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To Stop a Warlord
To Stop a Warlord Read online
Copyright © 2019 by Shannon Sedgwick Davis
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Spiegel & Grau and Design is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Davis, Shannon Sedgwick, author.
Title: To stop a warlord : my story of justice, grace, and the fight for peace / Shannon Sedgwick Davis.
Description: First edition. | New York: Spiegel & Grau, [2019]
Identifiers: LCCN 2018024393 | ISBN 9780812995923 (hardback)
| ISBN 9780812995930 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Davis, Shannon Sedgwick. | Human rights workers—Uganda—Biography. | Lord’s Resistance Army. | Military assistance—Uganda—History —21st century. | Special forces (Military science)—Uganda—Training of. | STTEP (Private military company)—History. | Human rights workers—United States—Biography. | Military assistance, American—History—21st century. | Insurgency—Uganda. | Uganda—History—1979– | LCGFT: Autobiographies.
Classification: LCC DT433.287.D38 A3 2019 | DDC 967.6104/4092 [B]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018024393
Ebook ISBN 9780812995930
spiegelandgrau.com
randomhousebooks.com
Book design by Jo Anne Metsch, adapted for ebook
Cover design: Greg Mollica
Cover photograph: Howard G. Buffett
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Intentions
Map
Part One
Chapter 1: To Stop a Warlord
Who Do You Love the Most?—David Ocitti
Chapter 2: Protection Urgently Needed
Chapter 3: Band-Aids on Bullet Holes
Chapter 4: A Thousand Haystacks
Chapter 5: A Mother’s Wish
Chapter 6: Makombo
You Could Be Next—David Ocitti
Chapter 7: Training and Communications
Chapter 8: The Ones We Were Waiting For
Panga—David Ocitti
Chapter 9: Zebras
Chapter 10: Red Tape and River Rafts
Chapter 11: A Close Call
Chapter 12: Red Zone
Chapter 13: Leather Shoes and Radios
There Is a Time—David Ocitti
Chapter 14: Iron Lady from Texas
Chapter 15: Non-Negotiables
Chapter 16: Al Dente
Chapter 17: Impossible Terms
Chapter 18: Drone
The Face of God—David Ocitti
Chapter 19: Black and White
Part Two
Chapter 20: In at Half
A Dirty Path—David Ocitti
Chapter 21: Impossible Cause
Chapter 22: Use the Force
Chapter 23: Operation Viper
Chapter 24: Flight Manifest
It Was You—David Ocitti
Chapter 25: False Ridge
Chapter 26: Camp Bondo
Chapter 27: Dance for Saint Jude
Chapter 28: Not in Our Interests
Chapter 29: Contact
Chapter 30: Command, Man Down
Chapter 31: Crocodiles and Killer Bees
Peace Club—David Ocitti
Chapter 32: Father, Daughter
Chapter 33: Jamaled
Chapter 34: Called Out
Chapter 35: The Farmer
Gulu University—David Ocitti
Chapter 36: Coined
Chapter 37: Kony 2012
Chapter 38: Otukene Means Grace
Chapter 39: Big Fish
Chapter 40: Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich
Roadie—David Ocitti
Chapter 41: Tracking White Ant
Chapter 42: Okello’s Teeth
Chapter 43: Binany’s GPS
Chapter 44: Operation Merlin
Chapter 45: What Is Good
Part Three
Chapter 46: Cut the Snake Off the Head
Chapter 47: Odhiambo the Butcher
History Checks In—David Ocitti
Chapter 48: Blue-Eyed Acholi
Five-Piece Suit—David Ocitti
Chapter 49: Let Your Heart Speak to You
Chapter 50: A Son Never Forgets
Chapter 51: Brother, You Are Home
The Bitter Root—David Ocitti
Chapter 52: Grace’s Sun
Chapter 53: He Calls Himself Ali
So It Can End—David Ocitti
Chapter 54: Evil Has Taught Me the Most
Epilogue
Photo Insert
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chronology
Glossary of Terms
How You Can Help
About the Author
INTENTIONS
I wrestled incessantly with whether or not to tell this story. In some ways, the decade-long journey felt too sacred for paper.
In our shared efforts to help protect those vulnerable to Joseph Kony’s violence in Central Africa, I worked with incredible souls, people who were united in giving their all to push humanity forward and past some terrifying events. I feel honored and humbled to have met so many of these heroes along the way.
