Five-year-old Benjamin stood in the field, tending the goats, when the raiders arrived. Moments later, as gunshots, flames, and screams engulfed his village, Benjamin found himself running, as fast as his legs could carry him, into the cover of the forest. In a nearby village, his cousins, seven-year-old Alephonsion and Benson, were driven from their homes as well. Every step led the boys away from their peaceful, agrarian world - a traditional world were spear-toting fathers protected their huts from the lions that roamed by night. With each footstep they were drawn deeper into the horrific violence of Sudan's civil war: a world of bombed-out villages, mine-sown roads, and relentless desert, a world where starving adults would snatch the grain from a weak child's fingers.Across Sudan, between 1987 and 1989, tens of thousands of young boys took flight from these massacres. They became known as the Lost Boys. With little more than the clothes on their backs, sometimes not even that, they streamed out over Sudan in search of refuge. Their journey led them first to Ethiopia and then, driven back into Sudan, toward Kenya. They walked nearly one thousand miles, sustained only by the sheer will to live.They Poured Fire on Us From the Sky is the three boys' account out of that unimaginable journey. With the candor and the purity of their child's-eye-vision, Alephonsion, Benjamin, and Benson recall by turns how they endured hunger and strength-sapping illnesses - dysentery, malaria, and yellow fever. How they dodged the life-threatening predators - lions, snakes, crocodiles and soldiers alike - that dogged their footsteps. How they grappled with a war that threatened continually to overwhelm them. Read Less