Another Man's War

by Sam Childers

  I was thinking, You dirty rotten thing. You just dented up my hood! He was trying to save my life, and I was worried about my hood. Deng became a very good friend, and today he handles all the money that comes through our missions.

  I’ve already mentioned Peter, one of my bodyguards. When Lynn and Paige came to Africa in 2001, General Michael Majock of the SPLA brought Peter over to our compound and said, “I’m going to give you Peter to guard your family.”

  I said, “Okay, thank you.”

  He explained, “Peter is a Dinka warrior, trained from seven years old to be a bodyguard.” After a couple of weeks I was heading back to America with my family and took Peter back to his compound.

  General Majock said, “Ah, Peter is yours.”

  And I said, “I know, and I thank you very much. You were a lot of help. My wife really appreciated it.”

  He said, “But he’s yours!”

  I said, “Thank you, but we’re leaving now.” I figured the general didn’t understand my English.

  Then he said, “No, I gave him to you.” Of course I know one man cannot “belong” to another, but I appreciated Peter being assigned to provide protection for me and my family. He stayed by my side for several years. Peter is now one of the head of customs coming through the border of Nimele and still works with our ministry.

  UPDF soldiers provided to Sam for protection, 2007

  Until they came to work for me, most of the men who help us had never seen a city before, never seen electric lights. They had come to serve me, but at the same time were getting educated for jobs in the new government, an opportunity that would otherwise be unavailable to them. During their first trip into Gulu, I took each of them to a buffet at a five-star hotel. Imagine being in the bush all your life, where you only eat enough to survive (never enough to be satisfied), and suddenly finding yourself in front of tables and tables of food offering all you can eat. Watching them chow down is one of the greatest things in the world.

  Marco is my head of security at the orphanage, and he is one tall, dark, scary-looking Dinka. Marco’s a killer. When he and I took his first trip to the buffet, he was sprawled out at the table, eating like a caveman. His plate was almost empty except for a bite or two of chicken, and the waitress came over to clear it. When she reached for his plate, he grabbed her arm and gave her a seriously nasty look.

  Marco, the head of security, in front of one of the machine gun bunkers that protect the orphanage at night

  In Arabic he said, “She’s trying to take my chicken!” We all started howling with laughter.

  “Marco,” I said, “she just wants to take your plate for you.” He was confused.

  “This lady’s trying to take my chicken! Why?” It’s funny now, but at the time I was afraid our poor waitress was going to get shot for poaching.

  One day I was walking through the orphanage compound and saw Marco on the side of the building where the guards sleep, sitting on a little log with one of the children. He was throwing the child in the air, laughing and gooing and gawing at this little child who was laughing as hard as he was. As soon as he caught me looking, Marco put the child down and got a stern expression on his face. He had to look serious for the mzunga.

  And that brings us back to the children, which is what my story is all about, and a brother and sister named Walter and Angela.

  The first thing you notice about Walter is a smile that lights up the sky. The next thing you notice, when he stands still long enough, is the crater in his face where his right eye should be. Imagining his smile is one of the inspirations that keeps me going when the road seems so long and hard. In 2004 Walter and his sister Angela were on the Kitgum Road, traveling from Gulu to Kitgum with their family and some others. Angela was about fifteen at the time, and Walter was five or six. They were an upper-class African family. The parents were merchants who worked the markets, and their father was taking them all to Kitgum in the car.

  A group of LRA ambushed them along the road. Following their usual procedure, they went for the driver first, killing the father almost instantly. (That’s why for years I drove a vehicle with American left-hand drive. Since cars here are usually right-hand drive, from the outside it looks like I’m the passenger.) The mother was killed quickly with a few machine gun bursts, as were a couple of people riding in the back. Then the soldiers captured Walter, Angela, and their sister, who was about thirteen or fourteen years old. They raped the sister in front of Walter and Angela, beat her, then set her on fire and watched her burn.

  While the soldiers were busy tormenting their dying victim, Angela saw a chance to escape. She quickly picked Walter up and started running down the road. The soldiers opened fire on the two small targets with their AKs, dropping them both in a burst of automatic fire. Leaving the body of the sister in flames on the side of the road, they walked up to the fallen figures. One of the armed men nudged them with a scuffed, dusty boot. No response. The soldiers left them for dead and melted back into the bush.

  Hours later my SPLA team came upon the grisly scene. Bloody bodies were scattered around the car, and the charred body of the sister still smoldered, giving off the stomach-churning smell of burning flesh. Movement a few yards up the road caught the team’s attention. Two little figures writhed in the grass just off the roadway. Somebody had survived the massacre. Running up, the soldiers discovered two children miraculously still alive. Walter had been shot in the eye; Angela had been shot in the neck.

  The troops kneeled down in the dirt, gingerly gathered Walter and Angela up in their arms, and sped to the hospital in Gulu as fast as they could. Walter’s eye was completely shot out, and bullet fragments were scattered under the skin all over his head and face. Angela had severe nerve damage that paralyzed one whole side of her body. The doctors in Gulu did what they could, and when the two children got out of the hospital they went directly to my home in Gulu. Angela was like a stroke patient, slowly recovering feeling and movement. If she’d had world-class medical treatment when she was first shot, she probably would be a lot better than she is now.

