The General: A Painful, Aching Rise to the Top

Julia K. Bono

Monrovia, Liberia - Although she rose through the ranks to be a brigadier general in Liberia’s army, Julia K. Bono didn’t want to dwell on that accomplishment. She operates an orphanage and is now in a position of influence as an aide de camp to Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, Liberia’s president. But even that level of influence didn’t seem to be what arrested her concentration.

Instead, she seemed most passionate, most achingly transparent when she discussed — over and over again – her gratitude to have survived the nearly 15 years of civil strife that rocked the very foundation of this country – and of her life.

“The war brought out the worst in people here,” she said. “I saw things I thought I would never see. I was forced to go places I had never been. And I ate things I never thought I would eat. And I did things to survive that I thought I would never do.”

Everyone here who survived the Liberian civil war, which ended in 2003, has a story of pain and of their box-seat view of unspeakable horror. But Ms. Bono’s is particularly striking. She joined the Army in her early 20s. She rose through the ranks, from sergeant, to captain, to major, to lieutenant colonel. In 1980, President William Tolbert was overthrown and killed by Sergeant Samuel Doe after widespread riots over food prices. It was a coup whose aftermath would ravage her very existence, as it did all Liberians.

By the late 1980s, the country’s economic collapse culminated in civil war when Charles Taylor’s militia, the National Patriotic Front of Liberia, overran much of the countryside, entering Monrovia in 1990. Soon after, Mr. Doe was executed and the fighting intensified as the rebels splintered, battling each other, the Liberian army and West African peacekeepers.

“It became terrifying because you didn’t know who to trust. You didn’t know if the soldier next to you might actually kill you. It was complete chaos,” Ms. Bono said, explaining that tribal rivalry had infected the ranks of the country’s military, causing soldier to turn against soldier. “People lived like animals, doing whatever they felt they had to do to survive,” she said. “Young children carried guns and killed people, just for no reason. People started killing other people the way you would kill a rat or a lizard, just to be doing it.”

She recalled witnessing rebel fighters killing civilians by the dozens after looting their homes. She spoke of men who were forced to watch their wives and daughters being raped by rebel fighters. She described the scene of army officers and others captured in their homes by rebels who gorged their bodies and placed their intestines upon the front door of their homes. At one point, she said she was held by rebel warriors distrustful of any army officer. They taunted her by firing shots around her head. “They were rough with me,” she said. “But they didn’t kill me. No bullet ever touched me.”

While she escaped death on that occasion, she said, matters had become increasingly dangerous. Any neighbor, friend or even a fellow member of the army fearing their own death, might alert the rebel bandits of her whereabouts. As a senior military officer she was, after all, prized plunder. Upon hearing that her life was in danger, she fled to Liberia’s countryside with her three children. “I saw my own officers being killed,” she said. “I had to escape to survive.”

Within a few short years, her 16-year-old son, the eldest, was killed in the war, her husband had deserted her and her life was in shambles. But while away from Monrovia, she visited Buchannan, the city where her late mother had lived and had, before her death, taken in a dozen or more children left by impoverished parents or orphaned by the war. She decided to continue her mother’s mission and manage the orphanage.

Roughly 250,000 Liberians were killed in the country’s civil war and many thousands more fled the fighting. The conflict left the country in economic ruin. As peace and calm started to settle into the country founded in the 1820s by freed black Americans, Ms. Bono eventually made her way back to the capital and, as she put it, liberation from hell. In 2003, she became a brigadier general, a first for a woman. She retired from that post in 2006 and became an aide to Ms. Johnson-Sirleaf.

Today, she manages many of the arrangements and preparations for events for the president. At the same time she has expanded the orphanage that she named after her mother, traveling on weekends to Buchannan, about 90 miles from here.

Today, the Catherine Memorial Orphanage takes care of some 50 children with assistance from Christian Aid Ministries. She says she is blessed to have her life and a superb job, in a country where unemployment is staggering. “Working with the president is exciting because she is someone who really enjoys her job.

Still, she lives a quiet life, she says. She takes care of her 19-year-old son, her three-year-old grandson who is the son of her 23-year-old daughter, who lives in Canada. She goes to the Pentecostal church in the Sinkor section of Monrovia. She prays and she aches unceasingly for her dead son, she added. More than anything, she says, she thanks God throughout the day and night just to be alive.

“The sad truth,” she said, relaxing on the couch after a meal of palm butter and rice, a Liberian staple, “is that I don’t even know what this war was really all about. I don’t know if it was a political war, an ethnic war or whatever. I just know that nothing good was accomplished. I just thank God every single day for bringing me through it.”

By Jonathan P. Hicks