Courtesy Photo | Anthony Lodiong (center) is hanging out with some classmates from primary secondary...... read more read more
BAGRAM AIR FIELD, Afghanistan - Pfc. Anthony Lodiong is a U.S. Army logistician with the 10th Sustainment Brigade and is currently deployed to Bagram Air Field, Afghanistan, in support of Operation Enduring Freedom.
“Lodiong is an outstanding Soldier who knows what it means to be a member of a team,” said Staff Sgt. Lobsang Salaka, the noncommissioned officer in charge of the 10th SBDE humanitarian relief yard. “He continues to put the mission first in everything he does.”
Lodiong spends his days on Bagram working at the 10th SBDE HR yard, but he is haunted by childhood memories – memories of war and of a stolen childhood.
In 1992, Lodiong lived with his family in Kaya, South Sudan, a small town that borders the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda. He was only nine years old then, but vividly remembers the rebel soldiers pounding on his family’s door in the middle of a hot summer night. The rebel soldiers barged in and started searching the house.
As he heard the voices and footsteps going from room to room, the fear and anxiety forced him to crawl under his bed but was found and forcibly taken from his house. The last memory he had before being taken away by the rebel soldiers was his mother hysterically pleading with them not to take him away.
“In 1992, I got recruited,” said Lodiong. “Forceful recruitment is something that is so sudden. You are sleeping at night, and then the soldiers come to your house. They open the door and search the house for you. When they find you, they take you even if you have already served in the SPLA. They gathered us in a nearby field until morning where they identified the former soldiers and sent them to go fight.”
The Sudan People’s Liberation Army was founded as a guerrilla movement in 1983, organized to fight the Sudanese government. The Second Sudanese Civil War was a conflict, from 1983 to 2005, between the central Sudanese government and the SPLA. The war originated in the southern part of Sudan and eventually spread as far as the Blue Nile and Nuba Mountains.
Over the course of the war, approximately 4 million people living in southern Sudan were displaced at least once, some multiple times. Lodiong’s family was originally from Kajo Keji but was forced to leave to avoid the fighting that had erupted. They moved to Yei, which is approximately 80 miles west, where his father worked for the U.N. as a camp commander helping Ugandan refugees.
Yei is where Lodiong was born and lived for a year before his family decided to move back to Kajo Keji in 1985, but because of the fighting, they had to keep relocating to try to stay away from it. His family moved all over southern Sudan.
Eventually the fighting caught up with Lodiong and his family.
“There is no way to escape,” said Lodiong. “They force you to do it. We were all young children from 8-14 years old.”
There was an order saying everyone going to primary school must be trained and recruited into the SPLA, he said.
Training camp
He said the training camp was on the outskirts of Kaya to make it more difficult to sneak or run away during training.
“The memories of the training I had … wow,” said Lodiong. “I still remember my trainer. His voice was so loud. At night, I can still hear him giving us orders for marching and other training.”
Lodiong said the training is normally six-months long, but his was only four months because the SPLA desperately needed more soldiers to go and fight. The conditions were hard, as they were given very little, but the young recruits always tried to do their best during the training. His trainer would tell them they are guerrilla soldiers and had to learn the hard way.
“Some of the other training camps had some really serious training and some people even died during the training,” said Lodiong. “I was happy during my training because nobody died. We were all child soldiers so the conditions were not as tough as the older group’s training.”
He figured they didn’t want to discourage the young recruits.
“When I was growing up I had no idea what the SPLA was really about,” said Lodiong. “I only knew that it was an organization that had to fight. At that time, I didn’t know the reason to fight but I was ready to fight since I was recruited.”
The recruits were housed in abandoned school structures, which are large huts with grass roofs.
Their living conditions weren’t much better than their diet, which consisted of beans, hard corn and Sorghum, which is a cereal grass that has corn like leaves and a tall stem bearing a cluster of grain.
“That is your lunch and dinner every day; there was no change of diet at all,” he recalled.
The child soldiers carried a wooden rifle every day during training, as their trainers wanted them to get used to a real AK-47. Training was focused on marching, shooting, attack tactics and group movements. Lodiong can still remember the tactics he was taught to attack the enemy.
He said they only went to the firing range once because they didn’t want to waste ammo. It didn’t matter if you were accurate with the weapon. You were considered trained as long as you could point it in the direction of the enemy and pull the trigger.
“I was being trained as the leader of a nine-man group,” said Lodiong. “I think it would be compared to a squad leader in the U.S. Army. I was trained on how to lead soldiers in attacks.”
After his training Lodiong returned back to his family.
“My parents realized since I was already trained it was only a matter of time before I was sent to fight in the war,” said Lodiong.
Liberation
In January 1993, Lodiong’s parents snuck him out of the country to Uganda where he stayed in exile. He lived with his uncle at the U.N. Magburu refugee settlement.
“Living there wasn’t too hard,” said Lodiong. “That was where I got my college scholarship.”
He said if you went to school, studied hard and passed with good grades you could get a college scholarship.
“Looking back, I am happy that I didn’t have to go and fight in the war because I later found out that most of the people I was recruited with and trained with lost their lives,” said Lodiong. “There were only a few who survived.”
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| Date Taken: | 05.22.2014 |
| Date Posted: | 05.22.2014 01:34 |
| Story ID: | 130726 |
| Location: | BAGRAM AIR FIELD, AF |
| Hometown: | NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA, US |
| Web Views: | 387 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, Through the eyes of a child soldier: From math problems to ambush tactics, Soldier recalls childhood struggle, by SSG Michael Selvage, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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