by Ger Duany
My father was happy I had made it to his home and that my mother and the rest of the family were safe back in Nasir. I spent my days tending his cattle and continued to feel that he was trusting me more, sensing that I had grown into a responsible young man. He allowed me to clean his guns, having noticed my skill when he watched me dismantle some and put them back together.
DAD: Hey, Ger, make sure you clean the guns today.
It became a regular instruction from my father, since we had a little armory inside our home. Whenever my father came back from a successful military operation, he would always allow me to take his gun and shoot in the air in celebration. These were the signs, to me, that he trusted me. Yet another reason why I decided not to rock the boat and ask about his shift in allegiance.
With the division in the SPLA, people’s personal security became their own responsibility, and families had to arm themselves. The attack in Bor resulted in deep-rooted animosity between the Dinka and the Nuer. Instead of seeing it as one SPLA faction attacking another, they viewed it purely through an ethnic prism. It was in this context of everyone looking out for themselves that my father honored me by giving me an AK-47 of my own.
DAD: Ger, use this to keep cattle rustlers at bay and defend the family against attacks from rival ethnic groups.
I expected we would have a further conversation about the gun, but that never happened. In a sense, my father assumed I already knew my responsibilities, the dos and don’ts of owning a gun. Being a man of few words, he believed I was grown enough to have seen my people’s way of life, and to know that a gun was not a toy but rather an instrument of both safety and death.
I quickly became known for firing the weapon fiercely in the direction of any danger I sensed, whether real or imaginary, possibly out of the excitement of finally having my father’s full confidence and feeling equal to SPLA fighters. I became a sharpshooter, rarely missing my target. I also started shooting for sport, and whenever aimless shooting was heard around my village, once he got home, my father would ask whether that had been me shooting for pleasure. It was something he seemed not to mind, since shooting for sport was my way of showing I had a good relationship with my AK-47.
One night not long after, cattle raiders attacked our village. To prove to my father that he had not made a wrong decision, I made sure I was among the fastest-running warriors going after the cattle. We ran with our guns heavy on our shoulders and I got tired along the way, but I couldn’t show any weakness—not even that I was afraid I might shoot someone dead. As we ran ahead, my father and the other older men stayed farther behind, watching us. I earned my place, and my father witnessed my capabilities. We recovered the cattle, chasing the attackers deep into the forest, where they disappeared.
I knew the implications of owning a gun—that in a split second I could take away a life, just as mine too could be taken, but my overarching philosophy was that all I was doing was protecting my family, being a proper Nuer man.
Although I was no stranger to guns, this was the first one I had ever owned. As I cleaned it most evenings, I wondered whether it would lead to my downfall or be my lifeline. It was at such times that the words of my late warrior brother, Oder, echoed in my mind: Trust me on this: Don’t become a soldier like me. Get an education. In my defense, I told myself that I had gone to Itang to seek an education, but then the Ethiopians had sent us back to Sudan, and now I didn’t know what the future portended. In the meantime, my gun was all I had. That night, I wiped it clean.
CHILD SOLDIERS BROUGHT INTO THE army wouldn’t really have a first day on the job, since by the time they started, they would already know how to march in a military parade, handle guns, keep secrets, and sing SPLA war songs. They would be deployed to fetch firewood and make meals, getting instructed not to venture too far out of camp. Boys who were joining the army ranks had already been indoctrinated to believe nothing but the SPLA’s narrative.
I began my time in the SPLA stationed in Baliet, within two subsections of Dinka Ngok and Eastern Nuer territory led by Dr. Machar. I initially was a gun cleaner, doing now for the military what I’d once done for my father as a domestic chore.
My specific posting was as part bodyguard and part assistant to SPLA First Lieutenant Peter Gatdor, the man from Itang who had developed a fondness for me through my karate training. Other than taking care of the wounded, I would do personal chores for him and his associates, like rolling their tobacco and running small errands that were not necessarily military-related.
