by Sam Childers
Along with telling me to get my hair cut and my heart changed, Clyde told me to get married. He didn’t think Lynn and I should be living together outside of marriage. By this time, I had decided that Clyde’s advice was worth taking. He was not what I would call a religious person, but he was a faithful man and had a genuine selflessness like I had never seen.
So on December 19, 1982, Lynn and I got married in Clyde’s living room. I was twenty years old. Lynn had told me once, “I knew I was going to marry you the minute I saw you,” and sure enough, she was right. On our wedding day, we moved into a house not far from Clyde’s on Land Avenue. It was a simple little ranch house with a porch around one corner and some brown shutters on the windows. No mud. No rats. Lynn and I felt on top of the world.
I kept working hard for Clyde even though I still had a huge appetite for drugs. I was doing a lot of heroin and cocaine and had to shoot up in the morning before work. Seeing Clyde, being part of his business, and getting a taste of the straight life made me realize that as long as I was a slave to drugs I was never going to get far with my life.
Lynn and I needed another fresh start.
In the fall of 1984, we went on a vacation to Central City, Pennsylvania, to visit my parents, who had moved back into the house I grew up in. I knew Lynn was ready for a change too, so while we were there I asked her if she thought she could live there. After a quick look around, she said yes.
We were making plans to move, when my wonderful friend Clyde dropped dead of a heart attack. His business was shut down, but I was blessed to get a lot of the tools and equipment that would be useful for starting a new life in a new place.
I had no idea that my world was about to change so drastically. The move to Central City was another step in a journey that took me places I could never have imagined.
SEVEN
anatomy of a rescue
The adrenaline rush starts before we ever get on the road. Will we find children alive today? Dead? Wounded? How many? Where are their families? Will we flush out any LRA? Kill anybody? Will any of us be killed? Will I die today and miss my daughter’s wedding? Lots of questions and no answers.
We check our weapons. One reason AK-47s are so popular is that they’re virtually indestructible. Dust and mud and spotty maintenance don’t seem to faze them. We check our ammo supply, which is always more than adequate. I travel with plenty of firepower. The vehicles have been inspected to make sure all the maintenance is up-to-date. All that’s left to do is move out.
Our African operation has rescued more than nine hundred refugees of all ages. More than half of them were children who had been captured by the Lord’s Resistance Army. These youngest victims spend anywhere from a few days to years with the LRA. In some cases the rebel army abandons them, and in others they escape, even though they’re brainwashed and usually too scared to try that.
LRA attacks come without reason, without warning. These rebels have no evident objective beyond killing, maiming, and demoralizing their victims, who are almost always innocent, unarmed villagers, mostly women and children. These twisted followers of Joseph Kony are too chicken to fight soldier against soldier—many of them are poorly trained children themselves—so they prey on the helpless, pitting soldier against child or soldier against woman. Soldiers sweep through the village burning tukuls; trampling crops; stealing, scattering, or butchering the animals; killing or disfiguring the adults; and kidnapping the children.
News about a raid comes to me from the locals through the “bush telegraph,” a long-established informal communication network that’s as fast as any phone and much more accessible. In fact, unless you have a satellite phone, telephone service of any kind is rare in the bush. Nobody wants to install or maintain telephone lines in places where the rebels could attack any minute.
While no two rescues are exactly alike, this particular trip into the bush has a lot in common with previous operations. I got word of an LRA attack on a village along the road to Pageri about twenty miles away, an hour’s drive along the rutted dirt road through the bush from Nimule. After so many years of fighting, large numbers of people who used to live in the countryside have moved closer to Nimule for protection or they’ve picked up stakes and left the area entirely. As you drive east and north along the road, you can see the population gradually thinning out. Close to town there are plenty of people on the road walking or riding bicycles. The farther from town you drive, the fewer people there are.
