Nelson Kargbo was a child soldier given asylum in America. But after he got in trouble Immigration decided to send him back. Illustration by Keith Negley

Nelson Kargbo was eleven years old when rebel soldiers attacked his village, Kamalo, in northern Sierra Leone. He was playing soccer on a dirt field at the edge of the village. When he saw houses on fire, he and his best friend, Foday, ran toward the jungle, following Foday’s mother and dozens of other people. They walked until late at night, when they came across a cluster of abandoned mud houses. Foday’s mother, who used to cook for the boys after their soccer games, told them to sleep under a grove of mango trees. “Tomorrow, we’ll keep walking,” she said. “We’ll make it to the city.”

The country’s civil war, which had begun five years earlier, in 1991, had seemed remote to Kargbo. He’d considered it only when he overheard his adoptive father, Lennard, a pastor who had assumed custody of him when his parents died, talking about it with members of his congregation. Kargbo was the youngest child in the family—he had seven brothers and sisters, who were all the biological children of the pastor—and he was accustomed to being ignored. He was reserved and nearly invisible, except when he played soccer. He hoped to play for the national team.

At 3 A.M., he and the others were woken by soldiers from the Revolutionary United Front, an army that was fighting to overthrow the government. They carried trussed goats and bundles of food looted from Kargbo’s village. The R.U.F. commander, a man in his early twenties called General Mosquito, told the boys and men to line up. Their mothers, wives, and daughters waited in another line. Mosquito asked the boy at the front of the line, who was Kargbo’s classmate, if he wanted to join the rebels or return to his mother, and the boy said that he wanted to go home. Without saying a word, a soldier put a gun to the boy’s head and killed him. When it was Kargbo’s turn, he said that he wanted to join the rebels. Foday said the same thing.

The soldiers then addressed the women, asking all but the elderly if they were ready to join. The first three women consented to be soldiers or “bush wives,” cooking, cleaning, and having sex with the rebels. A young soldier approached Foday’s mother, groped her breasts, and asked if she was a rebel now, too, but she pushed the man off her. The soldier shot her in the head, and said that he was setting an example. Foday fell to the ground crying. “Man up!” a soldier said, pulling him to his feet. “Stop whining like a little girl.”

Kargbo, Foday, and the other recruits walked for two days, until they reached the rebels’ base, an encampment of huts with pickup trucks parked nearby. The boys were given food, beer, cigarettes, and “brown brown,” a mixture of cocaine and gunpowder that was injected into their forearms. Kargbo’s adoptive father was a follower of the Methodist minister John Wesley, who viewed alcohol as poison. Kargbo felt that he had sinned by permitting alcohol and drugs into his body, but they made him aggressive and fearless, especially when the deputy commander, called Rambo, taught him how to operate an AK-47. He and the other boys practiced shooting at targets, as tapes featuring Tupac, Biggie Smalls, and Lucky Dube played from a boom box.

The commanders renamed Kargbo Fula Boy, because he was skinny and short, like children of the Fula tribe. (He is actually Temne, the country’s largest ethnic group.) After a month of training, Kargbo began helping to loot villages. He and the other soldiers approached towns at night, wearing bulky coats that hid the weapons slung on their backs. The boys entered first, to draw gunfire, so that older soldiers would know where to shoot. Kargbo was often so high that he would shoot an entire magazine of bullets, oblivious of whom he might be killing. The rebels had trained him to feel that he was superior to civilians. He told me, “They were just like chickens to me.”

Kargbo never understood the reasons for the war. The rebel leaders didn’t discuss politics, except to refer to their enemies as “bastards.” Kargbo saw the attacks as merely a way to procure what the soldiers called “rations”: stolen goods that they handed over to Mosquito. Kargbo came to respect Mosquito, who rarely spoke, which was Kargbo’s natural tendency, too. Before battles, Mosquito motivated the soldiers by playing the Tupac song “Me Against the World.” Kargbo, who slept with his AK-47, found solace in the lyrics: “witnessing killings / leaving dead bodies in abandoned buildings / can’t reach the children cause they’re illing / addicted to killing and the appeal from the cap peeling / without feeling.” Kargbo knew the story of Tupac’s life—he was murdered the same year that Kargbo was abducted—and viewed him as an idol who understood the inevitability of everyday violence, and the trauma of being both victim and perpetrator. Kargbo and Foday stole Tupac T-shirts from villages that they looted and wore them when they went into battle. “We were hyped from the brown brown, pumped up, ready to go,” he told me. “At the time, I was into it—I was so into it.”

When Kargbo and Foday were alone on night duty, guarding the camp, they spoke about their home, but stuck to quotidian details. Kargbo was afraid to mention Foday’s mother. He had seen what happened to boys who showed their feelings. “I used to be an emotional person,” he told me. “I used to cry.” At night, he was given marijuana and whiskey, which helped him fall asleep. He never tried to escape, because those who did had their arms chopped off with machetes. He figured that he would stop being a soldier when he died, a possibility about which he felt ambivalent.

In 1998, after Kargbo had been with the rebels for nearly three years, he contracted malaria. On the way to a village on the border of Sierra Leone and Guinea, where the older soldiers said that there would be cows to steal, Kargbo was too sick to aim his gun from the back of the pickup truck. When the rebels passed close to Kamalo, Kargbo’s village, Mosquito stopped the truck and told Kargbo to get out. Kargbo wasn’t sure if Mosquito was being cruel to him, since he’d become useless as a fighter, or merciful. He was left at a roundabout without weapons or food.

Later that day, a member of his father’s congregation recognized him and took him back to Kamalo. His family, like many residents, had fled the afternoon that he was abducted, and were now living in a refugee camp in Conakry, Guinea. When they learned that Kargbo was alive, they sent money for the trip to the camp. On his way, Kargbo travelled first to Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, where he saw graffiti of Tupac lyrics and imagery, much of it scrawled by an R.U.F. splinter faction, the West Side Boys, whose name referred to Tupac’s allegiance to rappers on the West Coast.

In Guinea, Lennard Kargbo was dismayed by his adoptive son’s newfound irreverence. “He had been such a good boy,” Lennard told me. “I didn’t know what had happened to him. He became a bad example.” Kargbo went through withdrawal from the drugs and became unhinged, yelling and swearing at people. Rather than playing soccer with the other kids in his compound, he stayed inside, watching Guinean music videos on a small television.