Some of those involved in this story remain in positions of government or have profiles that could be affected by their appearance in this book. I’ve changed several names in order to protect these people. (All pseudonyms are denoted with an asterisk at first introduction.) Certain details of sensitive operations have been omitted. Although I seek to honor all of the participants’ unique perspectives and contributions, this story is by necessity my account, describing experiences from my perspective. Given the nature of military operations, we didn’t always have full visibility of every dynamic at play, and the story is limited to my perspective and understanding of the events that unfolded. For times I was not present, I relied heavily on the recollections and stories that were relayed to me. I did my best to corroborate each of these stories but due to the long time that had passed, exact details and dates could not always be confirmed.
More than anything, I hope this book serves as an encouragement to engage more deeply in issues of injustice in the world, to look at the problems around us and seek creative solutions. I hope it adequately honors local heroes on the ground and encourages more support of locally driven solutions in areas of poverty and conflict. I hope it inspires deep listening, lively discussion, and thoughtful action as we strive toward a world with more justice, accountability, and love.
PART ONE
We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.
Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
—MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
1
TO STOP A WARLORD
IT WAS LONG after midnight in San Antonio, Texas, when the phone rang. Brody, my four-year-old, had crawled in beside me an hour or two before and was taking up most of the bed. I never sleep deeply anymore, even at home, even in the middle of the night. When I heard my cellphone ring I was quick, pulling on my robe, heading for the back porch where I took my early morning calls from the field. The alarm on the back door beeped as I crossed into the night. Steps away from my sleeping husband and sons, I suddenly felt as distant from them as I did during my trips to Central Africa, where I slept alone in a tent, surrounded by the snoring of hundreds of men, where being so far from my family was a physical ache in my chest.
Laren Poole’s voice came through the static of his satellite phone. Laren managed the operations of our mission in the field. His voice rippled with urgency as he spoke the words, the coded phrase we had devised should a moment like this ever arise.
“Boss,” he said, “it’s time to bet the farm.”
My heart leapt and my stomach dropped, some combination of excitement and dread, my mind whirring with the additional resources we’d need to pull together in support of a targeted operation, an unconventional collaboration between the Ugandan military, US Special Forces, humanitarian organizations, and the Bridgeway Foundation, the organization I run. Our cobbled-together alliance of private and public, military and humanitarian organizations was piloting a new way of trying to stop mass atrocities, and Laren’s words were the signal that it was time to go all in on our mission to catch Joseph Kony.
It was 2013, and by that point Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) had terrorized the citizens of four countries in Africa for more than twenty-five years. The numbers were staggering: more than a hundred thousand dead. At least thirty thousand children abducted and forced to become soldiers or sex slaves. At the height of the conflict, ninety percent of the northern Ugandan population—almost two million innocent civilians—were forcefully displaced and put under curfew by the Ugandan military in their attempts to counter the LRA. Government troops denied civilians access to their land and they were crowded into squalid camps, caught in the midst of a brutal war. Even those devastating figures don’t fully describe the suffering unleashed by the LRA. Their violence was especially brutal, often worse than I’d seen elsewhere in my human rights work. Kony and his army were setting a bar for evil in our world and kept raising it. In 2005, when the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued its first-ever arrest warrants, indictments were handed down against Joseph Kony and four other LRA leaders for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Three of five indictees, including Kony, were still at large, and the violence against the innocent had only worsened.
For a decade Kony had been like a ghost, invisible except in the stories of those who had escaped from his army or survived LRA attacks. Over the last five years, all the information our shared mission had gathered had made us fairly certain we knew the general area in which he was hiding. But pinpointing his exact location in that terrain was nearly impossible. On bad days, I’d often wondered whether our hope of capturing him and bringing him to justice was nothing more than a moonshot. But now, our target had materialized clearly in our sights: Kony’s nerve center in Kafia Kingi (K2), on disputed land between Sudan and South Sudan, had been identified.
Now, if we worked quickly, if our allies were skilled, and if we were lucky, Kony’s reign of terror might finally come to an end. Laren and I couldn’t talk specifics over the satellite phone; it wasn’t secure. It would be another week before he could brief me on the new intelligence that had bolstered his confidence that this time we could catch Kony.
I sat on the back porch, watching the sun start to rise. I had waited for this moment for almost three years, yet the surge of excitement and enthusiasm was muted by exhaustion. I was tired. And alone. Laren, my sounding board and partner in the operation, was half a world away and not around to answer the many questions racing through my mind. And I was all too aware that history was not on our side. One of the last times there had been confirmation of Kony’s hideout was in 2008, when Ugandan, Congolese, and southern Sudanese forces, with advisement from the US military, had launched a joint assault on the LRA camp. The operation had failed, reportedly due to leaked intelligence, bad weather, poor coordination, and resentments among the collaborating armies. Kony and his soldiers had scattered, breaking into small, mobile groups that were able to weave back and forth across borders and evade capture. The failed operation had made it more difficult to combat the LRA, and it had been devastating for civilians: in the weeks that followed, close to a thousand people were killed in a series of bloody reprisal attacks in northeastern Congo and southern Sudan.
