samuel the foxhole court momma i met a boy

He ended up near the border with Uganda, where a complicated and bloody conflict-one of Africa’s so-called forgotten wars-has been raging since 1987. In 1998 he used his meager savings to take his first missionary trip to Sudan. Leaving behind a life of drugs and crime, Childers set up a hardscrabble church in rural Pennsylvania. In 1992, Childers was born again, having promised his wife he would come to Jesus if God granted them a child. He seems suited more to bending steel in a motorcycle shop than to saving souls in Sudanese villages. Harley tattoos stretch down his thick arms, and “Freedom Fighter” is airbrushed on the back of his truck. 44 Magnum tucked in the small of his back. He lifts weights, favors army fatigues, and keeps a.

He speaks country-singer American, with plenty of grit, and he recounts, over and over, the same stories from his bar-brawling days. In firefights, he says, God sometimes tells him when to shoot. He claims divine justification for what he does. Childers is a former drug dealer and outlaw biker, with tired eyes framed by grizzly muttonchops and a walrus mustache. He is not your typical evangelical Christian missionary, nor, as a white American, is he your typical African warlord. Sam Childers is known in these parts, and back home in Pennsylvania, simply as the Reverend Sam. Sergeant Deng, in the passenger seat, turns around to me and says, “God’s assassins.” Ahead, the headlights peer down a fiery tunnel. Behind us, the past disappears in a cloud of dust. To remove the L.R.A.’s cover, villagers have set fire to the elephant grass on either side of the road. Childers switches from Christian rock to Aerosmith’s “Livin’ on the Edge,” turning up the volume. Most members of his militia are born-again Christians whom Childers has baptized himself. The unflappable Ugandan driving the militia truck wears a torn white pro-life T-shirt emblazoned with a picture of a fetus, a gift from Childers. Childers wants to intercept them, and kill their leader. Intelligence sources from the Sudan People’s Liberation Army-the ragtag military wing of the breakaway government of Southern Sudan-have indicated that elements of the L.R.A. In the area we’re passing through, just hours ago soldiers from the Lord’s Resistance Army (L.R.A.) hacked 15 villagers to death with machetes, then disappeared into the bush. The convoy is on its way to a Sudanese town called Maridi. A truck follows close behind, carrying 15 men from the small militia group under Childers’s personal command. Since leaving the town of Mundri, headed toward the Congolese border, we’ve been driving for two bone-jarring days on roads littered with the charred wrecks of armored vehicles and fuel tankers, remnants of battles past. His top sergeant, Santino Deng, 34, a Dinka tribesman with an anthracite complexion and radiant black eyes, sits in the passenger seat, an AK-47 across his lap. He has a Bible on the dash and a shotgun that he calls his “widow-maker” leaning against his left knee. Sam Childers, 46, is behind the wheel of a chrome-tinted Mitsubishi truck. In the cool of night, the temperature is nearly 100 degrees. It’s two a.m., and we’re barreling down a deeply pocked dirt road in Southern Sudan.

Samuel the foxhole court momma i met a boy