威尔逊喜欢坎帕拉和他的生命,但在Ug中anda a man doesn’t count for much until he has some property of his own, a piece of land that he can cultivate and use as a retreat, and which, one day, can serve as his burial ground. So Wilson built himself a house in his ancestral village of Amugo, a collection of tumbledown shops and mud-wattle huts along a derelict railway line in the north. Wilson’s wife Josephine and four of their children were staying there, visiting his mother, when the rebels attacked. They crept in early on an October morning in 2002, about a dozen youths in ragtag clothes, carrying axes, machetes, and machine guns. A neighbor who spotted the beams of their flashlights screamed and scrambled for the hut where Josephine and the children were sleeping. “We are all dead,” she shouted hysterically, and the shooting began.

A rebel appeared in the hut’s doorway. He wore gumboots, a trench coat, and a baseball cap. He was a boy, really, no older than fifteen. “Where are yours?" he barked at Josephine. She wailed and the boy called for a rope. He and a comrade then tied her eldest sons together at the waist—Jimmy, who was fourteen, and Oscar, a year younger—and marched them into the bush.

Wilson was asleep in Kampala, and he didn’t hear of the attack until later that morning when he was at school, teaching. He left immediately and headed north. Wilson was no family man. He talked to me unabashedly about his many women—hardly remarkable in polygamous Uganda—and he boasted of fathering fifteen children, counting the illegitimate ones that he knew of. But Josephine was his “official” wife, and he loved the big messy family they’d made together. He took enormous pride in Jimmy and Oscar, who were promising, well-educated boys, and as he left Kampala he told his friends that he was going to find his boys. It seemed a febrile plan, but he could not be dissuaded. “We could see the violence in him,” one friend recalled. “There was a change in him,” said another. “He was heartbroken. . . . He had that self-blame.” Any father might have such feelings at the loss of his children. Wilson had something else, too, when he thought of his sons’ ordeal: he had been there himself.

During his last years as a bush fighter, in the late eighties, Wilson had fallen in for a time with the Holy Spirit Mobile Forces, a rebel army that sprung up in the north during the first years of Museveni’s rule, led by a young, Bible-quoting soothsayer named Alice Auma, who preached both rebellion and religious revival. Auma claimed to be channeling a local warrior spirit named Lakwena—the word means “messenger of God”—and to be in communion with animals, mountains, and waterfalls. The north’s malady, she said, was spiritual, and if only northern fighters were cleansed of sin they could easily defeat Museveni. Auma’s message drew thousands of recruits, whom she commanded from a thatch-roofed temple. She enforced a strict code of conduct—no drinking, no fornication—and instructed her soldiers to anoint themselves with a holy oil that, she promised, would make them invulnerable to enemy fire. Wilson, who was not disposed to blind belief, quickly soured on Auma’s crusade. To declare your forces bulletproof, he felt, was pure suicide. Sure enough, the Holy Spirit army was soon defeated, and Auma fled into exile, but a young cousin of hers, Joseph Kony, claimed that Lakwena’s powers had passed into him, and he started his own rebellion, which he called the Lord’s Resistance Army.

科尼威尔逊出生大约在同一时间,in nearly the same place, and as a young man he had found power in cultivating a reputation as a sorcerer. He was a lanky, dreadlocked former altar boy who wore white robes and purported to be inhabited by warrior spirits and imbued with gifts of prophecy and healing. He had a mesmerizing voice and messianic pretensions, and when he began the LRA in the late eighties, he drew support from some of the renegade forces of the old dictatorships who regarded Museveni as a usurper. But most northerners declined to follow him, and Kony, enraged, turned harshly against his own people. He declared that if fathers would not rise up with him he would take their sons, and kidnapping became the LRA’s primary means of recruiting. It was a fiendishly effective tactic. Children made malleable, disposable troops, well-suited for the campaigns of murder and mutilation by which Kony gained an international reputation in the nineties. Eighty percent of his army of abductees were believed to be between seven and seventeen years old—and for the most part he sent them to attack not an enemy army, but their own brothers and sisters.

一位乌干达教堂的人在与LRA的短暂尝试进行和平谈判中担任政府中介人，曾经向我描述了与Kony在偏远的北部草地上与Kony举行的峰会会议。叛军穿着军事疲劳和飞行员太阳镜到达，由一群孩子的干部陪同，他们的脚前从壁画中倒了圣水。他在头顶上抬起了卡拉什尼科夫，并告诉和平谈判者：“看枪。我已经用这把枪战斗了七年，政府也与枪支作战，但他们尚未击败我们。”

实际上，违反失败是科尼的信号成就。没有人能确定LRA代表什么。科尼声称自己的命令直接来自上帝，他计划按照十诫统治乌干达。但是，LRA以圣战争为基础的宗教是完全发明的，这是一种泛滥的迷信，圣经的原教旨主义和萨满教的混乱，其政治甚至更不连贯。由于科尼的受害者从北部绝大多数都是被称为自发性何种的战争。尽管如此，许多北方人仍然同样责怪穆塞韦尼的持续苦难。他们坚信他可以随时随地挤压LRA，但他更喜欢让战斗继续进行以保持北方的瘫痪。穆塞韦尼说：“我不相信转动另一个脸颊。”他解释了为什么他拒绝与科尼的叛军进行认真的和平谈判。“我们正在杀死他们。”

袭击发生后的第二天，威尔逊到达阿ugo时，他发现自己的房子被烧在地上。约瑟芬走了。她逃到了母亲的村庄，那里有一段距离。威尔逊一直向北走，沿着叛军带出城镇的道路。起初，他雇用了自行车出租车。但是骑自行车的人只愿意走那么远。LRA部队经常杀死他们遇到的骑手，或者砍掉腿部，因为叛军认为他们是政府间谍。威尔逊走了。

He walked for days, passing through the flatlands around Amugo and the malarial swamps where the rebels collected water, then crossed the Moroto River and traveled on to rockier terrain. This land was barren, depopulated. When Wilson did encounter people, they fled in terror at the sight of him. In this area, any stranger was assumed to be a threat. He also encountered some children who’d escaped the LRA, and they gave him bits of intelligence.

在这样的小费之后，威尔逊离开了道路，向西行驶。他来到了一个清理工作，发现了一个营地的遗体。在大豆和高粱的小块地块中，几个临时十字架停在地面上。威尔逊在那里发现了四个孩子的尸体。他们被杀死了。孩子们在威尔逊似乎已经十一或十二岁了。他知道，LRA经常被处决缓慢或受伤或只是为父母哭泣的绑架者。这些杀戮是那些被允许生活的人的课程。

叛军几天前放弃了营地，尸体已经开始在热带热量中分解。威尔逊被吸引到了一个面对着的孩子，他的头顶着原木，好像他被迫被迫从地面上踢了。那个死去的男孩穿着蓝色，就像他的儿子奥斯卡被捕时所穿的那样。然后威尔逊注意到皮带。它是白色的，带有鳄鱼的徽章，就像奥斯卡的徽章一样。他试图研究尸体的特征。威尔逊稍后告诉我：“他们用很多手杖殴打了他，所以身体肿了。”“整个脸已经被玛格特吃掉了。即使他是我的儿子，我也无法认出他。”但是威尔逊可以肯定：奥斯卡死了。