On December 15, 2013, primarily Nuer units had defected from the SPLA, the army of South Sudan, amid a political rupture between President Salva Kiir, a Dinka, and his former vice president Riek Machar, a Nuer. In Juba, Dinka soldiers killed Nuer civilians in what some Nuer called a massacre. The violence did not stay in the capital. Three Dinka from the Bor subgroup were killed in incidents around Bor on December 17. For the people of Bor - a predominantly Dinka town whose residents remembered 1991, when Nuer forces under Machar killed an estimated 2,000 Dinka here - the news from Juba arrived layered with memory. The comparisons to the Bor massacre of 1991 were immediate, and they were painful, and they were made by the people who had buried relatives the first time.

Peter Gadet, commander of the 8th Division, led the defection. His forces overran the camps, then pushed into the city. On December 21, gunfire struck two US military aircraft attempting to evacuate American citizens, wounding four servicemen and sending the planes back. Ugandan jets began bombing rebel positions that same day. On December 24, the SPLA declared victory after retaking the camps and most of the city as Gadet's troops retreated in order. There were no Christmas services in Bor on December 25. By December 30, youths of the Nuer White Army had joined the rebels in a counterattack. On December 31, the rebels held most of the town while the SPLA clung to the airport. President Kiir declared a state of emergency in Jonglei on January 1, 2014. On January 17, overwhelmed by Ugandan airstrikes, Gadet's forces withdrew.

Bor sits on the east bank of the White Nile at the southern edge of the Sudd, South Sudan's vast central wetland. It was a regional ivory-trading hub in the late nineteenth century, the site of one of the first modern Christian missions in the country. For the Dinka of the Bor region, it is a place of origin and identity. For South Sudan as a whole, it has repeatedly been the ground where the country's fractures have shown through. The 1991 massacre that haunted 2013. The 2013 battle that would haunt what came after. Each time, the people who lost the most were not the generals whose names filled the dispatches. They were the farmers, teachers, shopkeepers, grandmothers - the Dinka civilians of Bor, whose homes were burned, whose cattle were taken, whose children fled north into the swamps or south along the road to Juba.

After a month of combat, Bor was mostly destroyed. Looting had finished what shelling began. When SPLA soldiers retook the town, some tried to force their way into the United Nations camp where thousands of civilians had taken refuge. A measles outbreak swept through the camp about a week later, a disease of crowded displacement rather than of war, though the distinction mattered little to the children who caught it. The mayor asked residents not to return yet. The dead were counted in the hundreds, then the thousands, then - as the civil war widened over the following years - in numbers that resist counting at all. The Battle of Bor lasted thirty days. What it opened has lasted far longer.

South Sudan's civil war would grind on through ceasefires that broke, peace deals that failed, and famines declared and denied. Bor survived and rebuilt, as it had after 1991, as it had after the Second Sudanese Civil War, as towns along the Nile have rebuilt for generations. But the statues of liberators at Malual-Chaat barrack now stand in a landscape where the word 'liberator' has grown complicated. The soldiers who defected in 2013 had fought beside the men they now shelled. The civilians they killed and were killed by spoke languages their grandparents had shared at cattle camps. Flying over the town today, you see a grid of compounds along a brown river, rebuilt and lived in. What the air cannot show is what the people below remember - which, in Bor, is always more than the map suggests.