I just finished reading Johnny Dwyer’s non-fiction story, American Warlord, about Chucky Taylor, the American son of former Liberian president and warlord, Charles Taylor. It is a fascinating story of a fairly average suburban kid, growing up outside Orlando and raised by his mother and stepfather, encountering in his teenage years his birth father, Charles, a ruthless demagogue who seized power and claimed victory in Liberia’s bloody civil war that plagued the country in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
In 1994, when Chucky was 17, he was arrested and charged with aggravated assault and attempted robbery, which compelled his mother to reach out to Charles half a world away and assert that it was now his turn to raise Chucky. Although the civil war had “officially” ended with the election of Charles as president, government forces continued to mercilessly suppress any challenges to its hold on power by wiping out various opposition factions. Barely out of his teens, Chucky soon became head of the infamous Anti-Terrorist Unit (ATU), which essentially became a roving band of thugs who indiscriminately utilized violence on their enemies, both real and perceived. Using rape, torture, and murder, the ATU forged a reputation as a brutal and intimidating “military” force, despite Chucky’s lack of any type of formal military training outside of American action films. Young, intoxicated on power, and abusing drugs, Chucky became a reprehensible character, perhaps even more so than his father.
The story itself was a little rocky for the first one-hundred pages or so, jumping around to different times and places, making it initially difficult to follow. Eventually though, Dwyer finds his footing and crafts an intricate and compelling story of one man’s ugly descent into darkness as chaos and corruption surround him and a nation at war with itself. The first American ever to be pursued by the U.S. government for torture and crimes abroad, this story showcases humanity’s penchant for unimaginable cruelty, and the lengths people will go to maintain an iron grip on power.