I FELT EMPTY AND DEJECTED after Oder left for the front line, but Itang provided some stability. We’d been moving around like nomads, and Itang gave me a sense of belonging to a physical place, somewhere I could consider home, even if just for a while. I played soccer with my age-mates and went to the beach in the afternoons and evenings, performed mock military parades and learned the alphabet. This gave me a sense of progress, like I was getting somewhere in life. The SPLA, on the other hand, gave me a sense of hope for the future, since there was talk that once we were older, we would be taken to school in Kenya, something that I looked forward to. And by now we had built homes and were no longer living in huts. It was the first feeling of permanence that I’d had in a long time.

On occasion, I would practice my karate in camp, which was another way to keep Oder’s spirit with me, even if I wasn’t allowed to discuss how he was. There was a man named Gatdor who saw me training by the bank of the river and struck up a conversation with me.

GATDOR: Where did you learn to do these stunts?

ME: My older brother showed me. I’ve been training ever since.

GATDOR: Do you think you could outmaneuver a machine gun with your fancy footwork?

ME: Not the machine gun, but maybe the man firing it.

Gatdor laughed. He thought me a bit cheeky but didn’t take offense. After that, he was friendly and would ask me what I had done to be better in the long run.

ME: I am loaded and ready to deliver.

Gatdor slowly walked toward me, then ordered me to do a standing front tuck. Which I did—quite well, I might add.

It was around this time that my father started sneaking in and visiting us for short spells when he wasn’t fighting for the SPLA. Dad’s spies seemed to suggest Anya Anya II spies were few and far between in camp, so it was somewhat safer for him to be around. With Dad in the house, it felt like one hero had gone but a new one had returned to take his place. If only all our family could be together again under one roof. If I’d had a thousand birthdays, it would have been my one and only wish.

A strange occurrence became commonplace in the camp: every evening there would be wailing from one home or another, news having gotten back from the front line that a family member—a son, father, or uncle—had died from enemy fire.

My schoolmate Moses’s father, Captain Bikhan Deng, was a senior SPLA soldier. One day Moses told me that his dad was back from fighting on the front line, and I accompanied Moses home after school. I couldn’t think about decorum or manners and blurted out my questions.

ME: How was the fighting? Is Oder okay? My brother?

CAPTAIN DENG: It is nice to meet you, young man. And everything is great at the front line. We fight like the fate of the world rests on our shoulders. Your brother too. You should be proud.

However, the following day, Captain Deng came over to my family’s home. He found my father and mother and me and asked us to move closer. I instantly felt something was wrong. He offered no formalities.

CAPTAIN DENG: I am sorry to be the one to have to tell you this, but your son, your brother Oder has been shot dead by soldiers from the north.

When we heard this coldly delivered news, voices from inside our home rose up in that familiar melancholic chorus that had quickly supplanted the chirping of insects as the soundtrack of the evening. Noises escaped my mum’s and my lips that none of us had ever before emitted, coming from wells inside that none of us had ever before tapped. They reminded me of the vivid screams I’d heard as a small boy that are implanted in my brain of a lion behind our hut defending itself against an attack by ten to fifteen hyenas. My father, shocked, sat still, neither moving nor blinking. We had cried tears of joy in that same spot when Oder had come back. Now we were crying because Oder was dead, killed in the battle of Nasir.

DAD: Everyone, stop crying now. You are giving me a headache.

Father exited the house after Captain Deng, leaving my mother and me to grieve with each other.

I was inconsolable and couldn’t sleep that night. I looked outside and saw my father seated alone in the dark. He was hunched over, his big frame looking almost like a pile of sticks in the moonlight, his shoulders heaving. He was crying softly. This began the first and only period of time I ever saw him cry. I quietly observed him cry at night for several nights. Oder’s death was easily one of the biggest blows to my family, since everyone was fond of him. And the way it went down. From Captain Deng telling me everything was okay, then coming the following day to tell my family of Oder’s death, to my father’s show of strength in public and weeping in private, it became clear to me that the SPLA wanted to keep deaths hidden. For acknowledging them in the open would yield a drastic drop in anyone’s enthusiasm for this—or any—war.