hadn’t been trying to pass me something secret. He had “coined” me, a long-standing military tradition. He only had a certain number of coins in his possession to distinguish exemplary service in the field, and he’d given me one to recognize my work and bless our mission. The collaboration with Special Forces was on solid footing, and I felt incredibly proud. I imagined giving the coin to my boys one day, a symbol of the possibility of triumph against the odds.

  37

  KONY 2012

  ONE EVENING IN early March, Laren and I sat in the mess tent at the Ugandan forward base in Djemah. The US bases were always built away from the Ugandan camps, sometimes as far as twenty minutes away. The physical separation was just one facet of the distance between the forces. There were also inequities. The US Special Forces budget was close to $100 million a year. We’d been told their three bases had cost in excess of $30 million to build, with full mess halls and an abundance of equipment and modern conveniences. They spent as much as $3.5 million annually to supply the bases with reverse osmosis water filtration systems for clean bathing water and preapproved drinking water that had to be transported on contracted aircraft. The contractors flew their helos—bigger than any available to the mission—to bring in air conditioners.

  Over time, some problems would emerge. The US Special Forces troops shifted every six months, pulled in and out of rotation so fast there was hardly time for them to secure familiarity or trust with the Ugandan military personnel. The relationship-building often had to start all over again every few months with each change in personnel.

  Tonight we were eating dinner with Colonel Joseph, the Ugandan overall counter-LRA commander. He was a warm, jovial man with a wide mustache and deep-set brown eyes. When he wasn’t commanding his forward troops, he watched Spanish-language soap operas with English subtitles from his command tent deep in the jungle. He and Laren had a fluid, friendly working relationship. I had never seen Colonel Joseph angry before.

  But tonight the colonel was upset. “They’ve betrayed us,” he said.

  Invisible Children had just released a new film, Kony 2012. Laren and I had watched it for the first time the night before in the business center at the hotel we’d been staying at in Entebbe, the only place where the Internet was strong enough to stream video. I had expected to celebrate with Laren. Even though he no longer worked for Invisible Children, he cared deeply for the people of the organization and their success, and we were ready to applaud another installment in Invisible Children’s highly effective work. But the film had made me cringe. While many the world over would find it moving and galvanizing—it would become the most viral video in the world then, garnering one million views in just one day, and more than a hundred million views in six days—I could see why the tone and content would be upsetting to Colonel Joseph and his fellow Ugandans.

  To them, the film was misleading. Much of the footage used in the video was ten years old, from the time when Ugandan kids were still doing the night commutes to avoid abduction. But the Ugandan military had pushed the LRA out of Uganda in 2006. The night commutes hadn’t happened for at least six years. To the Ugandans, the film paid no respect or gratitude to the significant progress the Ugandans had made against the LRA, and at least some of them felt humiliated and outraged. The Ugandans were glad that there was media attention on the LRA, but dismayed that the film spent so little time on the present realities of the conflict and on the people actually fighting the LRA.

  “Why would they make a film that casts such a negative light on our country and our army?” Colonel Joseph demanded.

  “Sir, I understand your anger,” I said. “It isn’t that they don’t understand the progress made. They want to highlight the things that will cause the biggest response from Americans in order to influence US policy.”

  The response was indeed huge. More than one million people left comments on the film on YouTube, eleven million people shared it on Facebook, and Joseph Kony and the LRA became a major topic of conversation around many dinner and policy-making tables. We had no idea how much publicity would come as a result of Kony 2012, or what the costs of that extreme public attention would be.

  * * *

  —

  Invisible Children was highly unusual in the nongovernmental organization world in that it was primarily funded by high school and college kids—in its early years, 80 percent of the donations made to the organization were in amounts of twenty dollars or less. The viability of the organization relied on the leaders’ ability to maintain a narrative that inspired youth to stay involved. Kony 20
12 was a product and example of Invisible Children’s gifts and successes: using digital space and social media to connect and engage youth in humanitarian work; transforming the activist and donor base for large NGOs; inspiring and mobilizing young people to care about the LRA and igniting their empathy for people outside their country.

