Chapter Nine
It was about two weeks after our raid at the stream when a column of the Ethiopian army rolled into the village. This wasn’t a troop of forty men, but a whole regiment of trucks, halftracks, wagons, mules, artillery pieces, and hundreds of soldiers.
Normally the tribe would have known a large unit was nearby, but they were moving so fast, it came as a complete surprise. It was early morning, and I was in the hut of a woman whose husband had recently died of malaria. She had two small children and welcomed me to live in the hut with her.
We heard the commotion outside, and I ran out to find the soldiers ransacking the huts on the edge of the village. They took everything they could get their hands on, including the young girls.
Dola was now twelve years old, and her bare br
