A Long Way Gone

13

IT MUST HAVE BEEN a Sunday morning when the corporal told us to take the day off training. He tapped the palm of his hand with the flat edge of his bayonet. “If you are religious, I mean a Christian, worship your Lord today, because you might not have another chance. Dismissed.”

We went to the square wearing our army shorts and the crapes that had been given to us. We started a soccer game, and as we played, the lieutenant came out to sit on the verandah of his house. We stopped the game and saluted him. “Carry on with the game. Right now I want to see my soldiers play soccer.” He sat on the stoop and began reading Julius Caesar.

When we were done with soccer, we decided to go to the river for a swim. It was a sunny day, and as we ran down to the river, I felt the cool breeze drying the sweat on my body. We played swimming games for a few minutes, then divided into two teams for an ambush game. The first group to capture all the members of the other group would win.

“Let’s go, soldiers, the holiday is over,” the corporal called out from the banks of the river. We stopped our playing and followed him to the village. As we jogged to catch up with him, we jokingly tripped and pushed each other into the bushes.

At the village we were asked to quickly service our AK-47s. As we cleaned our guns, backpacks and waist packs were distributed among us. Two crates of ammunition were set out, one containing loaded magazines, the other loose bullets. The corporal commanded us to take as much ammunition as we could carry. “Don’t take too much, though. We want you to be able to run fast,” he said. As I loaded my backpack and waist pack, I looked up and saw that some of the older soldiers were doing the same. My hand began to shake and my heart beat faster. All the other boys, except for Alhaji, were having fun, because they thought they were gearing up for more drills, but I knew we weren’t going for training, and Alhaji leaned on the wall of the building clutching his gun like a mother would hold her baby. He knew it, too.

“Stand up on your feet, soldiers,” the corporal said. He had left us briefly to change. He was fully dressed in army uniform and carried a backpack and a waist pack full of ammunition. He held a G3 weapon and his helmet under his arms. We stood in line for inspection. All of the boys wore army shorts and green T-shirts. The corporal handed us green head ties and said, “If you see anyone without a head tie of this color or a helmet like mine, shoot him.” He screamed the last two words. Now it was clear to all that we weren’t going for training. As we tied our head cloths, Sheku, standing next to me, fell backward. He had taken too much ammunition. The corporal emptied some of the magazines from his backpack and stood him up. Sheku’s forehead was sweating and his lips trembled. The corporal patted him on the head and continued talking. “The other men”—he pointed to the older soldiers—“will carry spare boxes of ammunition, so do not overload yourselves. Now relax, we will be on our way in a few minutes.”

The corporal walked away. We sat down on the ground, and everyone seemed to wander into their own thoughts. The daily bird-songs were gone, replaced now by the raising of firing levers as the older soldiers readied themselves. Sheku and Josiah sat next to me, their eyes watery and dull. All I could do was rub their heads to assure them it might be okay. I got up and walked over to Alhaji and the rest of my friends. We made a pact that no matter what, we would try and stay together.

A young soldier came by with a plastic bag full of some kind of tablets. They looked like capsules, but they were plain white. He handed them to each of us with a cup of water. “The corporal said it will boost your energy,” the soldier announced with a secretive smile on his face. As soon as we had taken the tablets, it was time to leave. The adult soldiers led the way. Some carried ammunition boxes, the length of two cement bricks, between them, and others had semiautomatic machine guns and RPGs. I held my AK-47 with my right hand, its mouth pointing to the ground. I had attached an extra magazine with adhesive tape to the one inside the gun. I had my bayonet on my left hip and some magazines and loose bullets in my side pack. In my backpack I had more magazines and loose bullets. Josiah and Sheku dragged the tip of their guns, as they still weren’t strong enough to carry them and the guns were taller than they were. We were supposed to come back that evening, so we carried no food or water. “There are a lot of streams in the forest,” the lieutenant had said, walking away, leaving the corporal to finish what he had started. “It is better to carry more ammunition than food and water. Because with more ammo, we will be able to find water and food, but with more water and food, we will not make it to the end of the day,” the corporal explained.

