by Sam Childers
Neither of my parents knew my brothers and I were into drugs. And they sure didn’t know about the sex. I burn with shame now when I think about it. As with pot, I got experience at an early age. My first time, I was not quite fourteen, and she was a grown woman, a neighbor who lived down the street from us. Over the next few years I slept with partners by the dozens, from girls younger than I was up to women who must have been forty or forty-five, middle-aged ladies with families and careers who just wanted to walk on the wild side for a little while. I mowed yards for several of them who lived in our neighborhood, but I entertained them in bed too. I remember more than once Mom taking a phone call and then hollering outside to me, “Sam, Mrs. So-and-so wants to know when you’re coming to mow her yard.” And I would think, Oh no! Not Mrs. So-and-so again! But most of the time I went.
By the time I got to high school, my life was one nonstop party. It’s a miracle I didn’t get killed. A lot of the people I ran with in those days ended up dead in car wrecks, driving when they were drunk or high or both. When I left high school, I was taking everything I could get my hands on, which was a lot of stuff. I smoked pot constantly. I started shooting up cocaine and heroin, sometimes both at once. When I first took LSD, I swallowed it in a pill, but later on my buddies and I dissolved it in water and shot it up for an instant acid rush. Then we’d keep the buzz going with whatever else we had around. Sometimes it was whiskey, sometimes PCP (we called it angel dust), sometimes amphetamines, sometimes quaaludes (which supposedly enhanced sexual pleasure).
I started dealing drugs, which gave me even more money so I could buy even more drugs. By the time I was sixteen, people were calling me Doc because I could find a vein faster and shoot somebody up quicker than anybody else in town. I gave plenty of people their first hit. I bought a Triumph 750 motorcycle with a chopper frame, using some of my drug profits, though a lot of the time I was too drunk or stoned to even sit on it, much less ride it. I’d gotten my first motorcycle when I was about eight and immediately taught myself to pop wheelies in the front yard. My dad must have bought me six or seven little motorcycles and dirt bikes before I bought my first real one. I’ve loved bikes ever since, to the point where the biker lifestyle eventually became a major part of who I was.
Besides drugs and sex, the third big thing in my life was fighting. My dad taught me why to fight and how to win; he also taught me a lesson about respect and about taking charge that shaped my view of the world. My dad was a Christian and a good provider who loved his family and followed the Lord the best he knew how. By the time I knew him, he didn’t pick fights or go looking for them like he might have once, but he sure would finish them. He couldn’t stand to see a helpless person get bullied, and he had no hesitation wading into a situation if he thought somebody was being treated unfairly. I know now that the urge to protect people who can’t protect themselves is a lot of what has kept me coming back to Africa over the past ten years. A willingness to fight another man’s war. Thanks, Dad, for showing me the way.
One time Dad and I were hauling a pickup-load of manure down the road outside of Cohasset with Dad’s friend Herb. There was nothing really wrong with Herb; he was a good guy. But he was a little slow and an easy target for people who wanted to make fun of somebody. Two wannabe bikers riding Hondas came by hollering and cussing at Herb and kicking the door of his truck, making fun of him and trying to run him off the road.
“Just keep going,” Dad said. These two guys were scaring Herb, but he did what Dad said and kept driving. They wouldn’t let up. They kept yelling and trying to bump us into the ditch. Finally Dad said, “Herb, I guess you better pull over.” Herb steered over to the side of the road and stopped.
Dad opened the glove box, pawed around inside for a minute, then pulled out a big monkey wrench. I had an idea what was up. “I’ll help you, Dad!” I said, eager to get in on the action.
He stopped still and looked right at me. “You stay in the truck,” he ordered. “Don’t say nothing, just stay in the truck.”
The two hecklers had pulled off the road too, just up ahead of us. When they saw Dad walking toward them, they ran back toward the truck to meet him. The looks on their faces said they were thinking today was going to be their day. After all, Dad was probably twice as old as they were. From my point of view, it appeared that they planned on pounding this old manure-hauling geezer.
