General but naked, aka Joshua Blie, aka just one of the many, many warlords that would form child armies and battle for power during the tumultuous and bloody first Liberian Civil War, which lasted from 1989 to 1997.

During the 90s, most of Liberia was controlled by numerous and incredibly violent rival militias.

In the bush, they battled for control of diamond mines and gold mines. In Minrovia, they fought gun battles in the streets.

Some of these warring factions were led by, or at least assisted by, brutal warriors and warlords, who adopted outlandish names like Chuck Norris, one-foot devil, General Mosquito, his nemesis, General Mosquito spray, not kidding.

And of course there was General but naked, perhaps the most brutal of all the warlords.

But naked was active for about three years and he led several dozen soldiers, the naked commandos, who fought mostly in Minrovia, sometimes more than several dozen soldiers.

Many of his soldiers were children, child soldiers, fed a steady diet of cocaine and American action movies, kids forced to kill, and also eat other kids.

Today's story is so, so crazy. Liberia in the 90s was so crazy.

General but naked said he had a vision when he was 11 years old, where he was told by a tribal god that he would become a great warrior, and that he should practice human sacrifice and cannibalism to increase his power and become impossible to kill.

And he seems to have taken this vision very seriously. Or maybe he made it up to try and rationalize and justify all the atrocities he committed to others.

About 10 years after his first major vision, Bly claimed to have experienced another vision, a divine Christian vision, that transformed him from a mass murderer into a man of God.

And ever since that event, he's committed his life to trying to write the wrongs he made in the past.

But is a genuine, is he really a man of God, or is he just a con man doing whatever he feels he needs to do in order to thrive in an extremely difficult place for someone with almost no formal education to even just survive.

During times of war, he became a warlord. During times of peace, he's become a man of God. Something about it feels very convenient.

General but naked is a complicated man and Liberia is a complicated nation. And we explore the man, the country he comes from, and so much more on today's war-mongering, death-defying, eye-opening, so much insane shit packed into one edition of Time Suck.

This is Michael McDonald and you're listening to Time Suck.

You're listening to Time Suck.

Happy Monday, meat sacks. Welcome to the Coat of the Curious. Work can wait for this one.

Hail Nimrod, Hail Luciferina, Praiseful Jangles, and Glory be to triple them. I'm Dan Cummins, Suck Nasty, Optimus Suck, Suck Norris, and you are listening to Time Suck.

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Okay, all right, let's do it. Holy shit, I got sucked in hard to the topic this week.

Let's head to Liberia on the west coast of Africa to suck a civil war, two of them, in fact, the founding of a nation and the life of a brutal warlord who once went by the name of General Buttnaked, a man who claimed that fighting naked made him immune to bullets.

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