Lomong said everyone was told to lie down and the soldiers took all the children away. He said he was crying, they were all crying. They were herded into a truck, boys and girls, and it was covered with a canvas top. Eventually, the truck stopped; they were blindfolded and marched single file into a room with no windows.
"They took the blindfolds off and now there were only boys."
They stayed for three weeks, getting water twice a day and little else. When they were given food, it was sandwiches with grain. Three of his friends he called "angels" advised him not to eat the food, to merely pick out the bits of grain, because it had been combined with sand and the indigestible "sand sandwiches" would eventually be fatal.
"Kids would eat them, then just be sitting there and go to sleep."
He escaped when older boys saw a hole in the fence and took him along.
"There was no moon. We could see the lights [soldiers smoking] and when they talked, we crawled. When they stopped, we stayed still."
They got to the hole in the fence and got through as the soldiers chased. One older boy took his right hand, another his left, and they ran. For two days, then another.
"We ran and there were trees and thorns. My legs were a mess."
They hid him in a cave at night and brought him water on tree leaves. At night, they made sure to sleep facing in the direction they were headed so they didn't mistakenly backtrack into the pursuers.
"Then we would get up again and run and run. We didn't know where we were going."
Unknowingly, they strayed into Kenya, where they were captured and put into a refugee camp. Lomong stayed for 10 years. He said the Kenyans didn't care for them because, as little as it was, they were getting food from the U.N.
"We would have to make it last, because the food only came once a month. We would eat once a day, and only late at night, so it would stay with you to the next night. During the day, we would play soccer to keep our minds off the hunger."
The rest of the story is oft told -- the essay that got him an interview, that led to his adoption at age 16 by the Rogers family in Tully, N.Y., that led to a flight on an airplane bigger than he had ever seen, that led to his first-ever trip to McDonald's.