They met on the side of the road and we heard a quick thump! thump! Before we knew what was happening, both would-be attackers were on the ground with blood running from their heads. Dad turned around and walked back to the truck, a calm expression on his face. He opened the door, tossed the wrench on the dashboard, and said, “Come on, Herb, let’s go,” like nothing ever happened. We drove on to the house. It was the first example I saw of somebody fighting another man’s war. It wasn’t long before I had a chance to practice the lesson Dad taught me.
Once I got the hang of it, I practiced fighting a lot. I don’t know why I liked to fight so much. Maybe it was because I heard so many stories about my dad being a boxer and being in the Marine Corps and I wanted to show him what I could do, wanted him to be proud of me. Maybe it was that like everything else I liked to do, fighting gave me a rush, especially when the other guy was bigger than me. When I was in the ninth grade, I had a fight with the biggest bully in the school. He stopped swinging for a split second, and I hit him a nice straight one, square in the chin. It knocked him out. Actually it was a lucky punch, and the kid should have beat me to a pulp, but the way it turned out, I won by KO. Word got around that I had knocked out this dude, and everybody was scared to death of me after that. They left me alone, at least for a while.
In high school I couldn’t stand to see kids getting picked on. Most of the time when I fought, it was to protect people who couldn’t protect themselves. There were four groups of kids at my school: jocks, nerds, hoods, and regulars. I was a hood (short for hoodlum), and while we were rough, we didn’t pick on defenseless people. It was mostly the jocks who did that, and so it was mostly the jocks I fought with. One day I was walking down the hall and saw one of the school’s football gods giving a little nerd a hard time. He hocked a huge clam and spit it right on the guy’s locker because he knew the kid was too intimidated to do anything about it. The jock didn’t see me, but I saw him.
I came up behind Mr. Football, grabbed him by the neck, and started ramming his face into the locker. Hard. Wham! His nose gave way against the metal with a crunching sound. Blood spurted from his face, arcing onto the wall. Wham! The blood flowed faster. Wham! Still faster. The principal came sprinting down the hall. He also happened to be Mr. Football’s father. He marched me to his office and called my dad. I’d been caught fighting in school before, and this time I could be expelled. While we waited for my dad, the principal cussed me out until his face was purple, and I cussed him right back. Dad left work and came down to the school.
When my father walked in the door, the principal quit yelling. Dad asked what happened.
“Your boy’s been fighting again,” the principal said, fuming. “This time he really roughed up my son. Broke his nose! And my son was completely innocent. Sam hit first.”
My dad turned to me. “Tell me what happened.”
“He was bullying somebody who couldn’t fight back, and I did something about it.”
My dad turned to the principal. “Okay, what are you going to do?”
“We’re going to suspend him for three days.”
“All right,” Dad answered. “We’ll make sure he does his work at home.” Then he stood up to leave and looked at me. “Come on, boy,” he said, “we’re through here. You done good.” I spent the next three days doing my lessons at home.
I was getting a reputation as a tough guy, which meant people wanted to pick fights with me, hoping they could say they’d beaten up Sam Childers. Kind of like being the fastest gun in the West. It’s great to be fastest, but the problem is everybody comes gunning for you because the
y want to be the fastest.
I can’t even begin to remember all the fights I had, but one example will give you some idea of what most of them were like. It was in the bar at the Sugar Hills ski lodge. I looked a lot older than the fifteen years I was, and didn’t have any trouble getting served in bars since the drinking age then was eighteen. The local dogcatcher—a former high school jock and serious bodybuilder named Rock—came in and started to pick a fight with me. Rock was in his mid- to late twenties, more than six feet tall, and a big, tough dude. Beating the tar out of me, even though I was smaller, would give him bragging rights because everybody in town knew I’d never lost a fight. He called me out, and as we were walking over to the dance floor to fight, he hit me hard on the back of the head with his fist. I reached into my pocket and grabbed my Buck knife—a sturdy hunting knife that folds like a pocketknife—and clutched it to give my fist some weight.
