John Nhial was barely a teenager when he was grabbed by a Sudanese guerrilla army and forced to become a child soldier. He was made to endure weeks of walking with so little food and water that some of his fellow captives died. Four more were killed one night in a wild-animal attack. Then the boys were given military training that involved ?running up to ten kilometres in the heat and hiding? before being given guns and sent to fight ?the Arabs.?
He spent four years fighting, bombed from the skies and blasting away on guns almost too heavy to hold against an enemy sometimes less than a kilometre away. ?I think, ?If I killed that one it?s a human being like me,? but you are forced,? he said. One day the inevitable happened: Nhial (not his real name) was injured, treading on a mine while on early-morning patrol with two other soldiers in a patch of Upper Nile state surrounded by their enemies.
?I stepped on it and it exploded,? he recalled. ?It threw me up and down again?and then I was looking around for my foot. I tried to look for my leg and found that there was no foot. When I saw there?s no foot I feel shock. I was really confused. If I was not with the two others I would kill myself because I thought there was no use for me now, so I decide to die.?
His comrades carried him back to base camp, but there was hardly any medical care there. It took 25 days before he received proper treatment, during which time he developed tetanus on one side of his body. Finally Nhial was put on a flight to the Kenyan border, his life saved when he was handed over to a Red Cross health team. Now, a decade later, he lives in a Juba refugee camp, having suffered further troubles in the whirlwind of conflict that has engulfed the struggling new nation of South Sudan.
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