By Callum Macrae Video producer in Uganda

It took a lot of discussion and diplomacy before the Ugandan People's Defence Force (UPDF) agreed to let me spend a day with a soldier. In the end, it was not until the morning of the shoot that I was finally able to meet my soldier.

Just the day before the shoot, I was to witness some terrible scenes which brought home to me the true horror, and the terrible dilemma of this war.

I was summonsed by the local head of intelligence, Lt Col Charles Otema, and flown, in a tiny military helicopter, to the site of a battle still under way in the bush near the Sudanese border.

He said the UPDF had scored a significant victory against the Liberation Resistance Army (LRA) and he wanted me to see the evidence.

The fact that I knew there would be children among the rebels did not prepare me for the reality. The first dead "rebel" I saw was perhaps four or five years old, lying slumped where he had fallen in the undergrowth.

Jimmy has been at war with this rag-tag army of stolen and brutalised children since he was 22

He was almost certainly born in the bush to a girl who had herself been captured and then "married" off to a rebel commander.

Nearby just such a girl lay, also dead.

'Discipline and duty'

My character, Jimmy, who is 28, has been fighting this war for six years. What I had seen the day before, he has seen dozens of times.

He has been at war with this rag-tag army of stolen and brutalised children since he was 22. In that time he has married and had children of his own.

It is impossible to believe these experiences have not affected him, but if I hoped to get some insight into his real thoughts, I was to be disappointed.

Jimmy was a model soldier. A decent man certainly, a devout Christian, but a disciplined soldier whose talk was all of discipline and duty.

Maybe when you are fighting children - even children as dangerous as these - you cannot afford to think too much.

One Day of War was broadcast in the UK on Thursday, 27 May, 2004 at 2100 BST on BBC Two.