I pulled that fist out of my pocket and hit Rock in the eye as hard as I could. Then I kept hitting him again and again in the same place. After about the third wallop, there was blood everywhere, and Rock the jock was on the floor, unconscious.
That was on a Friday night. The next Monday morning Rock’s mother called my mother, wanting her to pay Rock’s doctor bill. Mom asked her how old her son was. Then I heard her say, “Well ma’am, I’m so sorry that this has happened. I’ve been telling my son that he has to be nicer to people and hold on to his temper. But ma’am, my son is only fifteen years old, and your son hit first.” That pretty much put an end to the conversation.
It didn’t take long for word to get around that I had beaten up Rock and beat him good. That enhanced my reputation even more as a guy nobody wanted to mess with. Even people who could have whipped me easily were afraid to tangle with the high school kid who sent Rock to the doctor.
Mom defended me like she always did, even though by that time she was beginning to figure out something weird was going on in my life. She started asking me questions, but I always denied I had anything to do with drinking or drugs. Eventually she knew better than to believe me, but she still never lost sight of the prophecy that I would be a preacher. She held on tight to that future hope.
It took a lot of years and a lot of heartache before that future came to be. Yet even in high school and during all the wasted years that followed, my experiences were shaping me and preparing my heart to defend weak, innocent people in Africa who couldn’t fight for themselves.
When I came home from that first trip to Southern Sudan in 1998, all I thought about was going back. Those children and their families needed somebody to fight their war for them. But was it me? I lived in a completely different world with my own responsibilities and had a family of my own to take care of. How could I ever make the transition from one life to another? I had no clue.
“Boy, somebody’s gonna kill you one of these days!” That prediction never came true through all my years as an outlaw. Would it happen on the battlefield of an African civil war? My first trip, I’d gone over as a volunteer roofing contractor. Now I was heading back to fight. I’d fought all my life and loved it, but this was different. This time I was fighting God’s battle, and I could feel him pulling me back to that place and those desperate people. My dad had died several years before, but as I made plans to return to Africa, I could hear him saying, “Boy, you done good.”
FOUR
never stand away
Like the town around it, the Assembly of God church in Central City, Pennsylvania, is neat, modest, and working class. Set in low rolling hills in the southwestern part of the state, Central City is home to fifteen hundred or so souls, definitely blue collar and overwhelmingly white. The church is low slung and contemporary, with brick walls interrupted by vertical panels of rough stone at intervals all the way around. I was raised in that church but hadn’t been a regular attendee for years until one hot, sticky June night in 1992.
That was the night my wife, Lynn, talked me into going to a revival. She was a Christian, I wasn’t, and that had bugged me big time. I was basically jealous of Jesus. It was as though Lynn was dedicated to somebody else and not to me. She wouldn’t go fishing with me on Sunday mornings any more. Wouldn’t go to flea markets. Wouldn’t sleep in. And on nights when there was a revival, she wouldn’t go out to eat dinner. We used to fight about it. Deep down I knew I was the problem, but I wouldn’t admit it. I had to win.
The night I realized for sure that my wife absolutely did love me—and was absolutely right about her faith—was after we’d been fighting hard for a week. I woke up in the middle of the night because I thought I heard something in the house. I looked over and saw Lynn on her knees beside the bed praying for me. I tried to reach out to her but I couldn’t move or say anything. It was like I was paralyzed, frozen in place. All I could do was lie there and listen to her pray for hours and hours.
A few months later she convinced me to come to the revival service. Hot as it was, the excited congregation inside the church raised the temperature even higher with their singing, shouting, and praising. I sat on the back row, taking it all in—the congregation singing up a storm, the guest evangelist preaching for all he was worth. As I listened I remembered all those prophecies about me when I was young—that I would be a preacher—and over the last few years, I’d been living what I considered a more Christlike life, even though I wasn’t a Christian.
