A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

6

BEING IN A GROUP of six boys was not to our advantage. But we needed to stay together because we had a better chance of escaping the day-to-day troubles we faced. People were terrified of boys our age. Some had heard rumors about young boys being forced by rebels to kill their families and burn their villages. These children now patrolled in special units, killing and maiming civilians. There were those who had been victims of these terrors and carried fresh scars to show for it. So whenever people saw us, we reminded them of the massacres, and that struck fear in their hearts again. Some people tried to hurt us to protect themselves, their families and communities. Because of these things, we decided to bypass villages by walking through the nearby bushes. This way we would be safe and avoid causing chaos. This was one of the consequences of the civil war. People stopped trusting each other, and every stranger became an enemy. Even people who knew you became extremely careful about how they related or spoke to you.

One day, as soon as we had left the forested area of a village we had bypassed, a group of huge, muscular men sprang from the bushes onto the path in front of us. Raising their machetes and hunting rifles, they ordered us to stop. The men were the voluntary guards of their village and had been asked by their chief to bring us back.

A large crowd had gathered in the chief’s compound for our arrival. The huge men pushed us to the ground in front of them and tied our feet with strong ropes. Then our hands were pulled behind our backs until our elbows touched, making our chests tight from the pressure. I was in tears from the pain. I tried to roll on my back, but that made it even worse.

“Are you rebels or spies?” The chief stamped his staff on the ground.

“No.” Our voices trembled.

The chief became very angry. “If you do not tell me the truth, I am going to have these men tie stones to your bodies and throw you in the river,” he roared.

We told him we were students and this was a big misunderstanding.

The crowd shouted, “Drown the rebels.”

The guards walked into the circle and started searching our pockets. One of them found a rap cassette in my pocket and handed it to the chief. He asked for it to be played.You down with OPP (Yeah you know me)You down with OPP (Yeah you know me)You down with OPP (Yeah you know me)Who’s down with OPP (Every last homie)

The chief stopped the music. He stroked his beard, thinking.

“Tell me,” he said, turning to me, “how did you get this foreign music?”

I told him that we rapped. He didn’t know what rap music was, so I did my best to explain it to him. “It is similar to telling parables, but in the white man’s language,” I concluded. I also told him that we were dancers and had a group in Mattru Jong, where we used to attend school.

“Mattru Jong?” he asked, and called for a young man who was from that village. The boy was brought before the chief and asked if he knew us and if he had ever heard us speak parables in the white man’s language. He knew my name, my brother’s, and those of my friends. He remembered us from performances we had done. None of us knew him, not even by his face, but we warmly smiled as if we recognized him as well. He saved our lives.

We were untied and treated to some cassava and smoked fish. We ate, thanked the villagers, and got ready to move on. The chief and some of the men who had tied our hands and feet offered us a place to stay in the village. We thanked them for their generosity and left. We knew that the rebels would eventually reach the village.

Slowly, we walked on a path through a thick forest. The trees hesitantly swayed with the quiet wind. The sky looked as if it was filled with smoke, endless gray smoke that made the sun dull. Around sunset we arrived at an abandoned village with six mud houses. We sat on the floor of the verandah of one of the houses. I looked at Junior, whose face was sweating. He had been so quiet lately. He looked at me and smiled a little before his face resumed its dullness. He got up and walked out to the yard. Never moving, he stared at the sky until the sun disappeared. On his way back to sit on the verandah, he picked up a stone and played with it throughout the evening. I kept looking at him, hoping that we could have another eye contact and maybe he would then say something about what was going on in his head. But he wouldn’t look up. He only played with the stone in his hand and stared at the ground.

Once, Junior taught me how to skip a stone on a river. We had gone to fetch water and he told me he had learned a new magic that let him make stones walk on water. Bending his body sideways, he threw stones out, and each one walked on the water farther than the last. He told me to try, but I couldn’t do it. He promised to teach me the magic some other time. As we were walking back home with buckets of water on our heads, I slipped and fell, spilling the water. Junior gave me his bucket, took my empty one, and returned to the river. When he came home, the first thing he did was ask me if I was hurt from falling. I told him I was fine, but he examined my knees and elbows anyway, and when he was done, he tickled me. As I looked at him that evening sitting on the verandah of a house in an unknown village, I wanted him to ask me if I was fine.

Gibrilla, Talloi, Kaloko, and Khalilou were all looking at the top of the forest that engulfed the village. Gibrilla’s nose twitched as he sat with his chin on his knee. When he exhaled, his whole body moved. Talloi continuously tapped his foot on the floor, as if trying to distract himself from thinking about the present. Kaloko was restless. He couldn’t sit still and kept switching positions, and sighed each time he did so. Khalilou sat quietly. His face showed no emotion and his spirit seemed to have wandered away from his body. I wanted to know how Junior was feeling, but I couldn’t find the right moment to break into the silence of that evening. I wish I had.

