First Kill Your Family: Child Soldiers of Uganda and the Lord's Resistance Army

“Richard Opio has neither the look of a cold-blooded killer nor the heart of one. Yet as his mother and father lay on the ground with their hands tied, Richard used the blunt end of an ax to crush their skulls. He was ordered to do this by a unit commander of the Lord’s Resistance Army, a rebel group that has terrorized northern Uganda for twenty years. The memory racks Richard’s slender body as he wipes away tears.”

For more than twenty years, beginning in the mid-1980s, the Lord’s Resista...