We snake along through the bush in our Land Cruiser as fast as the rutted, rocky road will allow. As usual, we have a brand-new set of tires, cheap insurance in places where the roads are unpredictable and being stranded could mean dying as sitting ducks awaiting an ambush. The morning is already scorching hot under a cloudless sky when we roll on through the tall grass past an occasional bush or acacia tree, their silhouettes squashed into a horizontal shape, almost like a rectangle of leaves and branches balanced on top of a trunk.
I have my AK bouncing around in its customary position on my lap, the barrel resting on my left arm and poking out the window. My SPLA squad rides in the back, some dressed in fatigues and some in slacks and brightly patterned shirts. None of us talk much. All thoughts are on our destination and what we might find there. As the village comes into view, we strain to see or hear any hint that LRA soldiers might still be around. We don’t want to be surprised in case they heard our car coming and are waiting in ambush. Nothing moves anywhere around us; there is no sound, no insects, no animals in the area to make noise. Even the bugs are afraid to stay where the rebels had been. The only sound comes from our little two-truck convoy as we pull within sight of the village.
The low thatched roofs of the tukuls and storage sheds pop up into view all of a sudden. We are in the middle of the village before we know it is there. Around us are maybe two dozen tukuls dotting the edge of the clearing where the village common had been. Crops are trampled, cattle and chickens scattered. Some of the tukuls had their mud brick walls bashed in. Others were burned, leaving the smell of charred thatch and human flesh hanging in the air. Fresh graves, some of them covered with bricks, are scattered through the village near the entrances of the victims’ tukuls. The LRA killed twenty-seven people in the village that day and wounded many more. They abducted children, of course, some of whose parents were murdered as they watched.
On the road to mile 40, (one of the biggest conflict fighting areas in that part of Southern Sudan) with SPLA, 2000
The locals know who we are and why we are there. A couple of my soldiers go out into the bush to find children who have been scattered in the raid or grabbed by the LRA, then left behind. Some of them, maybe most, will have at least one parent or another relative who could take care of them, though the adults sometimes tried to hide that from us; they figure we will take better care of the children than they can, plus they won’t have another mouth to feed. We will sort all that out later.
What we have to do now is wait for word to spread that we are there and for the children to come to us out of the bush or for our SPLA soldiers to find them. I’m not very good at waiting. I sit in the Land Cruiser with the door open, saying a word now and then to one of the soldiers, but mostly keeping quiet. We very seldom ran across rebel soldiers in the bush with the children, which was all right by me. The LRA would just as soon kill their captives as let them go, or a child might be hit by crossfire. We never invade LRA strongholds for the same reasons—our appearance there could end a child’s life by murder or collateral damage.
Sam talking with the SPLA on a day after a village was raided.
I hear footsteps rustling in the tall grass and look up to see a woman in a colorful summer dress and a big white necklace. She walks forward with a shy smile, holding a two- or three-year-old child by the hand. The little one has a red patterned shirt and red shorts, looking well fed and healthy. Is he related to the woman? A freshly orphaned refugee? She leads him to the truck and speaks to one of the soldiers. As she t
alks, another woman, younger and dressed in bright yellow, appears with a baby on her hip. It could be her brother or her son or a baby she found abandoned in the bush. Then three boys walk out of the tall grass, three stair-steps with the oldest one about ten or eleven. Soldiers talk to the adults. Where are the parents? Aunts or uncles? Supposedly these children are all orphans. They tell us there are more hiding out but they’re still too afraid to come back to the village. I tell them we’ll send a truck back in two days to get anyone else.
We return with the children to the orphanage where Slinky Schillingi, our compound manager, interviews them and fills me in on the details. Slinky had polio as a child and walks in a distinctive way that somehow reminds you of a toy Slinky, pulling his feet around from the side with each step instead of putting one foot straight in front of another. It doesn’t slow him down though, doesn’t dampen his enthusiasm for doing his work, and surely doesn’t keep him from being very much in charge.