  Invisible Children did a brilliant job giving American students an emotional and social connection to some of the most troubling global realities, bringing former LRA abductees to college campuses all over the country. Many of the people who ran Invisible Children were products of that life change, millennials who’d been going about their daily lives until they were suddenly moved to greater awareness and action, having a life-changing revelation about their place and responsibility in the world.

  * * *

  —

  The film was created at a critical time when Congress needed to reauthorize US troop deployment to the counter-LRA mission and there was indication that this reauthorization was at risk. It garnered immediate, positive results: important doors opened in DC, increasing political strength and energy toward stopping the LRA; audiences raised more than twenty million dollars, enabling the expansion of high-frequency radio networks and other projects in Central Africa to protect communities vulnerable to LRA violence; and, as hoped, the deployment was reauthorized.

  Our friend Jason Russell, who had founded Invisible Children with Laren, was the genius behind the film. He’d always been particularly drawn to activist leadership—public speaking, interaction with audiences, mentorship—and he was incredibly good at energizing and inspiring youth. With the release of Kony 2012, he received more significant and rightful praise for his work. He was contacted by news outlets the world over, all wanting interviews with him. He began an intense schedule of media appearances, traveling constantly, sleeping little, trying to meet the demands of the world’s attention. But along with the support and praise, he also started to face criticism. When the public eye that had been such a source of validation became a source of its opposite, it was confusing for him—even toxic.

  Ten days after the release of Kony 2012, Jason suffered a psychotic breakdown, tearing off his clothes on a suburban street near San Diego in the middle of the day, ranting about good and evil, screaming obscenities, and slamming his hands against the pavement until the police took him away. Someone recorded a video of this episode, and it, too, went viral.

  Jason spent nearly two months in a psychiatric hospital before returning home to his wife and children. It was a terrible time, and my heart broke for my friend. A vibrant, charismatic, and solidly good person, a caring soul, had taken a hard turn, and now his health and well-being were on the line. Laren was especially devastated and worried. Both of us were on the phone constantly, checking in with Jason’s family and speaking with Invisible Children staff, all of us deeply concerned for Jason.

  Later, when he had had time to process and heal, Jason reflected on what had caused his breakdown. On top of the physical exhaustion from lack of sleep and too much travel, there was the confusing brew of massive public scrutiny. He told one news source, “On the one hand, there was Bono saying, ‘Jason Russell deserves an Oscar,’ and Oprah wants to fill stadiums for me, and Ryan Seacrest wants me on American Idol. And on the other, there were people saying, ‘These people think they’re white saviors trying to save Africa,’ and, ‘The money goes to corrupt places,’ and, ‘There is a special place in hell for you.’ They were so polar opposite. So extreme. And in my head I wanted to reconcile them and I just couldn’t.” In an interview with Oprah about a year after his breakdown, he said, “I should have been listening to my loved ones. I should have surrendered Kony 2012 and Invisible Children to the people at large, to my colleagues. I should have slowed down, let go. And instead I chose to keep pushing, keep pushing. Your mind is so, so powerful. It’s so strong. And if you feed it with this chaotic noise, you lose who you are.”

  38

  OTUKENE MEANS GRACE

  LATER THAT SPRING, a SOG group stationed at the forward base in Nzara made contact with the LRA. There were no significant captures or defections in the skirmish, no intelligence gains, but as the SOG prepared to return to the base they found a woman hidden in the dense bush. She had gone into labor during the attack and the LRA had left her behind as they fled. She’d labored alone in the jungle, bringing her tiny son into the world in complete isolation. Her baby appeared healthy, a full head of dark curls, fists closed protectively over his sweet sleeping face. But his mother, terrified and weak, was still bleeding from her ordeal. She was brought to the base in Nzara where the nurse helped her into the bed in the medic tent.

  Laren visited her multiple times a day, speaking through an Acholi translator, wishing her and her baby health, checking in with the nurse about their progress. The baby was nursing well and gaining weight, and when Laren visited he was always asleep, his mother curved protectively around him, the baby snug in her shelter.

