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 An estimated two million people have died and four million have been made refugees in the eighteen year old civil war in Sudan.

hey remained in camps in Ethiopia until a newly-elected government expelled them in 1991, and they were forced to return to Sudan.

Last year, the United States offered to resettle 3,600 of these "lost boys."

The walking seemed endless. So did the sun, and the thirst. Every day.

And walked. And walked.

He walked because stopping might mean death. Or enslavement.

Then 10 years old, Ariath was considered an elder among the boys who fled, so he was put in charge of 250 others younger than him.

“I had them hold hands as we walked in a long line through tall grass, forests and darkness so they would not get lost,” he wrote in an essay. “It was a nightmare. As we walked, we often heard gunfire and daily boys would die from dehydration, starvation and disease. When we stopped to rest, we often left dead bodies there.”

VAD: It is very close to the truth, but many things in the book are somewhat different than what happened in life. Some characters have been combined. Some time is compressed. They are minor things, but they were necessary. For one thing, I was very young when the book begins, so I could not remember conversations and small details from my early childhood in Marial Bai. It was necessary to reconstruct the chronology, and that is what Dave did. He took the basic facts and then created the story from there.

In 2001, intolerable living conditions in the refugee camp gave the United States government reason to resettle some 4,000 of these now young men in America.

He was 3 when he fled civil war in Sudan and walked hundreds of miles on foot through the hot desert plains to the refugee camp.

Yet, despite their name, the Lost Boys are remarkable in that many found their way to safety despite encountering unimaginable horrors.

In 1999, the United Nations High Commissioner of Refugees and the U.S. State Department referred about 3,800 children and young adults to the United States for permanent resettlement. Those under 18 were placed with foster families from Fargo, N.D., to Phoenix, Ariz.

In 1987, civil war drove an estimated 20,000 young boys from their families and villages in south Sudan. Most just six or seven years old, they fled to Ethiopia to escape death or induction into slavery and the northern army. They walked more than a thousand miles, half of them dying before reaching a Kenyan refugee camp. The survivors of this tragic exodus became known as the Lost Boys of Sudan.

ince its inception in 2001, the Lost Boys Emergency Fund has distributed over $14,000 to southern Sudanese refugees, with the generous support of IRC donors.

He was a young boy when Arab raiders ransacked his village, killed the men, and bound Dang and his mother to a camel.

They were then dragged away from their home in southern Sudan to a life of slavery.

"They let me sleep with goats," Dang told CBN News.