If this opportunity was missed, Kony would likely slip off the edge of the Earth again, taking his army and hostages with him and perhaps leaving a trail of destruction in his wake. We weren’t only betting the resources and partnerships it had taken us most of a decade to cultivate. Also at stake were the lives of women and children held captive in Kony’s K2 camp and the civilians who might become victims of his vengeance.
And yet, what if we succeeded? What if we could bring Kony out in custody? Perhaps the tens of thousands of children in South Sudan, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of Congo would be a little safer. Fewer girls would be used as sex slaves. Fewer boys would be forced to kill.
I had been chilly in my robe and slippers when I first came outside, but now the morning air was growing warmer, the pale early light revealing a thick yellow blanket of mountain cedar pollen that had settled on the grass overnight. A light came on in the house, and I could see Sam and the boys shuffle into the kitchen. I watched them for a moment—Sam in sweatpants and a Captain America T-shirt, pouring bowls of cereal; Connor and Brody in their cotton-print jammies, grabbing their Lego spaceships from the coffee table, flying them through the air.
“Mommy!” they called, smiles bright, as I came back into the house.
* * *
—
When I landed in Entebbe, Uganda, a few days before the Kafia Kingi (K2) mission was to begin, the heat was so intense I could see it, a bright glare coming off the tarmac. If this were a routine visit, after going through Immigration and Customs and a few hours’ wait, I’d head back out to the tarmac, climb into our nine-seat Cessna Caravan plane crowded with drums of jet fuel, and fly four and a half hours north to our forward operations base. I’d put on headphones and listen to music, hoping to block out engine noise and turbulence, trying not to obsess over my worries. I am a peacemaker, a human rights activist. And here I was, in the middle of a military operation.
But this wasn’t a routine visit.
I passed my visa documents to the immigration official and stopped in the bathroom to put myself together after twenty-four hours of travel. I pulled my blond hair back under a headscarf to keep the fine strands from sticking to my face and put on a pair of sunglasses. Of all the thousands of people I interacted with in my work in Central Africa, in my meetings at the highest levels of military and government groups, I was almost always the only woman. I pinched my cheeks to wake up and to move some color back into my face. I pulled my backpack on and made my way out to the line of taxis at the curb.
On the drive to the US Special Forces compound in Entebbe, I reviewed the operation that had been diagrammed on paper and rehearsed in the field for over a month. Five Mi-17 helicopters—two from the Ugandan military, one provided by Bridgeway, and two more we had agreed to charter from a contractor in Entebbe—were ready to carry sixty Ugandan special operations soldiers from their forward base in Obo, Central African Republic, to a location on the other side of a ridge from Kony’s suspected hideout. To move quickly, to avoid detection, the soldiers would split into nimble splinter groups, each equipped with a satellite phone. They would put on night vision goggles and cross a mountain range and
then semi-arid savanna, traveling only under the protection of darkness over the course of two successive nights. And when dawn broke they would attempt to catch Kony.
US Special Forces Commander Paul Korbel* met me at the gate to the compound. As we walked together, the soldiers looked up from their work. They always treated me with respect, but I couldn’t escape the feeling that they thought of me as a trespasser in their domain, a humanitarian civilian who didn’t belong behind the scenes of a military operation.
Commander Korbel wiped sweat from his forehead and grinned. “We’ve got our eyes on K2,” he said. “We estimate between forty and sixty combatants in the camp. A hundred and twenty-five women and children.”
“They’re still there?”
“Looks like it, with smoking fires.”
Military personnel understandably tend to undersell success and downplay certainty. Even so, I couldn’t help myself from asking, “Is this going to work?”
“We’ve got a shot,” he said.
Okay, it was only a shot. But it was the best chance we were likely ever to have. I wanted to say, That’s enough for me. But of course we all wanted more than a shot: we wanted to stop the LRA. We wanted the man who had led the kidnapping of more than thirty thousand children to be brought to justice. We wanted every mother in Central Africa—in the world—to have the right that I have, the right to put her children to sleep at night and trust that in the morning they will still be there. To shatter the lie that we are powerless against violence and evil. To remember that in the face of monumental darkness, there is no limit to what we can do for each other, there is no fence around the human heart. I traced my finger over the Saint Jude pendant I’d been wearing since we began this mission. Saint Jude, the patron saint of lost and impossible causes. The contours of the pendant had become like Braille to me. We would get him this time. I felt sure.