  On one visit Laren said, “Your baby was born on the day you got your freedom back. What are you going to name him?”

  She said she hadn’t chosen a name yet and asked Laren to suggest one. Laren didn’t feel comfortable taking a parent’s rite, but the nurse kept pressing him. “She wants you to give him a name,” she said.

  “Let’s name him Miracle,” Laren finally suggested. The translator explained that there’s no exact Acholi word for miracle, no direct translation, so they settled on Otukene. Literally, it means “came on its own”—as in, everyone thought it would never happen, but all of a sudden it happened. An impossible grace.

  After two days the mother was still weak. She was running a fever and she said that one of her breasts hurt. The nurse suspected that she had a plugged milk duct or the early stages of mastitis—a painful breast infection not uncommon among nursing mothers—and recommended that she be treated in a hospital. Laren arranged for her transport home to Gulu, Uganda, and two Ugandan soldiers helped her stand and slowly climb the steep stairs of the airplane.

  She and the baby made it safely to the hospital, where she was diagnosed with mastitis. She was promptly put on antibiotics. But it was too late. The infection had spread. She died in the hospital from a treatable infection, and her newborn boy became another orphan of this dreaded war.

  * * *

  —

  I tried to take hope in the arrival, in April, of the Bell 412 helicopter Howard Buffett was funding. The Cessna Caravan airplane had come in February and both mission-specific aircraft were stationed in the Central African Republic. The US Department of State provided fuel for both the Caravan and the Bell as part of their contract with the Ugandan military. The two aircraft had complementary capabilities. The Caravan—provided to us at cost by an aviation firm called Tempus Jets—could land on short, unimproved (i.e., dirt) runways, and was used to transport food and supplies from Entebbe or Obo to Djemah, while the Bell helo could land virtually anywhere and was used to transport troops, pick up defectors, and provide medical evacuations from the bush. Our contract was flexible, and the Bell could overnight in the jungle rather than having to return to a base. Until the United States military would bring its own choppers to Obo in about a year, the Bell 412 would perform nearly 100 percent of the mission’s medevacs and defector pickups, and 70 percent of the troop movements, all at 10 percent of the cost of the two State Department helos. Nine months after the first SOG deployment, we finally filled the mission’s crucial gap in air support.

  Adding the aircraft also meant we added to our team. The mess tent grew to accommodate the pilots and mechanics who now lived on the base so they could always be available for the mission. Among them: John Gianasi, a perennial handyman who’d flown for a private US company chartered to drop water and firefighters when blazes threatened the forests; and B. J. Patterson, an accomplished American bush pilot who spoke Swahili from having lived in Tanzania, and was a rare breed of pilot and
mechanic, able to perform his own maintenance and repairs in the field.

  * * *

  —

  When the Bell arrived, Laren and I dedicated ourselves to helping plan the operation into Kafia Kingi, the disputed area between Sudan and South Sudan, in search of the suspected LRA camp. But even with the mission’s new airlift capabilities, the logistics were next to impossible. With no changes in the Special Forces helicopter assets or permissions, we were short on air support for the operation by at least half. And although more human intelligence was trickling in that confirmed Kony had taken refuge in Kafia Kingi, the Ugandan military had only a vague idea of his location, and, other than the presence of simsim for sale at market, there was no hard evidence that what the informants said was true. By the end of April, they had to concede that the operation was a no-go, for now.

  39

  BIG FISH

  LESS THAN A week later, early on a Saturday morning, my ringing phone jarred me out of sleep. The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was the pink carnation Connor had given me the day before at his school’s Mother’s Day concert. He’d been so proud to hand me my flower, to line up in his colorful polo shirt and sing the special songs his class had learned to honor all of the moms. I didn’t usually get sentimental about the big orchestrated displays of appreciation, the Hallmark moments. I preferred the spontaneous ones, the authentic expressions of love my little ones would give that made me want to freeze us right there in time where nothing else mattered. But I’d been gone so much that spring that I got caught up in the sweetness of the ritual, almost forgetting to record him singing.