Boy Soldier Read online

  Finally the group came along; I stepped out of the bushes and showed myself to them. I gambled that they would not send me back, because it would delay their mission and they would lose one of their soldiers as my escort. My bet paid off. They decided it was easier to let me join them, and together we made the journey back to Sudan.

  CHAPTER 3

  Return to Sudan

  SINCE I HAD BEEN IN ETHIOPIA, I had had no contact with my family. Any contact with Sudan had to take place through a military radio operator, and often it took more than two weeks to get the parties at both ends ready at the same time. On top of that, you would have needed your family to be near a radio in the first place – which wasn’t the case with mine. And on top of that, you needed connections and influence in Pinyudo. I had none.

  So I had no idea how my family were, or even where they were. I was desperate for news of them, but when I fled Pinyudo I also bore an amount of shame. When my elder brothers had come back home from the army, they had had their own guns. They had celebrated their return home by firing their guns into the air. As for me, I had only used a gun in training and didn’t have one of my own. People would ask if I’d really been with the SPLA, or if I’d really been in Ethiopia at all. Monyleck would interrogate me and, after our history, I was scared of that. I thought he might even send me back to Pinyudo. Or, he would hold me up to ridicule for running away.

  It was a hard place to be in for a boy of twelve, or thirteen, or however old I was. I wanted to see my family more than I wanted anything in the world; but it was a scene that I also feared more than anything in the world.

  In any case, it was a lottery whether I would be going anywhere near my home. Once I fell in with the group, I had to go where they were going, and it turned out that they were going nowhere near Bentiu. Instead, they were going to Nimule in eastern Equatoria, south of where we were, close to the border with Uganda.

  I trailed along at the back of the group for two months. I was the youngest, and the only one without a gun. Our progress was slow because wherever we found a village who would give us food, we would rest for a few days.

  Villagers usually welcomed us, because they relied on the trade with army groups, who brought in clothes or medicine in exchange for food. I brought Panadol which I had taken from the clinic at Pinyudo, and it was good currency. We also gave them bullets, as they often had guns but no ammunition. Mostly the villagers supported the SPLA, except where groups had come through and stolen from them. If we went to the village leaders and asked for supplies, offering to trade goods rather than stealing from them, they were welcoming.

  I had to carry whatever they told me to: a box of bullets, military equipment. All I possessed was the clothes I was wearing. I was able to fit in because I had learnt the one iron law of the SPLA: if you did what they told you, they left you alone. If you had a problem with taking orders, you attracted attention.

  I did what I was told.

  Then one day, as we made our way along the track, we began to notice the smell of a dead animal. The further we got the stronger the smell became. The air was thick with the smell and the humidity and there were vultures flying over us. We knew the animal was near. Some of the others tried to guess what it was, one suggesting a dead donkey and another thinking it was more of a fishy smell. Either way, it was bad and growing stronger by the minute.

  Suddenly we heard gunfire in the distance. The sergeant yelled at us, ‘Down, sit, sit, sit!’ We crouched low as the sergeant listened intently to what was happening ahead. Whoever it was, they now seemed to be retreating and the gunfire had stopped.

  Feeling more cautious now, the sergeant sent the landmine expert, a man named Okello, along the track ahead of the rest of us. Chances were that if there was fighting nearby there would also be landmines. Okello edged forward, watching each step, looking for changes to the surface of the ground, such as freshly turned soil or leaves in piles. For the most part the track had a smooth, hard-packed earth surface. It would be easy to see if any new mines had been planted. Okello didn’t find any, but he did discover the dead animal. He stopped there, called us over and waited for us to pick over the remains with him.

  It was not one but several animals, all lying there, some still in army uniform. Some had been stripped: their shoes, clothes, guns and ammunition all gone. There was one further into the bush who lay there, his hands up beside his face as if he were surrendering. His mouth and eyes were open, and bullet wounds covered his face and neck. As I looked I wondered if his family would be able to recognise him. Between the wounds, the swelling and the yellow discolouration of his skin, even those who knew him well would probably not be able to identify him now. I wondered also about his age. I think he would have been about seventeen or eighteen.

