Song for Night

A Funnel Is Fingertips Steepled, Palms Apart

I scan the road ahead and try to figure out what the enemy might have in store for me, if this is their territory now. Ambush is a standard procedure — for both sides. This is how the enemy set their traps: they plant mines in the road verge, in the brush, then they ambush an oncoming troop. The initial volley of fire from them is aimed a little too high so that it kills only a few oncoming soldiers. Naturally, and in spite of the three weeks of boot-camp training and the formations we have been taught to assume, we scatter for cover, stumbling onto the mines, blowing up ourselves and our friends. It is a particularly cruel way to take out an enemy, but since land mines are banned in civilized warfare, the West practically gives them away at cost and in this way they are cheaper than bullets and other arms. If they could, the enemy would have jerry-rigged the mines so they could throw them like grenades, but the firing mechanism of a mine is too sensitive to take such risks. Instead they lay them like a metal undercarpet. When a mine explodes, anyone directly on top will usually be killed. They are lucky. For the rest, shrapnel tears off arms and legs and parts of faces. Mines are like little jumping jacks. You step on one, they arm, you step off, and they jump up about mid-torso high and then explode, ripping you apart. For us, the rebels, mines are as valuable as bullets. We have no generous superpower sugar-daddies and we reuse every mine that we successfully defuse. Waste not want not.

To counter these ambushes, the rebel leaders came up with the funnel. The name reminds me of the white cone my dog wore after he was neutered, and I can hardly make the sign for it without cracking up in soundless mirth. At the tapered end of the funnel, which is the front, are the scouts and mine diffusers. The scouts are split into two groups: the rekies who are strictly there for reconnaissance, and who report directly to the leader and are the only ones with radios or satellite phones; the other group of scouts are called kamikazes. Their job is to draw enemy fire while we mine diffusers get to work clearing the road for the body of the troop, which is spread out in a fan, the two sides ready to flank the enemy if necessary.

My platoon and I are often at the front of every encounter. This has pros and cons. Pros and cons — the language of the invisible manual of John Wayne; invisible or lost. I like lost better — the lost manual of John Wayne. It should probably have a subtitle like my French textbook did: French Afrique Book One: French Even Africans Can Speak. Anyway, pros and cons would be a chapter in that manual. John Wayne swore by them.

“Weigh the pros and cons of every situation!” he would shout at us. “It is best to proceed when there are more pros than cons, but not every con is a bad thing. In war we have acceptable losses; provided of course that it is in the service of the greater good … It’s all in the manual,” he would add to forestall Ijeoma’s questions.

Thinking about it now, I will pay good money to see that manual. I slap myself. So many digressions — no wonder I have lost my platoon. Pros and cons of being at the front of every battle:

Pros—

• Prime pillaging opportunities.

• The battle is over quicker.

• If you die, it is quick (unless you fall victim to a mine, which can be a slow death sometimes).

• The kamikaze dies first.

• Choice pick of weapons.

The cons?

• Death.

• Death.

• Death.

But regardless of the risks, I will not trade places with the clean-up crew, the platoon of vultures that bring up the rear, whose job is to clean up the dead and ensure the counts are accurate. Some of us have dog tags and some don’t, so their job is at best a good guess. I am sure that when the war is over, many of the reported dead will stream back to their families only to be rejected as ghosts or zombies. For us at the front, death is quick, ours and our comrades. For the clean-up crew, death is a lingering disease. Do they get tired of it? Counting the dead is not easy. It is rare to die intact in a war. Bullets and shrapnel from mines and mortars and shells can tear a body to pieces. An arm here, a leg over there in the foliage — all of which have to be retrieved and assembled into the semblance of a complete body before there can be a count. The worst thing about this job may be the irreconcilable math of it: Many of the parts don’t add up. This is the enemy’s cruelty — that much of the generation who survive this war will not be able to rebuild their communities. Even now it is not uncommon to run across groups of these half-people holding onto life in distant parts of the forest. Even the enemy soldiers spare these pitiful creatures when they come across them.

I remember a group I saw once. Children without arms or legs or both, men with only half a face, women with shrapnel-chewed scars for breasts — all of them holding onto life and hope with a fire that burned feverishly in their eyes. If any light comes from this war, it will come from eyes such as those.

Someone had found a radio and it was tuned to a BBC World Service broadcast of Congolese highlife. There were a bunch of disabled children dancing in a circle. A young girl with one leg standing off to the side leaning on a stick made fun of the dancers. Challenged to do better, she laughed, threw the stick away, and jumped into the circle. She stood still for a moment as though she was getting her bearings, and then she began to move. Still balanced on one leg, her waist began a fierce gyration and her upper body moved the opposite way. Then like a crazy heron, she began to hop around, her waist and torso still shaking. She was an elemental force of nature. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I have never seen anything like it before or since — a small fire sprite shaking the world and reducing grown war-hardened onlookers to tears.

I think of her and the fire I saw burning in the others and I realize the fire burning in me is shame; shame and fear, and it drives me to get up and proceed. I must find my platoon.