Lieut. Col. Bad Child

Liberian mercenary Karmo Watson, 38, and his children Mickey, 6, and Diamond, 9.

Karmo Watson is 38, a former child soldier and an aging warrior with a jagged scar across his left cheek. A yellow Georgia Southwestern State University t-shirt partially hides his emaciated body scarred with bullets. Noisily he gulps down his soup and fufu. One bullet ripped off the top knuckle of his left pointer finger. He set his feet on fire setting off an RPG. He returned yesterday from Ivory Coast, where he was leading a group of men, half Liberian, half Ivorian, on a rampage, burning and pillaging. He fought in the "first phase" of war, from 2003 to 2004, and for the last four months, in what he calls the second phase.

Watson says the rebel forces loyal to Alassane Outtara, who the UN said won last November's elections in Ivory Coast, recruited him to fight for a fee of $1,500. He said when he arrived, the rebels refused to pay, so the men were left to steal money and food and whatever else they wanted as they rampaged through Ivorian border towns.

He's a high school graduate who earns $55 a month in the maintenance department of the Liberian Petroleum Refinery Company. Not enough to pay his four children's school fees, or to take care of the orphan he inherited from a dead brother in arms, or his mother, a recent widow. When I ask his mother how she feels that her son kills for money, she says "Money matters. Money matters." They live in a three-room tin roof house in a slum behind the Capital Bye-Pass where children play with a deflated soccer ball and women cook over coal pots.