According to the survivors he talks to, two children were shot and killed, and five more are still in the bush. The oldest boy we brought back is named Emmanuel. He’s very quiet, barely speaks above a whisper, and looks down at the ground. Sometimes he glances up to the side but never looks anyone in the eye. He saw the two children killed. He saw his mother beaten with a rifle butt and both parents shot to death. The blank expression on his face is almost cracked by a quiver of the lip, corners of the mouth turned down, but he holds fast. Doesn’t let the emotion out. He can’t. Doesn’t know how. What he saw is too horrible to think about now. It may come out later in the nightmares so many of these children have.
Another new arrival sports a brand-new Aristocats sweatshirt from our stock of donated clothes. She has precious, delicate features and talks even less than Emmanuel. She is seven years old, and her name is Gift. She doesn’t know where her parents are. She spent a month carrying luggage for the LRA. Our caretakers say she was probably sexually assaulted, but she says nothing about it. I tell Slinky to let every child know that they are safe from the soldiers they know as Tom-Tom, meaning “cut-cut.” Every child deserves to wake up in the morning and not be afraid, to face the future without worrying about whether he or she will see someone killed that day or be killed him- or herself.
It’s a privilege and a joy to rescue these children and give them a home, but it’s even better when we can reunite them with their parents. On another rescue we brought two young teenage boys, Martin and James, back to the orphanage. The LRA had kidnapped them and used them as pack animals to carry supplies. They’d also probably used them for their own debased sexual gratification.
The boys’ families had been scattered in the raid, but we were able to locate Martin’s parents and get word to them that their son was safe. Along with a few soldiers, I took Martin to a meeting place in the bush on the side of the road and waited for his family. In a few minutes a woman parted the tall grass and stepped into the clearing where we were. She wore a crisp, white blouse and a flowing-bright pink skirt with bold flower designs—happy clothes for a happy reunion. Martin was sitting in the back of the Land Cruiser, and as soon as she saw him she started to run. With a huge smile on her face, she flung open the rear door, reached in, and picked up her son. Long and lanky as he was, his feet almost dragged the ground. She sat down in the dirt with him on her lap and tenderly felt his arms and legs, making sure he was all right. There’s no telling what shape his heart or his spirit were in after his experience, but at least physically he seemed okay.
A few minutes later Martin’s father joined us, looking like a well-dressed suburbanite in white slacks, white shoes, and a pullover sweater. He spoke to us in English. “Thank you. Thank you very much,” he repeated over and over.
In these two instances we found families of at least some of the children, then took the rest to our Children’s Village. Unfortunately the stories don’t always end so well. On a later rescue, I sent a runner in a couple of days ahead of my soldiers and me to search for the kids who’d been scattered in a raid. We heard there were abandoned children in the area but didn’t know exactly where or how many. Based on what the runner told us, I figured we’d find five or ten kids. When we got in, we discovered more than forty. The sight of so many children all alone absolutely floored me. I started checking the kids over for wounds. Everyone there had something wrong, and many had more than one problem. They were wounded, sick, malnourished, and infested with worms.
What could I do? I had room to take a dozen back with me if we packed them in, but they all needed attention, food, medical treatment, and shelter. I picked out fifteen kids who seemed to be in the worst shape and wedged them into the truck one by one until I couldn’t fit any more. That meant I had to leave more than twenty behind. I saw flashes of fear in the eyes of the children around the vehicle waiting to get in. Under furrowed brows all those little eyes blinked up at me questioning, Why are you leaving me? When will you be back? Will you be back?
When the kids remaining realized I was leaving without them, they started to panic. They started shouting and crying, holding out their arms to me. I couldn’t understand the words they were saying, but “No! No! Please don’t leave me!” feels the same in every language. Tears streamed from their eyes, making tracks in the dust caking their cheeks. They were hungry and afraid and I was their only hope. Now I was abandoning them. Even though I was taking some of them to safety, my heart broke to leave the rest of them.
