The Guns May Be Silent But for Some, There Is No Cease-Fire

"The thing I still feel on my skin and in my heart is the experience of hiding in a bomb shelter," Ung says. "The fear that invades your body, that sets your mind ablaze even when the bomb doesn't hit. Fear. When I was hiding in a bomb shelter, everything is quiet except for the whizzing of cannons and rockets overhead. We are all counting under our breath, hiding from the bombs that were thrown by invisible people. They don't know you. You don't know them. You are counting and counting and waiting.

"When it doesn't hit, there is a moment of disappointment. You know it won't stop. . . . When you are in war, there is no relief."

* * *

In Sudan, the attack on Alephonsion Deng's village came without warning. "Explosions, horses and camels chasing people, shooting, screaming, crying: It was like the end of the world," he wrote with Benson Deng, Benjamin Ajak and Judy A. Bernstein in "They Poured Fire on Us From the Sky: The True Story of Three Lost Boys From Sudan."

"I watched as the invaders tied the arms and legs of their captives and put long ropes around their necks. They led them from the village on a line blindfolded so they didn't know the place they were going. 'Drowning them in the river,' a person cried. 'They don't want to waste bullets.' "

Alephonsion Deng ran and hid. He could not return to his village to look for his family. Someone told him there was no one left alive except for the enemy. So he and other boys -- tens of thousands of boys who fled massacres between 1987 and 1989 -- walked countless miles across Sudan, without parents, walking barefoot at night, with wounds on his feet.

Almost 20 years later, Deng lives in San Diego and works as a filing technician at a hospital. The memories of war reside with him, like a piece of him.

"The consequences of war? What can I tell you?" Deng asks. "The war experiences are not so much fun. I always tell people everybody hates war. You can't really benefit from it."

The war takes everybody equally.

"Our ancestors fought certain wars and nobody won," he says. "There is victory, but nobody won. There are wounds and sorrows and pains that remain in individual hearts that will never be healed until the individual dies."

Wars are eternal, he says. "Looking at the American war or any other war, it will not be easy. You cannot set a date: 'This will end.' What about the wounds created? What about people with vengeance? Who will repay? Who is responsible for those things? . . . Whether it be the Iraqi war or the war in Darfur or wars in the rest of the world, the experiences are the same. The pain the same. The same wounds."

* * *