It wasn’t glamorous work, but it kept me close enough to the senior officers such that they too grew to like me and grant me special favors, like the ability to access portions of military food and pass it on to my starving family. Normally, food supplies were taken to a central storage facility. From there they would get distributed to different SPLA camps. But I’d found a way to use my position and friendships to my and my family’s benefit. I neither regretted nor felt any shame for this.
Each week, when food was transported to the Nasir side and delivered to the satellite military camps, I managed to get on the truck by buttering up the senior SPLA guys.
ME: Bol Mel, Tank 55! How are things on the front lines?
BOL MEL: We are holding up strong. But I suggest you leave Baliet for Nasir Town, young Ger!
ME: I am better off in Baliet because famine will finish me in Nasir Town.
BOL MEL: Know where your brother Chuol is? He’s in Ketbek Town with Dr. Riek Machar.
ME: Bol Mel, I hate to ask, but my mother and my sisters and brothers are starving in Nasir Town, I swear to God. I want to visit them sometime, but I can’t go empty-handed.
BOL MEL: Okay, I will speak with John Noor. He’ll help you get there with a sack of maize, but make sure not to come back to Baliet.
ME: Shukran, my brother!
BOL MEL: Say hello to Chuol Thabach, my brother!
But I was not going to Ketbek. Having already secured a little maize for my mother before securing a spot on the truck, I’d sometimes sleep underneath it to ensure I’d be nearby when it was set to depart. I’d mark my bag using charcoal so that no one else picked it up once we got to Nasir, then I’d sneak over IED-strewn roads to get this food to my mother.
We didn’t have adequate supplies due to the split in the SPLA. This meant the majority of soldiers didn’t wear proper military gear. Some wore flip-flops, others worn-out, hand-me-down uniforms. We were starting to look more like a ragtag militia than an army, and the line between who was SPLA and who wasn’t grew thinner by the day, since everyone around us owned a gun to protect himself. There was a growing need for soldiers, and the only qualifications were loyalty and the ability to operate a gun. While some Dinkas were loyal to Dr. Machar, and some Nuers to Dr. Garang, for the most part, their fellow soldiers did not trust them and saw them as spies for the other side.
* * *
—
It was in the early days of combat that I was unexpectedly reunited with Peter Gatkuoth, my old friend from Itang, who was now sixteen to my thirteen. We hugged like long-lost brothers, which we essentially were: the boys of Sudan. He still loved a good joke and entertained us with little stand-up comedy routines about our predicament.
PETER: Once upon a time, a skeleton man bumped into a human cannibal in the forest. The human cannibal exclaimed, “Skeleton man!”
“Yes, sir,” the skeleton said.
“Where were you heading? And where were you coming from with such long, skinny legs?”
The skeleton man replied, “I went to visit a friend, but I am going to Bentui Town.”
“Well, I want to eat you now, but you look so skinny, like you could poison me,” said the human cannibal.
“I’d definitely poison you,” said the skeleton man, “because I have no fat on my body.”
Said the cannibal, “What if I kill you and mix yo
ur meat with a fat man’s meat? Don’t you think you’ll taste better?”
“No, I won’t taste like anything in your mouth. In fact, I will spoil your good stuff,” the skeleton man replied.
The human cannibal shot back, “You are right. I’ve never seen a man as thin as you. Please get out of my sight before I change my mind.”
The skeleton man bid the cannibal farewell: “Good-bye, and if you have any ideas, catch up with me.”
“Before I let you go,” the cannibal said, “here’s what I think: What if I kill you today and dry your meat for next season? Do you think it will taste better?”
The skeleton man said, “You’ll be wasting your time. My entire body is made of veins like a camel’s.”
And with that, the cannibal had had enough: “You’re so honest with me. Please go to Bentui Town and keep your mouth shut!”
Together we formed a tight group, along with a small, fierce seventeen-year-old we called Airborne Boy, who was a celebrity in the army for his skilled storytelling and the bloody battles he’d survived, often using counterinsurgency strategies.
