ulius Okello played soccer on a field in the village when the soldiers came. “My team was just about to win,” recalls the now 33-year-old. He would never know how the game would have ended.

The soldiers took him and other children who looked fit and strong enough to deal with in their cars. “From then on, was nothing more in my life as it once was.” Okello was nine years old when he became a child soldier. He joined the National Resistance Army (NRA) in Uganda when she was still a rebel force. A few months later, in 1986, its leader, Yoweri Museveni came to power. He ruled the country until today.

“They gave me a gun and showed me how to use it,” said Okello. Soon the boy had to join in the fight. At about robbing the Karamojong, a pastoral people in northern Uganda, whose warriors cattle herds. “I was a child, I imagined war against adventurous and heroic. But in my first battle was nothing left of it. I thought I would never come out of there alive.”

Children only as cooks and porters?

Ugandan rebel groups like the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), the “Lord’s Resistance Army”, are notorious for having recruited child soldiers for years. But Okello did not fight for insurgents, but for the Ugandan military.

The government does not deny that there child soldiers – kadogos – were also in the army. In the eighties, they estimated that at that time belonged to the NRA about 3,000 child soldiers. It had been all but children who were caught in the crossfire and had no other refuge. “Our kadogos were for their own protection from the NRA. We have picked up and let go with us,” said army spokesman Felix Kulayigye. “They performed tasks small as porters, cooks or wash clothes.” As child soldiers while they were carrying arms, but that would have served only to self-defense.

But Okello is not the only one whose stories do not coincide with the official story. Some former child soldiers NRA report that they had systematically as a warrior on the front. The most famous is the Ugandan woman Keitetsi China, which today employs worldwide from the cruel nature of child labor in wars.

No sleep during the fighting

Julius Okello served 22 years in the army. When the NRA came to power, the fighting went further still, against supporters of the defeated regime and other insurgent groups. The soldier’s life was for the kids to day – until Okello forgot where he came from, what the names of his siblings and where he had gone to school. “We camped out on the field and kept us hidden in trenches,” he says. “One could sleep only alternately. And woe to anyone snoring, and lured to the enemy. Then there lashes.”

While the battles were all very energized. No one was allowed to sleep more and was rarely eaten. On quieter days, the soldiers also had some free time. “When we were near a village or a city could take, we visit friends, go to the hairdresser once a bath,” says Okello.