  Eventually, in 2006, both of them came to America for treatment. Angela had electric stimulation treatments on her muscles that dramatically improved her ability to move. The treatment involved placing long needles into her muscles and zapping them with electricity. She recovered amazingly well and can walk with confidence. Walter visited America a second time in 2007 for surgery on a tumor that had grown in his eye socket. At first the doctor thought that a single bullet went through Angela’s neck and hit Walter in the face. But they told me after the surgery that they think Walter was hit with his own bullet. His face is still full of bullet fragments. You can actually feel one of them under the skin on his head.

  For every story like this that ends on a positive note, there are countless others we’ll never know about—children who are victims of terrible crimes where God is the only witness. I have a special connection with those tender, innocent hearts; I feel a special calling to save and protect kids, because there was a time when I preyed on them as heartlessly as any LRA soldier. I wasn’t out to shoot them, but in a way I was even more dangerous. I represented fun and excitement, only to lure them in to satisfy my own desires.

  My heart aches for girls like Angela. Part of it is the compassion I think any father would have for a defenseless girl who has been so brutally abused. Looking into Angela’s face, I can’t help seeing the face of someone else. Someone who suffered so much on account of me. Someone whose memory inspires me to help children when I think I have nothing left to give. Someone God sent to teach me dark truths about myself—hard lessons that prepared me for my life’s work in a way I could never have imagined.

  SIX

  in the wilderness

  Her name was Jackie. I met her in 1976 when I was fifteen. She had long, blond hair; fair skin; sparkling blue eyes; and a big, bright smile that lit up her whole face. Jackie was a beautiful girl looking for excitement. She was way too young to
realize it, but she was also looking for a boy who would love and protect her. Something tricked her into thinking that boy was me.

  I had already been sleeping with girls and older women for about two years when I convinced Jackie to sleep with me. It didn’t take a lot of convincing because I already had a reputation in town, and she wanted the experience. It was her first time, and she worshipped me. She would do anything I asked her to do with me or anybody else because she loved me and wanted to please me.

  In spite of that, I used her as I did every other female during those wild years. Drugs, sex, and money were my gods, and I bowed down to them with gusto. I took advantage of Jackie. I gave her the first hit of drugs she ever had and got her messed up on narcotics. I taught her that her life was no good. I showed her that she was not special. She was not a jewel. A young woman has that special gift of her purity, and she should be encouraged to save that precious gift for the person she wants to spend the rest of her life with. I stole that gift from her and thought nothing of it. It was just another trophy, another conquest.

  Jackie had an abortion. She didn’t know who the father was, but a lot of people said the child was mine. I feel in my heart that they were right. It was all over before I knew anything about it. I wonder what I would have done if I had known. We all should feel the same when it comes to abortion: it’s killing a human being. But at a time when you’re fully possessed and living for the devil, you don’t care.

  Jackie was the one I’ve felt most guilty about, but she wasn’t the only young girl whose purity I stole. There were four others at least. It just didn’t matter to me. All that mattered was the party.

  One night three other guys and I had taken turns with this one girl, and the party was winding down when an acquaintance named Donny dropped by. Donny was one of the best-known drug dealers in town, and he decided he wanted a little session with this girl too. She turned him down and started walking home. Donny followed her in his car, picked her up, beat her, and raped her. She reported him to the police, and the other guys at the party and I had to give sworn affidavits about what happened. Because she had been with so many other partners that evening, they couldn’t charge Donny with rape so he got away with it. The girl’s stepfather said he was going to kill Donny for what he did. It was years before I found out how that story ended. Donny eventually ended up dead under mysterious circumstances. It wouldn’t surprise me if the stepfather had made good on his threat.

  By that time I’d dropped out of high school. I had moved out of the house when I was sixteen to make it easier to party, and quit school in the eleventh grade. Sometime around then I started carrying a sawed-off shotgun. I never killed anybody with it, but soon I had a reputation as a bad dude who always had a sawed-off within reach. It was a reputation I gladly encouraged. My friends and I started going back and forth to Florida looking for fun. That was when we went from just using drugs to dealing drugs and, most profitable of all, robbing drug dealers. The dealers always had plenty of cash, and they sure weren’t going to report us to the police. Because I carried a gun everywhere, bar fights turned into knife fights, which turned into gunfights. I always had either a .25 automatic, a .380 automatic, or a .38 Special with me, and carried a .38 derringer as a spare.

  The first time I ever went to Florida for the summer, I went with my high school buddy Joe Ramonovitch. He was better looking than I was—short, blond hair; long face; high cheekbones; a scraggly beard like all of us tried to grow—but I was a much better shot.

  We spent six days partying our way from Minnesota to Orlando and found a place to stay in a Lockhart, Florida, trailer park. My brother George lived nearby and told us about this place. We rented a twelve-by-sixty-foot trailer that sported a peeling coat of off-white paint and a little rickety porch at the front door. There were trees around us, but lawn grass was scarce, and any sign of shrubs or flowers was nonexistent. There were no paved roads or parking lots, just sand everywhere that we constantly tracked inside, creating a layer of grit over everything. For company we had rats and cockroaches galore, but we didn’t care. It was a place where we could drink and shoot up any time, and that’s all we worried about. Later we moved to another trailer that was a bit of an improvement, with more windows and bright yellow trim. But as we had in the other place, we still parked our motorcycles in the living room.