AIRBORNE BOY: My close friend Waad got caught up in a dreadful Antonov An-225 aircraft attack. I survived the bombardment because I stayed in my trench, but Waad got chopped up into little pieces.
I listened, rapt, just as I had when my mother told me tales under the cover of night when I was a little boy. Though she’d meant for the stories to put me to sleep, they instead excited me. Airborne Boy always had a cheekful of chewing tobacco and spat the brown juice out as punctuation. The three of us laughed together, slept side by side, and were nearly inseparable.
I WAS SCARED OF GOING to war, but I had been surrounded by death for so long now that it had an air of inevitability to it. The first time I saw combat was in 1992, when I was about fourteen. The platoon I was with—a mix of child soldiers, young cats, and older army men—attacked a group from Torit, one of the areas aligned with Dr. Garang. There was a military parade to select men after word came that the enemy was approaching. First Lieutenant Gatdor, to whom I was attached, gave me his military bag to carry. He told me we were going to war. Though the enemy had more guns and bullets, we had more manpower. We realized that if the enemy attacked first, there was a real possibility they would overrun us, hence our need to be proactive and go on the offense. I walked along with the fighters, approaching the front line.
We opened fire wildly, and miraculously gained ground, marching through a field of bodies. My hands shook and my heart pounded as we shouted our rallying cry.
SOLDIERS: SPLA Oyee!
At that moment, it all felt right, and with adrenaline spurring me on, I acted unfazed by the spilled blood of my fallen comrades. As much as it shocked me, I felt I was the warrior I was always meant to be. When we returned from the front line, I searched for First Lieutenant Gatdor’s bag but couldn’t find it. I went to bed, but soon he was shaking me awake.
FIRST LIEUTENANT GATDOR: Ger, where is my bag?
ME: I put it somewhere and didn’t see it when I went to get it.
First Lieutenant Gatdor got wild and started screaming at me.
FIRST LIEUTENANT GATDOR: How could you lose my bag? How could you lose my bag?!
Before I knew it, he was smacking me. There was a lot of theft at the time, everyone just trying to survive, but I had been tasked with what seemed like something simple, and I had failed to keep his possession safe.
Even more than during times of peace, one’s meager possessions take on added value during times of war. There was a European journalist and aid worker named Simon wandering around the camp, and we were fascinated by him. He wore shorts and military boots, and we always hung around him to hear how he spoke English through the nose. Simon had a really huge camera with long lenses, which went missing one day. Simon suspected the thief was a soldier from the Nuba Mountains. The man was apprehended and beaten for days by senior soldiers before being locked up in a makeshift jail. It was highly unlikely that the man was the guilty party, but he was the enemy and therefore an easy person on whom to pin the blame. It was terrifying, watching what happened to him, and it did not seem as though the punishment fit the crime.
I flashed back to the time I had to watch my uncle Tut get humiliated and tortured by Anya Anya II soldiers. It was a year after his initiation. He had trained in Bonga with Oder in a separate battalion and then returned to our village for a short family visit. That’s when Anya Anya II caught him. His reputation as a good soldier preceded him, and they wanted to both break and recruit him while frightening the rest of us villagers into submission. They accused him of stealing a gun, and they tied his hands and legs to his back. He was so compressed he reminded me of travel luggage. His chest was pressed into the hot sand as they beat him down like a donkey. I couldn’t stop screaming.
ME: LET GO OF MY UNCLE. HE DIDN’T STEAL YOUR GUN!
Uncle Tut just moaned and rolled on the ground, without any tears streaming out of his eyes, until almost all life was drained from his body. Ultimately, they’d forced my uncle to join their ranks instead of the SPLA and fight for their cause. That itself was a different kind of torture—one of the soul. I felt the same pain now watching this soldier’s brutal humiliation over the missing camera.
