A Six-Year-Old Walks Into a War Crime

So here’s a fun story about childhood trauma that I’ve been carrying around for the past thirty-something years, and by “fun” I mean “the opposite of fun in every conceivable way.”¹

I was six, maybe seven—old enough to be curious about everything, young enough to have zero concept of consequences. The age where you still believe the world makes sense and adults have their shit together, which is hilarious in retrospect.²

My mom told me to go to my room because she was watching something on TV that wasn’t appropriate for kids. “Hindi pang bata.” Someone else was there with her—tita, neighbor, one of those random adults who populated our house like furniture—but honestly, I’ve blocked out who it was because that detail doesn’t matter to the story.

What matters is what happened next.

I couldn’t help myself. Of course I couldn’t. Tell a kid they can’t see something and suddenly that’s the only thing in the universe worth seeing. Basic human psychology, the forbidden fruit problem, the reason every generation has to learn the same lessons the hard way. So I crept out of my room, bare feet on wood floor, and peeked through the doorway like some miniature spy with questionable judgment and no survival instincts.

What I saw that night… Jesus.

It burned itself into my brain with the precision of a brand, this image so vivid and inexplicable that my child’s mind had nowhere to file it. No context, no framework, no box labeled “horrific shit you’ll think about at random intervals for the rest of your life.”³ Just pure horror floating free in my head like debris after a shipwreck.

For decades—literally decades—I told myself it was just some movie.

Had to be, right? Some violent Hollywood thing that slipped past the censors, because real life doesn’t get that dark. Real life doesn’t show you those things when you’re six years old and your biggest worry should be whether there’s ice cream after dinner. Real life has ratings and warnings and responsible adults making sure children don’t accidentally witness atrocities before bedtime.

Except, you know, it doesn’t.

I carried that image around like a splinter I couldn’t dig out, this brutal scene that made no sense but wouldn’t fade. Occasionally it would surface—random moments, late at night, that flash of memory that made my stomach drop—and I’d push it back down and tell myself again: just a movie, just some fake thing adults watch when they think kids are asleep.

It wasn’t the first time I’d peeked and caught glimpses of things I wasn’t supposed to see. Horror films, supernatural thrillers, whatever weird shit adults decided to watch after dark. My mom was never really into that stuff, but maybe it was my aunt’s influence? Who knows. Maybe it’s just something every adult passes through—suddenly watching weird films because you’re grown now and nobody can tell you what to do.

The 90s were wild, after all. We had horror films that spilled over from the campy 80s, everything extreme and boundary-pushing and trying way too hard. So yeah, I convinced myself it was just another piece of 90s shock content, forgotten and irrelevant.

When The Past Catches Up (Or How A Random Book Gave Me Answers I Wasn’t Looking For)

Fast forward to a few years ago.

I’m reading “The Dictator’s Handbook” because I saw it and thought “sure, why not.”⁴ Learning all about how political power actually works and why bad behavior is almost always good politics, when I come across this passage that makes every hair on my body stand up:

Following a gun battle that killed off Doe’s entourage, Prince Johnson captured the president and videotaped his subsequent interrogation. The interrogators repeated the same question over and over again before Johnson turned to cutting Doe’s ear and eating it: “Where’s the money? What is the bank account number?”

And just like that—click.

That sensation when something slots into place after thirty years of not fitting anywhere, when the key finally turns in a lock you didn’t even know you were carrying. That horrible, crystalline clarity of suddenly understanding something you wished you could keep not understanding.

Samuel Doe. President of Liberia. 1990. Tortured, executed, videotaped.⁵ A man having his ear cut off and eaten while being interrogated about bank accounts, like violence and bureaucracy having the world’s worst collaboration.

That’s what I saw when I was six years old.

Not some director’s fever dream. Not some actor covered in corn syrup and theatrical makeup. Real blood. Real screaming. A real human being being degraded and destroyed on camera while I watched through a crack in the doorway, too young to understand what I was witnessing but old enough for it to scar.

Let that marinate for a second.

I was six fucking years old, watching a man die in the most brutal way imaginable, and I had no context for it. No framework. No way to make sense of what my eyes were absorbing. So it just… floated there in my head for three decades, this inexplicable cruelty that didn’t fit into any story about how the world works.

And now I know.

Now I can finally name the thing that’s been haunting me since childhood. Samuel Doe, Liberia, civil war, the kind of violence that makes you understand why some people believe in hell because surely there has to be cosmic justice for this shit somewhere.⁶

The Thing Nobody Tells You About Closure

Here’s the weird part—finally knowing didn’t devastate me the way you’d expect.

I thought it would. I thought discovering that this thing I’d carried around for thirty years was real, was an actual human being being tortured to death, would break something in me. But it didn’t. It just… clicked into place. Like finding the last piece of a puzzle you’d given up on finishing.

Maybe I’m just desensitized. Maybe growing up where I did does that to you.⁷

The world showed me its teeth when I was six, but honestly, it had been baring them my whole life. This was just the first time I got close enough to see the details.

I don’t know if this says something terrible about me or something terrible about where I’m from. Probably both. Probably neither. Probably it just is what it is—another data point in a lifetime of learning that violence isn’t an aberration, it’s just Tuesday in certain parts of the world.

I don’t know why I’m writing about this now. Maybe because I’m tired of carrying it around alone. Maybe because understanding something, even something horrible, is better than living with inexplicable nightmare fuel lodged in your brain. Maybe because sometimes you need to name your demons before you can figure out what to do with them.

Or maybe I’m just processing trauma through essays like some kind of therapy substitute, which is extremely on-brand for my generation.⁸

There’s no redemptive arc here, no lesson learned or wisdom gained. Just the strange relief of finally understanding what the fuck I saw that night, of putting a name and date and context to the horror. Of knowing that I’m not crazy, that this thing actually happened, that my memory isn’t some distorted fever dream but a fragment of real, documented atrocity that I witnessed before I was old enough to spell “Liberia.”

Sometimes the truth isn’t healing. Sometimes it’s just true.

And maybe that’s enough.

P.S. If you’re wondering whether you should let your six-year-old watch news coverage of civil war atrocities, the answer is no. Firmly, definitively no. Some things can’t be unseen, and some images will follow you for the rest of your life like ghosts you never invited in.

P.P.S. I looked it up after writing this—the footage was widely broadcast in 1990, shown on news programs around the world as evidence of the brutality of the Liberian civil war. Which means my mother probably didn’t even know what she was about to watch until it was already on screen. Just another night of international news coverage, except this time it scarred her kid for life. The 90s were wild, man. We just broadcast everything and assumed children were safely tucked away in bed where they belonged, not creeping through doorways like tiny trauma collectors.

P.P.P.S. The universe has a weird sense of humor about these things. Of all the books I could’ve read, all the random facts I could’ve stumbled across, it was a book about political power structures that finally gave me the answer I didn’t know I was looking for. Sometimes the universe hands you closure in the weirdest fucking ways, like “here’s that thing that’s been haunting you for three decades, btw it’s even worse than you thought, you’re welcome.”