  Nasir and Pinyudo had inured me to death and looking closely at dead bodies. I was no longer rigid with shock. When they’d executed those men in Pinyudo and made us march close past them, forcing us to look right into their faces, they had been preparing us for moments like this.

  As I sat thinking about his family and what his life might have been like, one of the officers reached over and removed the gun and ammunition from him – he wouldn’t be needing it any more. The officer then gave it to me. I accepted it, to protect myself.

  We rejoined the rest of the group who had managed to pick over the other bodies – removing shoes, uniforms, whatever they could find. We hadn’t been the first to find these dead soldiers, and whoever had been here before us were either low in numbers or had been scared off before they could take full advantage of what was left behind.

  It felt wrong to be stealing from the dead, but we needed their supplies. If we didn’t take them, someone else would. If it was a gun or ammunition that was taken, better we have it than it landing in the hands of our enemy.

  We walked for two months south-west from the Ethiopian border. My legs were longer than when I’d covered the same distance in the opposite direction! At times we were ambushed by the Sudanese government army. The leaders of our group were shot at, and the rest of us dived for cover until it was over. These were minor skirmishes, but the war itself was now big, much bigger than I was prepared for and much bigger than when I had left Sudan. A lot of people had been and were being killed. Guns were everywhere, and villages had been either destroyed or abandoned after combat. The nature of the war seemed to have changed, too. Instead of it being the SPLA fighting the government, now the government-sponsored militias had broken up into factions, and so had the SPLA. The rebel army was in a general retreat towards the south. Civilians were armed now, and there was chaos everywhere, every village for itself, with no structure of support from either the government or the SPLA. I couldn’t see how my family and village could have survived this.

  After two months, in what must have been the middle of 1990, we arrived at our destination, the town called Nimule. The journey had been long, tiring and full of sights and sounds that I will never forget. I was tired of walking and being scared of every footstep due to the landmines that riddled the ground. By now I had lost any ounce of childhood. I wasn’t the boy who had left Panaruu. I wasn’t myself anymore. I had no sense of home and I felt no love. The army had moulded me into a hard, emotionless machine.

  As we got closer to Nimule in the south, the SPLA presence grew stronger. Since I had left Ethiopia, a civil war had broken out there. The Ethiopian government was no longer protecting the SPLA, so the entire rebel army was converging on its only stronghold, south near the border with Uganda.

  Nimule was a small town of about 40,000 people on a hill overlooking the Nile. The group I had walked with helped guard the town and trained as police and agricultural organisers. I started to go to school in a Catholic mission, run by the Diocese of Torit under Archbishop Taban. It was a big mission and included sisters from America, France, Uganda and Italy.

  When we arrived in Nimule, the SPLA allowed me to go to school during the day and come back to the barracks at night
. But once I was in the mission, I explained to the sisters that I wanted to leave the army as they weren’t looking after me. I told them I was on my own and had no family. Taking pity on me, the sisters said I could live in the compound and move into the church and work there. It was a risk for them, but the SPLA was weak and disorganised, with desertions taking place everywhere. If they captured me they still wouldn’t send me to fight, as I was too small, but instead put me in a town, maybe at a machine gun post, to guard it.

  I didn’t want anything to do with the SPLA any more. I was tired, the army had ruined my life, it had lied to me, and I decided I had to get away from the war. Some other boys came into the mission with me to hide from the SPLA.

  The mission consisted of a group of well-built concrete structures with electric light and high ceilings. The floors were concrete and the beds were real. The sisters cultivated their own food, fed us and gave us shelter and clothes, and treated us if we were sick. This was a brief but happy respite for me – I was clean and well fed for the first time in months. I established good relationships with the sisters, who took responsibility for us like ‘mothers’, each with a few boys to look after.

  This was the closest I had come to feeling happy since I had left my village. Right now, the sisters were the nearest thing I had to family.

  While I stayed in the mission, the war was changing rapidly. Colonel Bashir had come to power in Khartoum in a military coup, strengthening the government push into the south. The weakened SPLA had destroyed the bridges and road entries to Nimule, so the government would bomb the town from air force Antonovs. At first it was just early in the morning and in the evening, but within months the bombings intensified, continuing all through the day.