I climbed inside my mosquito net that evening and closed my eyes, hoping sleep might release me from the agony of wakefulness and the horrors of real life. I dreamed of my mother, of hugging her and being home again, safe. She squirmed a bit in my grasp, which I did not understand. Why would a mother deliberately shun her own child? As my eyelids creaked open, she slunk farther from me, then turned to face me dead-on. I recognized that look. I was staring into the gaze of a deadly python. I stifled a scream and threw the snake away from me as I leaped backward and fumbled for my gun. The python slithered out of the netting and away into the night. Sleep was no longer even a temporary comfort. No escape.
Later I was called away from Baliet for a few weeks to fight, and we stumbled upon a group of men lined up to be executed by firing squad. I did not allow myself to look away from these men who were facing their deaths head-on. Some were scared, others blank, as though their spirits had been drained from their bodies long ago and they were walking shells of who they once were, their humanity already dead.
But that was nothing compared to what followed. Soon we faced an attack in Baliet by a vicious warlord named General George Athor, a Dinka Ngok, a subtribe of the Dinka already supporting the Garang arm of the SPLA. General Athor was known for his bravery and strategic military mind. He had been a soldier in Sudan’s military before joining the SPLA. He was short, stout, and brainy, and word was that if he attacked, you wouldn’t survive.
General Athor had disguised his troops as civilians and they infiltrated our camp, milling about, waiting for the perfect opportunity to strike. He and his gunmen surrounded the camp around four a.m., before the sun had come up, and one could hardly see. Guns were trained on us, including RPGs. Everything was happening so fast, and everyone would have to jump into the Nile to stand a chance of survival, First Lieutenant Gatdor included.
Our faction of the SPLA didn’t have enough guns to go around, and so I found myself terrified and without a weapon as the enemies forced our troops—many of whom couldn’t swim—toward the Nile. I had done this dance before, but this time I was not an innocent civilian, I was the enemy. Although I could swim, I knew I’d most likely get shot in the river, and so I jumped into the passenger seat of a military truck parked nearby. I didn’t know how to drive. The bullets whizzed past, and I recognized it was only a matter of time before they found me and filled my body with holes.
Suddenly the vehicle’s door swung open, and there was First Lieutenant Gatdor! I couldn’t believe my luck. In a split second, he’d already jammed his foot on the gas and sped off from the fighting across the grasslands, bullets pinging off the truck as we fled.
Airborne Boy and his girlfriend, Nyankor, were in their little grass room, sleeping in the nude, when soldiers sneaked in and shot them dead. I had no clue what happened to Peter and could not stay to find out. It is hard to explain to people what it feels like to leave someone you care about behind with the knowledge that doing so most certainly means they will die. But my mother and I had done so before with my dad, and then my mother had done so with me, and now I was doing so with my best friend. It’s the kind of thing you do everything in your power not to think about ever again. To swallow, bury inside your bones, and forget.
Countless others were shot in the Nile, and Baliet was completely flattened. About ninety people, soldiers and civilians, were killed on that one day. The bullets did not discriminate between them. I took the news hard and considered it payback or karma for the suffering of the soldier accused of stealing Simon’s camera equipment.
The attackers took vehicles, guns, and prisoners. Most of those captured were from the Nuba Mountains and didn’t know how to swim. Bodies floated on the Nile, and word got around that people in Malakal had seen body parts in the river, an indication that there was war upstream. The soldiers took the food supplies and torched the ferry that brought provisions. The villagers around, a good percentage of whom were Dinkas, came and looted the place.
Land mines were scattered across the terrain, making driving a risky venture, but no one thought about this in our panic to escape. Although we were fleeing a lion, that didn’t mean we wouldn’t be attacked by a cheetah. My people say, Problems won’t leave you alone because you have other problems. So you face them as you go along. I was learning quickly the importance of quick decision-making during wartime, and also coming to terms with the idea of luck and the philosophy of being protected by the gods, since there was really no science behind the fact that I survived and some of my friends didn’t. I had to attribute it to some force bigger than myself, even if I had simplified it to just being lucky, time and again.