Climbing into the Land Cruiser, I looked out at the sea of desperate faces and said, “I’ll be back for you. Give me a couple of days, and I’ll be back.” I was an adult and they wanted to believe me. Maybe they did believe, because the alternative was too scary to think about. But I lied. I had no intention of coming back in two days. I wouldn’t be able to return to the area that soon.
A week or so later the LRA hit that area again and killed several people, including some of the children I left behind. I was shaking with rage. “I swear to you, God,” I said through my tears, “I will never leave a child behind again as long as I live. Next time I’ll get all the weapons and ammo I can and stay behind with them, wait with them for the truck to come back. This will never happen again. Never again!” I had told all those pairs of fearful eyes that I would be back for them. They trusted me—because they had no one else to trust—and I let them down.
I still see those eyes sometimes.
Back in Pennsylvania after that trip, I stayed messed up more than I’d ever been. I kept seeing those little faces; I heard my own lie ringing in my head over and over. I didn’t want to talk to people at church about it, didn’t want to discuss it when I was speaking on the road, didn’t want to talk about it to anybody. I wanted the world to leave me alone. All I wanted was to get on my bike and ride.
I hadn’t had a motorcycle in eighteen years—since before I was married. But after a couple of close calls in Africa, I had told my wife, “Before I get killed I want to start riding again.” Lynn smiled and said, “You do whatever you want to.” Someone who knew my taste in transportation made a designated gift to our ministry specifically to help me buy a motorcycle, so in 2004 I’d bought the bike of my dreams—a brand-new Harley. Black, lots of chrome. The bike was a blessed escape once in a while, but, of course, I knew it wasn’t the ultimate answer.
Eventually I accepted the fact that I had done all I could in the bush that day and didn’t have anything to feel guilty about. My men and I had saved fifteen lives. But I reaffirmed the promise that I would never abandon a child again. I stood up crying in our church one day and made that vow public. “Before God,” I declared, “I’m making a commitment right now: I will never leave another child behind.”
To make good on that promise, I have to have a split personality. When I’m at home, I think about the orphanage and the children in Nimule. I’m constantly on the phone to Sudan dealing long-distance with its challenges and decisions. When I’m in Africa, I worry about Lynn and Paige and our ministry in Central City.
I lie awake in my tukul long past midnight thinking about my wife running our local ministry on her own and my daughter growing up without her father so much of the time. Juggling two worlds is hard, especially when both worlds need me at the same time. In some situations one of them gets shortchanged, no matter how hard I try.
Probably the most painful instance of being pulled in two directions at once was when Lynn’s son, Wayne, died in 2004. Wayne had moved in with us after we settled in Pennsylvania and stayed until he was fourteen or fifteen. He had gotten pretty rebellious by then and didn’t like the rules in our house. Since his father didn’t have so many rules, he went to live with him. Wayne was basically a good kid and a hard worker. He got married and had a daughter, Faith, but when his wife went to jail, he couldn’t take care of their child by himself. The state was going to take her if Wayne didn’t do something, so he called his mother. Lynn and I talked about it and decided, “We’ll take her. That’s what families do. Let’s just go pick her up.” We went to Wayne’s house in Daytona Beach and got her at Christmas. Wayne signed his parental rights over to us.
Three months later, Wayne died of a heroin overdose. He and his friends had been partying for days. He passed out, and his heart was really racing, so somebody gave him an injection of heroin to slow the heart rate down. I know this can work because I’ve done the same thing to other people. When they saw that his heart rate had slowed down, they put him in the bed, but nobody went back to check on him. His heart kept slowing down and slowing down until he died.
This all happened right as I was getting ready to go back to Africa. As badly as Lynn needed me, I couldn’t postpone my trip because of some crucial things going on over there. I had to be two places at once, and it was impossible. I literally left Wayne’s casket at the funeral to go to the airport. A week or two after I got home again Lynn basically had a nervous breakdown. I put her on a plane and sent her to her mom’s for a while to rest and recover.