So­phie was eight when the rebel army took her away. It was al­most Easter, she re­mem­bers.

Four men came into her fam­ily’s hut one night out­side of Gulu, Uganda. They didn’t knock.

Her par­ents stood by, silently.

So­phie says one of the men, pointed a small ma­chete at her and said, “If you don’t cut your brother, we will kill you all.”

“So I did,” she said. “I cut him.”

So­phie cut her brother’s neck. The first time, the rebels didn’t think the cut was deep enough.

They made her do it again.

Charles, her brother, was five. He screamed loud and hard.

So­phie and Charles — bleed­ing down the front of his tat­tered green T-shirt, were loaded into a rick­ety truck where a dozen chil­dren were al­ready crammed in. Hours later, the truck stopped and the chil­dren clam­bered out of the truck, un­sure of what was going to hap­pen. Charles, badly in­jured, was roughly han­dled by the rebels as they wrapped a rope around his an­kles and tied him up­side down in a tree. The rebels laughed as they tied him, So­phie re­calls.

The cap­tured chil­dren were warned that if they ever tried to flee, they too would be tied up in trees.

So­phie’s voice trails off at this part of the story.

“The next day, they took us back to see,” she said. “He was al­ready dead.”

“The red ants had got him.”

There are cer­tain sto­ries you write as a re­porter that con­tinue to haunt you. They are the sto­ries that send you gasp­ing into the night, on a ran­dom Wednes­day evening, in a safe, quiet bed in a safe, quiet coun­try. They are the sto­ries that flood your brain when you are home in North Amer­ica, pick­ing out peanut but­ter of all things, as you stand in the gro­cery store tear­ing up be­cause you can’t fig­ure out which of the 57 op­tions you should buy.

They are, sim­ply put, the sto­ries that mess with your head.

The story of So­phie Akello was one of those sto­ries.

In 2006, I ar­rived in Uganda with a chip on my shoul­der, a small de­sire to help oth­ers, and, above all, a de­sire to see war, to re­port on war, and to gen­er­ally end up like the griz­zled war cor­re­spon­dents I used to see — sun baked and grouchy, with eyes lined by too many hours in ex­otic lo­cales — the kind of per­son I wanted to be, I be­lieved.

It was my first stint as a so-called “war re­porter” (re­ally, I was a rookie that knew noth­ing) and I dove in, spend­ing time in north­ern Uganda, a re­gion em­broiled in a nasty 20-year civil war be­tween a re­li­gious fa­nat­i­cal leader, Joseph Kony, and the Ugan­dan gov­ern­ment. The Lord’s Re­sis­tance Army, a rad­i­cal re­li­gious rebel group, had been ter­ror­iz­ing north­ern Uganda for the bet­ter part of 25 years.

Kony is the cru­elest of lead­ers — 80% of his army is under the age of 12. Chil­dren, as it turns out, make the best sol­diers. They have no fear. They are adapt­able. They be­lieve every­thing.

So­phie’s own story was not unique — she was one of more than 30,000 Ugan­dan chil­dren who have been cap­tured by the Lord’s Re­sis­tance Army. The chil­dren are forced to kill their own peo­ple, often, as in So­phie’s case, their own fam­i­lies.

Many chil­dren, like So­phie, had es­caped the clutches of the Lord’s Re­sis­tance Army and now walked miles and miles every night, from their vil­lages to larger towns, such as Gulu, where they could sleep in safety, hun­dreds of them in­ter­twined on the cold ce­ment floor, a sin­gle guard at the front door.

And that was my job. Write about the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion in north­ern Uganda. Write about the chal­lenges these chil­dren face — much of which re­volved about the fear of being kid­napped and con­scripted back into a rebel army.

Sadly, it was their fear and the shared ex­pe­ri­ences of con­stantly being ter­ri­fied that cre­ated and fu­eled my ad­dic­tion to ad­ven­ture. Per­haps it is more ap­pro­pri­ate to call it an ad­dic­tion to war.

I did not want to change the world by going to the worst places on earth and writ­ing about them. I was cer­tainly not a com­mit­ted do-gooder. I just wished I was.

I liked the feel­ing of my heart pound­ing in my chest. I liked the feel­ing of hear­ing bul­lets and pre­tend­ing they were fire­works. I even liked the feel­ing of how peo­ple thought I was im­por­tant if I wrote about them. If those peo­ple only knew how lit­tle power or sway I had and how lit­tle words mat­ter. How the pen is not might­ier than the sword, de­spite our best in­ten­tions. If so, we would not have had Rwanda in 1994, or still have Robert Mu­gabe in Zim­babwe. No, the pen is weak and pa­thetic, and yet we still treat it with such rev­er­ence. The sword al­ways wins.

And yet, it was the sword I was ad­dicted to.

The other week, as I was think­ing about where I might like to travel to next, I stopped, dead still, in the mid­dle of the street, a fine driz­zle com­ing down around me. One ques­tion had stopped me cold: what would ever pos­sess a human being to so will­ingly and ex­cit­edly go some­where like the war­zone of north­ern Uganda to tell these sto­ries? The rea­sons why some­one would go to Sudan for a va­ca­tion, to ex­otic sound­ing places like Bu­jum­bura, or Mo­gadishu, or to Goma, where 14-year-old red-eyed drug-crazed boys with Kalash­nikovs man road­blocks that I had to pass through, mul­ti­ple times a day. They are scarcely big­ger than the guns they carry.

Through those years, all around me, peo­ple have died. My life, I be­lieved, was charmed.

Sim­ply put, it was bore­dom. It was a type of sub­ur­ban rest­less­ness that made me leave my com­fort­able home and jump on a plane to East Africa, to a fan­tas­tic, beau­ti­ful war-torn coun­try with wounds so deep, I still won­der if it will ever heal.

Ad­ven­ture is an ad­dic­tion. That con­clu­sion, years later, I have come to.

And yet, in that same phrase, all I can think is: war is also an ad­dic­tion. I jum­ble the words to­gether every chance I get — war, ad­ven­ture — ad­ven­ture, war — and yet at the end of the day the feel­ing is the same and the sto­ries are the same. For me, the terms are in­ter­change­able.

Four years later, it is those war-soaked mem­o­ries that con­tinue to pop up in the most in­con­ve­nient of places all the time. It is on the train in the morn­ing, or in the gro­cery store when I buy peanut but­ter. It is when I hear fire­works and want to hit the ground and cry, while every­one around me is cheer­ing be­cause it’s the Fourth of July. It is when peo­ple at a party say, “Hey, have you seen that movie Blood Di­a­monds? You’re like that girl,” and I se­cretly want to punch them in the face.

Some­times I fear that I will never shake my ad­dic­tion to war and ad­ven­ture. It is a feel­ing that ebbs and flows, de­pend­ing on how my bor­ing sub­ur­ban life is going, de­pend­ing on how much I miss feel­ing that tight­ness in my chest, the feel­ing of blaz­ing adren­a­line, like I can run for miles with­out stop­ping, the feel­ing like some­thing ex­treme could hap­pen at any mo­ment.

It is a feel­ing that I can­not seem to rid my­self of. And years later, as I dream of going back to those war-torn coun­tries, to tell more sto­ries about the peo­ple that live there, I often ask my­self if it was all worth it. Is it bet­ter to be ad­dicted to war and ad­ven­ture than to have never ex­pe­ri­enced it?

The an­swer, thank good­ness, is yes.

It is al­ways worth it.

Por­trait Of A Heavy Sink­ing Feel­ing In Your Gut That Cant Be Ig­nored And Then Your Ears Fall Off - Al­isha Dall'Osto