The women and older people in the village stood on their verandahs and watched as we were led away by the adult soldiers into the clearing toward the forest. A baby cried uncontrollably in his mother’s arms, as if he knew what lay ahead of us. The sun’s brightness painted our shadows on the ground.

I have never been so afraid to go anywhere in my life as I was that day. Even the scuttle of a lizard frightened my entire being. A slight breeze blew and it went through my brain with a sharp swoop that made me grit my teeth in pain. Tears had begun to form in my eyes, but I struggled to hide them and gripped my gun for comfort.

We walked into the arms of the forest, holding our guns as if they were the only thing that gave us strength. We exhaled quietly, afraid that our own breathing could cause our death. The lieutenant led the line that I was in. He raised his fist in the air and we stopped moving. Then he slowly brought it down and we sat on one heel, our eyes surveying the forest. I wanted to turn around to see my friends’ faces, but I couldn’t. We began to move swiftly among the bushes until we came to the edge of a swamp, where we formed an ambush, aiming our guns into the swamp. We lay flat on our stomachs and waited. I was lying next to Josiah. Then there was Sheku and an adult soldier between myself, Jumah, and Musa. I looked around to see if I could catch their eyes, but they were concentrated on the invisible target in the swamp. The top of my eyes began to ache and the pain slowly rose up to my head. My ears became warm and tears were running down my cheeks, even though I wasn’t crying. The veins on my arms stood out and I could feel them pulsating as if they had begun to breathe of their own accord. We waited in the quiet, as hunters do, our fingers gently caressing the triggers. The silence tormented me.

The short trees in the swamp began to shake as the rebels made their way through them. They weren’t yet visible, but the lieutenant had passed the word down through a whisper that was relayed like a domino effect: “Fire on my command.” As we watched, a group of men dressed in civilian clothes emerged from under the tiny bushes. They waved their hands and more fighters came out. Some were boys, as young as we were. They sat together in line, waving their hands, planning a strategy. The lieutenant ordered an RPG to be fired, but the commander of the rebels heard it as it whooshed its way out of the forest. “Retreat!” he told his men, and the grenade’s blast got only a few men, whose split bodies flew in the air. The explosion was followed by an exchange of fire from both sides. I lay there with my gun pointed in front of me, unable to shoot. My index finger had become numb. The forest had begun to spin. I felt as if the ground had turned upside down and I was going to fall off, so I clutched the base of a tree with one hand. I couldn’t think, but I could hear the sounds of the guns far away in the distance and the cries of people dying in pain. I had begun to fall into some sort of nightmare. A splash of blood hit my face. In my reverie I had opened my mouth a bit, so I tasted some of the blood. As I spat it out and wiped it off my face, I saw the soldier it had come from. Blood poured out of the bullet holes in him like water rushing through newly opened tributaries. His eyes were wide open; he still held his gun. My eyes were fixed on him when I heard Josiah scream. He cried for his mother in the most painfully piercing voice that I had ever heard. It vibrated inside my head to the point that I felt my brain had shaken loose from its anchor.

