Time and again, Denis Okwonga was confronted with countless mangled bodies, which covered the blood-spattered ground. Scenes like this had become commonplace for the 14-year-old child soldier, forced to fight in the civil war in Uganda that has now raged for 20 years.    

Denis had no choice but to keep walking past the lifeless people.    

“There’s no special ritual. They’re only buried, after they’ve been killed, when there’s time,” the youth recalled during a phone interview from Uganda. Far too often, soldiers are in a hurry and simply leave their victims in the bush to decompose.    

For 18 months after the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebels abducted Denis from his village, they held him captive.    

 “After training for a few days, they gave me a gun, and I was expected to fight. I think that while I was fighting I might have killed people using my gun,” Denis said. He also remembered the rebels forcing him to beat people until they were almost dead. They may have died after he left them; Denis doesn’t know.    

The rebels also forced him to abduct children like himself in village raids.    

These children ultimately numbered about 100 of the 400 rebel soldiers in the group. They formed a common bond.    

 “The child soldiers were like my own brothers and sisters –  we were all taken the same way,” he said. “Whenever there was food we would all eat together, however little there was. When there was no food, we all suffered together.”     

Besides his fellow child soldiers, Denis wasn’t sure if he could trust anyone else. The rebels taught him to fear the government. “The rebels would always tell us that if we escaped and came back to lead a normal life, the government would kill us,” he said.” So while I was in captivity I kept thinking that the government was bad.”    

Denis finally managed to escape when government troops held the LRA in a cross-fire during a battle. “When I escaped I realized that what the rebels were telling us were completely lies.”    

But, to this day, Denis, now 17, still can’t return to his home village. Instead, he’s enrolled in a program to help rehabilitate child soldiers in Northern Uganda. He plans to stay there until rebel activity subsides.     

 “I fear that if I go to my village I will be re-abducted. Because I was in the bush, the commanders would know me and they would definitely kill me.”