The guest evangelist that week was a white South African of English descent—a big, tall scrapper of a man. During the service he gave an altar call. I sensed God working inside me but didn’t know what to do, so I didn’t do anything. The preacher walked to the back row where I was sitting and looked straight at me.
“What is wrong with you, man?” he asked.
What kind of question is that? I thought. But there was no denying that something powerful, something outside of me, was working on my heart at that very moment.
I wasn’t ready to talk about it. “What do you mean?” I said.
“The power of God is all over you and wants to consume you, and look at you—you’re just sitting there, rejecting it!”
I knew he was right. Still, it scared me to think of what a commitment might lead to. I didn’t want anybody to know I had these feelings, but this guy could see them in me. Though I didn’t want to admit it, I knew what the problem was: me. I didn’t want to submit myself to Christ. But that night, sitting on the back row, I did. I gave my heart to the Lord, even though I stayed put in my seat and didn’t tell anybody.
The next night I went back, and when the altar call came, I walked to the altar, hands lifted high. At times like that, it’s easy to mistake emotions for the power of God. Emotions can be powerful and get you all whipped up, but when it’s emotions and nothing else that touch you, your heart is not truly changed. People will sometimes see others visibly moved during a service and say, “Oh look, there’s the spirit of God on that person. She just gave her heart to God!” But that’s not what happened. It was emotion. My experience that night was not driven by emotion. The key difference is that an emotional transformation is a mile wide and an inch deep, while a Spirit-led change transforms you down to the root of your soul. There’s no doubt, no hesitation, no going back.
While I was standing at the altar, so filled with thanksgiving and joy, the preacher came over to me and prophesied that I was going to go to Africa, that it would be during a time of war, and that I would go with him! How crazy was that? I had never been anywhere near Africa and had no interest in going. His making a wild statement like that made me mad. I was ready to bust this guy right in the mouth standing there at the altar.
After the service I bolted for the door, then stood on the sidewalk smoking one cigarette after another and waiting for the pastor to come out. The departing crowd dwindled to a trickle, and finally I saw him walk through the door. In typical Sam Childers fashion, I was very up front about expressing my opinion.
I got right in his face and said, “I want to tell you so
mething right now. Don’t you tell me I’m going to Africa!” I was hot. “You can just get that crap out of your head right now.” Only I didn’t use the word crap. “Those people got themselves into that mess, and they can get themselves out.”
He just stood there listening to me and shaking his head. When I was through ranting at him, all he said was, “We’ll see.”
Six years later he talked me into going to Africa to do a roofing job. With him. In a war zone.
That first trip in 1998—the trip when I saw the carnage at the edge of the minefield—gave me a sample of what I could expect life to be like over there. Sudanese government soldiers set up unofficial roadblocks all the time. Four or five of them in uniform with their AK-47s stopped trucks and small convoys to steal supplies or demand a “toll” before allowing the travelers to pass. My pastor was driving one night—we weren’t supposed to drive at night because it was unsafe—when we got stopped by some drunk soldiers at a roadblock on our way out of Yei. There were three of them: one standing over by a tree, and a couple near our vehicle who started arguing with each other, one with a machine gun slung across his back and the other pointing his machine gun through the truck window at my head.
No doubt he had done this plenty of times to people who had no experience with weapons and no idea how to use one. My guess is I was the first person he ever stopped who knew more about an AK than he did. Once I saw that the safety was on, I grabbed the barrel and yanked it as hard as I could. The soldier busted his forehead on the top of the car—hard—and let go his grip. Blood flew everywhere and smeared across the truck as he fell unconscious to the ground. I pulled the machine gun out of his hands, got out of the car, and advanced on the other two soldiers, who took off into the darkness as fast as they could. As far as I can remember, that was the last time we had trouble at that particular spot on the road.