  I could feel every nerve in my body becoming metallic with fear as I heard the planes approaching. Their bombing runs would start at seven in the morning and continue until three or four in the afternoon. All the shops were forced to close and people couldn’t get food. We would spend most of the day in a khandag, or bomb shelter. In our shelter we had seven people. It was hot as hell inside, and sometimes it would rain. Although some khandags had roofs to protect from the sun and the rain, many did not. At worst they were a hole in the ground designed only to stop you from being hit by shrapnel flying sideways after a bomb had dropped. If the bomb hit over the hole, you were dead.

  My khandag had just branches and sand laid over it for a roof. Thirty to forty bombs a day would explode around me, and I became more and more nervous and scared. It’s the worst kind of killing when you can’t see the person who’s trying to kill you. You live in a state of pure terror.

  In a khandag in a nearby village, fifteen people died. I lost my best friend at the time, whose name was David Kiir. I had only met him in Nimule, and we had sat in classes together. We played soccer together and fished and swam in the Nile. He was in love with guns, and attended school less than I did. When we had problems, I usually suggested we go to the sisters, but David would say, ‘If we go to the sisters, we are like civilians.’ He saw himself as a soldier, a warrior. He died a warrior’s death.

  In the breaks between the bombings, life in the Nimule mission had its benefits. We had beds, clean water and healthy food. On the other side of the coin, we had little contact with the outside world, little protection from the bombs and little hope of a life that was free from the worries that burdened us all. Hope, to me, was the most precious thing in life – while ever there was hope there was a future. Under the guidance of the sisters, I made it a point to always carry a little bit of hope with me wherever I went.

  But this hope was rocked one day. An army group came through from my area, and everyone rushed out to ask for news. Wour – who had followed me from Pinyudo when the Ethiopian civil war started – and I found a soldier from Panaruu and asked him for news of our families. He looked at me and said, ‘Your family are all right except for your sister Ajok.’ I can’t remember exactly what he said next – his voice seemed to be coming to me from a long, blurry distance – but the news was that my eldest sister had died of kalazar (bilharzia), a fatal parasitic disease common in southern Sudan. I was too shocked to ask for more details. Also, I didn’t want to believe any more until I had spoken to my immediate family. I think this might have been my way of protecting myself from the pain: I wouldn’t believe Ajok was dead until it was confirmed by the family I could find no way of speaking to.

  The Catholic mission was full of fences. There was one large wire-mesh fence that surrounded the compound, a thatched-grass fence that separated the boys’ areas from the girls’, a fence surrounding the hospital and another for the leader of the camp, Father Leo. His fence was rarely crossed. His house was the most impressive of all the accommodation on site. The walls were brick and the floor concrete, although the roof was more traditional, made of thatched grass. Father Leo had his own generator, so he had electric light and refrigeration.

  Father Leo was a grumpy old man, but he was fair in his treatment of us. I think he was Italian, but he spoke in English, his second language. He also knew enough Arabic to tell us when he was unhappy with us. My colloquial Arabic had improved with use in Pinyudo, and I certainly understood when Father Leo was cranky. He smoked a large black pipe which seemed to hang from his face like a surgically attached hook.

  Among the jobs that I had in the camp was filling up Father’s water tank. The corrugated-zinc tank was the tallest structure in the compound, towering over his house. There was a ladder leaning against the side of the tank, which I would climb, thirty-litre jerry can in one hand, the other hand holding on tight as I reached the top of the tank.

  I shared the job with my friend Angelo Kuot. We were in the same class in Nimule. He had arrived there before me, but while I slept at the mission, Kuot slept in the military barracks. Kuot was from Bhar-el-Ghazal, west of where I grew up. He was taken to Ethiopia like me, and came down to Nimule when the Ethiopian war broke out. We had never met in Pinyudo, but we had a lot in common. He was the same age as me, and his father was also in the army. Like me, he was uncertain about what had happened to his family. He was luckier than me in one way: his brother Garang had been with him all the way and was still with him now. Angelo was taller and skinnier than me, and much more talkative! He laughed so much at times, he would fall over on the ground, attacked by his own laughter. He always wanted to look flashy: if anyone appeared wearing new clothes, Kuot would vanish, then reappear wearing something even better, even newer. He liked fooling around and would talk to anybody. I liked the way Kuot always talked up his big plans: ‘Let’s go to Uganda!’ ‘Let’s go to Europe!’ ‘Let’s run away and just travel together!’ But he was still serious: he got mad with himself if he got a maths problem wrong, and he hated getting beaten for making a mistake. He was also good at talking his way out of trouble. He was an excellent shot, and we liked to hunt animals together, sometimes shooting a gazelle and selling the meat. His brother Garang wasn’t anywhere near as friendly, and Kuot and I would gang up on him. The friction between the two brothers brought me and Kuot closer together.

