Lords Resistance Army. - To stop a warlord: my story of justice, grace, and the fight for peace

I T WAS LONG after midnight in San Antonio, Texas, when the phone rang. Brody, my four-year-old, had crawled in beside me an hour or two before and was taking up most of the bed. I never sleep deeply anymore, even at home, even in the middle of the night. When I heard my cellphone ring I was quick, pulling on my robe, heading for the back porch where I took my early morning calls from the field. The alarm on the back door beeped as I crossed into the night. Steps away from my sleeping husband and sons, I suddenly felt as distant from them as I did during my trips to Central Africa, where I slept alone in a tent, surrounded by the snoring of hundreds of men, where being so far from my family was a physical ache in my chest.

Laren Pooles voice came through the static of his satellite phone. Laren managed the operations of our mission in the field. His voice rippled with urgency as he spoke the words, the coded phrase we had devised should a moment like this ever arise.

Boss, he said, its time to bet the farm.

My heart leapt and my stomach dropped, some combination of excitement and dread, my mind whirring with the additional resources wed need to pull together in support of a targeted operation, an unconventional collaboration between the Ugandan military, US Special Forces, humanitarian organizations, and the Bridgeway Foundation, the organization I run. Our cobbled-together alliance of private and public, military and humanitarian organizations was piloting a new way of trying to stop mass atrocities, and Larens words were the signal that it was time to go all in on our mission to catch Joseph Kony.

It was 2013, and by that point Joseph Kony and his Lords Resistance Army (LRA) had terrorized the citizens of four countries in Africa for more than twenty-five years. The numbers were staggering: more than a hundred thousand dead. At least thirty thousand children abducted and forced to become soldiers or sex slaves. At the height of the conflict, ninety percent of the northern Ugandan populationalmost two million innocent civilianswere forcefully displaced and put under curfew by the Ugandan military in their attempts to counter the LRA. Government troops denied civilians access to their land and they were crowded into squalid camps, caught in the midst of a brutal war. Even those devastating figures dont fully describe the suffering unleashed by the LRA. Their violence was especially brutal, often worse than Id seen elsewhere in my human rights work. Kony and his army were setting a bar for evil in our world and kept raising it. In 2005, when the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued its first-ever arrest warrants, indictments were handed down against Joseph Kony and four other LRA leaders for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Three of five indictees, including Kony, were still at large, and the violence against the innocent had only worsened.

For a decade Kony had been like a ghost, invisible except in the stories of those who had escaped from his army or survived LRA attacks. Over the last five years, all the information our shared mission had gathered had made us fairly certain we knew the general area in which he was hiding. But pinpointing his exact location in that terrain was nearly impossible. On bad days, Id often wondered whether our hope of capturing him and bringing him to justice was nothing more than a moonshot. But now, our target had materialized clearly in our sights: Konys nerve center in Kafia Kingi (K2), on disputed land between Sudan and South Sudan, had been identified.