The sun showed flashes of the tips of guns and bullets traveling toward us. Bodies had begun to pile on top of each other near a short palm tree, where fronds dripped blood. I searched for Josiah. An RPG had tossed his tiny body off the ground and he had landed on a tree stump. He wiggled his legs as his cry gradually came to an end. There was blood everywhere. It seemed as if bullets were falling into the forest from all angles. I crawled to Josiah and looked into his eyes. There were tears in them and his lips were shaking, but he could not speak. As I watched him, the water in his eyes was replaced with blood that quickly turned his brown eyes into red. He reached for my shoulder as if he wanted to hold it and pull himself up. But midway, he stopped moving. The gunshots faded in my head, and it was as if my heart had stopped and the whole world had come to a standstill. I covered his eyes with my fingers and pulled him from the tree stump. His backbone had been shattered. I placed him flat on the ground and picked up my gun. I did not realize that I had stood up to take Josiah off the tree stump. I felt someone tugging at my foot. It was the corporal; he was saying something that I couldn’t understand. His mouth moved and he looked terrified. He pulled me down, and as I hit the ground, I felt my brain shaking in my skull again and my deafness disappeared. “Get down,” he was screaming. “Shoot,” he said, as he crawled away from me to resume his position. As I looked to where he lay, my eyes caught Musa, whose head was covered with blood. His hands looked too relaxed. I turned toward the swamp, where there were gunmen running, trying to cross over. My face, my hands, my shirt and gun were covered with blood. I raised my gun and pulled the trigger, and I killed a man. Suddenly, as if someone was shooting them inside my brain, all the massacres I had seen since the day I was touched by war began flashing in my head. Every time I stopped shooting to change magazines and saw my two young lifeless friends, I angrily pointed my gun into the swamp and killed more people. I shot everything that moved, until we were ordered to retreat because we needed another strategy.

We took the guns and ammunition off the bodies of my friends and left them there in the forest, which had taken on a life of its own, as if it had trapped the souls that had departed from the dead. The branches of the trees looked as if they were holding hands and bowing their heads in prayer. We crouched into the forest and formed another ambush a few meters away from our initial position. Once again, we waited. It was between evening and nighttime. One lonely cricket tried to start singing, but none of its companions joined in, so it stopped to let silence bring night. I lay next to the corporal, whose eyes were redder than normal. He ignored my stare. We heard footsteps on the dried grasses and immediately took aim. A group of gunmen and boys emerged from under the bushes, crouched, and took quick cover behind trees. As they got closer, we opened fire, dropping those who stood in front. The rest we chased into the swamp, where we lost them. There, crabs had already begun feasting on the eyes of the dead. Limbs and fragmented skulls lay on top of the bog, and the water in the swamp had been replaced by blood. We flipped the bodies over and took their ammunition and guns.

I was not afraid of these lifeless bodies. I despised them and kicked them to flip them. I found a G3, some ammunition, and a handgun that the corporal kept for himself. I noticed that most of the dead gunmen and boys wore lots of jewelry on their necks and wrists. Some even wore more than five gold watches on one wrist. One boy, whose uncombed hair was now soaked with blood, wore a Tupac Shakur T-shirt that said: “All eyes on me.” We lost a few adult soldiers on our side and my friends Musa and Josiah. Musa, the storyteller, was gone. There was no one around to tell us stories and make us laugh at times when we needed it. And Josiah—if only I had let him continue sleeping on the first day of training, perhaps he wouldn’t have gone to the front line in the first place.

We arrived in the village with nightfall and sat against the walls of the army house. It was quiet, and as if we were afraid of silence, we began cleaning the blood off our guns and the ones we had brought with us, cleaning and oiling their chambers. We shot the weapons into the air to test their effectiveness. I went for supper that night, but was unable to eat. I only drank water and felt nothing. As I walked back to my tent, I stumbled into a cement wall. My knee bled, but I didn’t feel a thing. I lay on my back in the tent with my AK-47 on my chest and the G3 I had brought with me leaning on the peg of the tent. Nothing happened in my head. It was void, and I stared at the roof of the tent until I was miraculously able to doze off. I had a dream that I was picking up Josiah from the tree stump and a gunman stood on top of me. He placed his gun on my forehead. I immediately woke up from my dream and began shooting inside the tent, until the thirty rounds in the magazine were finished. The corporal and the lieutenant came in afterward and took me outside. I was sweating, and they threw water on my face and gave me a few more of the white capsules. I stayed up all night and couldn’t sleep for a week. We went out two more times that week and I had no problem shooting my gun.