  He and I would take turns holding the bottom of the ladder as the other carried yet another jerry can of water to fill the tank. It would take fifteen to twenty jerry cans each time.

  Filling Father Leo’s tank was the most important job Kuot and I had to do all week. One day there was a soccer tournament in Nimule between army guys and the schoolboys. Everyone from the school was there to watch. The field wasn’t very good – it was just a big patch of long grass cut with scythes – and no one had any boots or proper uniforms, but the tournament final was one of the most exciting I’d ever seen. Kuot and I were so wrapped up in watching the game that we completely forgot about filling Father’s tank. Suddenly we heard an angry shout from the other side of the compound. It was Father Leo. ‘Where’s my water, where’s my water?’ The tank had had enough water for about thirty seconds of showering, and then it had run out. Kuot and I had about thirty seconds to
race and fill the tank with enough water for Father Leo to finish his shower, otherwise we would be in serious trouble. We’d never been on his bad side before and didn’t know what to expect. He was still yelling as we scrambled to the top of the tank with what water we could carry in one quick trip.

  Expecting him to punish us, we were taken by surprise when he started to laugh as the water poured through to the showerhead.

  ‘Don’t forget my water again!’ he laughed.

  I didn’t mind such a mild warning and it was the last time Father Leo had to wait for his shower to be filled.

  Alongside Father Leo, the sisters taught us and looked after us in the mission. The two I had the most to do with were Sister Rita and Sister Shaun. Both were short and stocky, dressed in traditional habits, and both were Ugandans. The similarities ended there. Sister Rita was grumpier than Father Leo and twice as quick to anger. She would only give you biscuits, clothes or soap if you had worked yourself to a standstill. Sister Shaun was one of the gentlest human beings I’d ever met. If you were upset, she would listen carefully to your problem and wrap you in a giant cuddle as though she was your own mother. So we avoided Sister Rita when we could and gravitated to Sister Shaun. Unfortunately, there was a lot of competition for her! I stayed in Nimule until I was about fifteen years old. I had fallen in love with the way the sisters lived: they were clean, they dressed neatly, they were kind (Sister Shaun, anyway), and they placed a lot of value on education. I had given up all hope of returning to my village by now. I wanted to be somewhere different, somewhere I could improve myself and live like the sisters.

  When I was about fourteen, I received what I took as another sign to give up on going home. My cousin Wour, who was related to me on my blind grandmother’s side, would go to the army radio station in Nimule from time to time and try to connect with someone back home. If the army had an outpost near the villages, they would have a radio. One day he managed to make contact, but he brought back terrible news. During an attack on our village by Arab militia, everyone had fled except for my grandmother. It had been hard enough getting her, with her walking stick, away from these attacks years earlier when I had been a child. Now she was older and weaker, and during this particular raid she had said to my mother, ‘You go ahead, I cannot run with you, I will stay in the hut.’ She surrendered herself to the mercy of the mujahideen. It was a fatal gamble. They burnt down the village, Wour told me, including the hut with my grandmother in it. She was dead. Having survived through these attacks myself, having left Grandmother in the long grass that memorable day, I could picture all too clearly how it had happened. I was more upset by my grandmother’s death than by Ajok’s. When I had been in trouble as a child, I always ran to Grandmother. She was kind and gentle with me, even more so than my own mother, who punished us because she feared my father. Grandmother never feared him – he was her own son! So when he wanted to punish me and I sheltered behind Grandmother, she waved her stick at him to keep him back. Even without her eyesight, she knew where he was!