The following morning, a large group of people passed through the village. Among the travelers was a woman who knew Gibrilla. She told him that his aunt was in a village about thirty miles from where we were. She gave us directions. We filled our pockets with unripe oranges that were sour and unbearable to eat but the only source of food at our disposal, and we were on our way.

Kamator was very far away from Mattru Jong, where the rebels were still in control, but the villagers were on guard and ready to move anytime. In return for food and a place to sleep, the six of us were appointed watchmen. Three miles from the village was a big hill. From the top, one could see as far as a mile down the path toward the village. It was at the top of that hill that we stood watch from early in the morning until nightfall. We did this for about a month and nothing happened. Still, we knew the rebels well enough to brace for their arrival. But we lost our vigilance to the gradual passing of time.

The season for planting was approaching. The first rain had fallen, softening the soil. Birds began building their nests in the mango trees. Dew came down every morning and left the leaves wet and soaked the soil. The odor of the soaked soil was irresistibly sharp at midday. It made me want to roll on the ground. One of my uncles used to joke that he would like to die at this time of year. The sun rose earlier than usual and was at its brightest in the blue, almost cloudless sky. The grass on the side of the path was half dry and half green. Ants could be seen on the ground carrying food into their holes. Even though we tried to convince them otherwise, the villagers grew certain the rebels weren’t coming, and so they ordered us from our scouting posts and out into the fields. It wasn’t easy.

I had always been a spectator of the art of farming and as a result never realized how difficult it was until those few months of my life, in 1993, when I had to assist in farming in the village of Kamator. The village inhabitants were all farmers, so I had no way to escape this fate.

Before the war, when I visited my grandmother during harvest season, the only thing she let me do was pour wine on the soil around the farm before harvest commenced, as part of a ceremony to thank the ancestors and the gods for providing fertile soil, healthy rice, and a successful farming year.

The first task we were given was to clear a massive plot of land the size of a football field. When we went to look at the bush that was supposed to be cut, I knew tough days lay ahead. The bush was thick and there were lots of palm trees, each surrounded by trees that had woven their branches together. It was difficult to get around them and chop them down. The ground was covered with decayed leaves that had changed the top color of the brown soil to dark. Termites could be heard rummaging under the rotten leaves. Every day we would repeatedly stoop and stand under the bushes, swinging machetes and axes at the trees and palms that had to be cut lower to the ground so that they wouldn’t grow fast again and disrupt the crop that was to be planted. Sometimes when we swung the machetes and axes, their weight would send us flying into the bushes, where we would lie for a bit and rub our aching shoulders. Gibrilla’s uncle would shake his head and say, “You lazy town boys.”

On the first morning of clearing, Gibrilla’s uncle assigned each of us a portion of the bush to be cut down. We spent three days cutting down our portions. He was done in less than three hours.

When I held the cutlass in my hand to start attacking the bush, Gibrilla’s uncle couldn’t help himself. He burst out laughing before he showed me how to hold the cutlass properly. I spent restless minutes swinging the cutlass with all my might at trees that he would cut with one strike.

The first two weeks were extremely painful. I suffered from back pains and muscle aches. Worst of all, the flesh on the palms of my hands was peeled, swollen, and blistered. My hands were not used to holding a machete or an ax. After the clearing was done, the bush was left to dry. Later, when the cut bush was dried, we set fire to it and watched the thick smoke rise to the blue summer sky.

Next we had to plant cassava. To do this, we dug mini-holes in the ground using hoes. To take a break from this task, which required us to bend our upper bodies toward the ground for hours, we fetched cassava stalks, cut them into shorter pieces, and placed them in the holes. The only sounds we heard as we worked were the humming of tunes by expert farmers, the occasional flapping of a bird, the snaps of tree branches breaking in the nearby forest, and hellos from neighbors traveling the path either to their own farms or back to the village. At the end of the day, I sometimes would sit on a log at the village square and watch the younger boys play their wrestling games. One of the boys, about seven, always started a fight, and his mother would pull him away by his ear. I saw myself in him. I was a troublesome boy as well and always got into fights in school and at the river. Sometimes I stoned kids I couldn’t beat up. Since we didn’t have a mother at home, Junior and I were the misfits in our community. The separation of our parents left marks on us that were visible to the youngest child in our town. We became the evening gossip.

“Those poor boys,” some would say.

“They aren’t going to have any good complete training,” others would worriedly remark as we walked by.

I was so angry at the way they pitied us that I would sometimes kick their children’s behinds at school, especially those who gave us the look that said, My parents talk about you a lot.

We farmed for three months at Kamator and I never got used to it. The only times that I enjoyed were the afternoon breaks, when we went swimming in the river. There, I would sit on the clear sandy bottom of the river and let the current take me downstream, where I would resurface, put on my dirty clothes, and return to the farm. The sad thing about all that hard labor was that, in the end, it all went to ruin, because the rebels did eventually come and everyone ran away, leaving their farms to be covered by weeds and devoured by animals.

It was during that attack in the village of Kamator that my friends and I separated. It was the last time I saw Junior, my older brother.