  Trailer parks like these were their own little worlds. They were full of alcohol and drugs, especially crack cocaine, even though that wasn’t really popular back then. Cocaine and heroin were what most of the residents used. It was a community of outlaws, and we were model citizens.

  Daytona was just a few miles up the road on the Atlantic Coast, and it was one rockin’ kind of place. There was plenty of action in the bars in the historic area, where the streets were narrow and the old buildings stood close together. There was even more going on at the beach, where the restaurants and bars spilled right down to the water; you could still drive on the sand, which was a famous tradition there.

  My life in Florida during those years was one unending fight. One of the first and biggest was after a drug deal went sour, and we went to visit our trading partners at their trailer. I announced our arrival by busting their door in with a baseball bat. Inside we had a free-for-all that sent me to the hospital for forty stitches in my head where somebody whacked me with a tire iron. The police came and arrested us all. Fortunately the other guys were the ones who had the drugs. They were also illegal aliens from Canada. That—plus the fact that I was underage—got me off with the sheriff’s department when I could have gotten ten years.

  There was a pier on the Daytona boardwalk where small-time drug dealers used to meet. It was a great place to rob them. One time two friends and I robbed a couple of dealers of about half a pound of marijuana and one hundred hits of LSD. We drove up and down the beach yelling, “Pot!” or “Acid!” depending on the type of person we saw. After a couple of sales, two young guys came up to buy from us. The first one pulled out a .38 Special and pointed it at my head. Turnabout is fair play, I thought. We’d stolen the stuff and now somebody was stealing it from us. But then the second guy pulled out a gun and a badge. We weren’t being robbed; we were being arrested.

  I had a long beard, long hair, and a fake ID saying I was twenty-one, but I was only seventeen. Once I knew they wouldn’t arrest me (I was underage and they didn’t want to go through the hassle), I started trash-talking them. They handcuffed my hands in front, shackled my feet, chained my hands to my feet, and shuffled me off to the juvenile detention facility. It was like walking into middle school—nothing but kids! In a few hours, my brother George bailed me out, and we got my friends Joe and Pat out. As soon as Joe was bailed, he and I headed back to Minnesota.

  But Florida kept calling us. A few months later we were back, and before long bar fighting turned into a regular after-work hobby. One night after some serious whiskey drinking, four other guys, one woman, and I decided to take on the whole crowd at the ABC Liquor Lounge outside Apopka. Too bad we didn’t notice ahead of time that everybody but us had on pointy-toed cowboy boots. It was not a good place for a bunch of bikers to start a fight, but by the time we figured that out, the bottles were already f lying. When we tried to escape through the front door, we found a cluster of unhappy rednecks blocking our way.

  We headed for the back door, but there was a huge guy there who was wider than the doorway. I hit him three or four times, but he didn’t flinch. I got out my pocketknife and started carving up his forehead. He went down, and I headed for the door again when—crash!—I took a beer bottle to the forehead, mistakenly (I hope) from the woman who was with us. Bleeding like a stuck pig, I bolted for the door with the rest of my bunch, but now the bouncer blocked our exit. I had thought about using my gun before but hadn’t. Now I put my pistol to the bouncer’s throat. Neither of us said a word, but he moved out of the way and let us by.

  I was the last one to the car. Sprinting across the back parking lot, I heard a
gunshot and saw a man firing at me from behind a truck. Just then the bouncer came running at me for more. I knocked him down and returned fire toward the truck. I dove through the window as our car sped off. As soon as we made it to the highway, we saw a roadblock—two police cruisers across the road with their red lights flashing. I grabbed a shotgun off the backseat, leaned out the window, and fired forward. The cops scattered, and we flew around the roadblock.

  Screaming down the two-lane road, we tried to put some distance between us and the ABC Liquor Lounge. Then we saw a sea of red lights in the distance. But this time instead of two police cars, there were eight. A powerful floodlight locked on us from above, and I heard the chopper overhead. We were sunk. I handed the shotgun to a buddy who jammed it down behind the backseat.

  The police swarmed over the car, dragged us out, handcuffed us, and searched our car for the shotgun. They couldn’t find it. Later they took the seat out, and it still wasn’t to be found. Somebody was looking out for me: committing a crime with a gun carried a five-year minimum prison term. Because I was seventeen and wouldn’t get in as much trouble, I took the fall for everybody. I ended up in jail at first because of my fake ID. After about five days, George came and bailed me out again. He didn’t have any money, so he put up his motorcycle—a 1947 Panhead Harley, black and chrome—as collateral. A couple of weeks later, the charges were dropped (to the bail bondsman’s disappointment), and George went back and claimed his bike.

  It turned out that there was some sort of clerical error, and the charges had been reduced but not dropped. I moved back to Minnesota, and when I didn’t show up for court, a warrant was issued for my arrest. It was never served.