A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (11 page)

“Attention. This is an order from the lieutenant. Everyone must gather at the square immediately.” A soldier spoke into a megaphone. Before he had finished his last word, the square was filled. Everyone had waited for this moment that would determine what we were going to do for our safety. Before the announcement, I sat with my friends near the window in the kitchen. Their faces were blank; they showed no emotion, but their eyes looked pale with sorrow. I tried to make eye contact with each of them, but they all looked away. I tried to eat my breakfast, but fear had taken away my appetite.

As we found spots in the back of the crowd, gunshots filled the air, then faded to a silence even more unbearable than the reports.

The lieutenant stood on several bricks so that he could be high enough to be seen by all. He let silence settle in our bones, then waved his hands to some soldiers who brought before us two bodies—a man and a young boy who had lived in the village. The blood that soaked their clothes was still fresh and their eyes were open. People turned their heads away, and little children and babies began to cry. The lieutenant cleared his throat and started speaking in the midst of the cries, which eventually ceased as he went on.

“I am sorry to show you these gruesome bodies, especially with your children present. But then again, all of us here have seen death or even shaken hands with it.” He turned to the bodies and continued softly: “This man and this child decided to leave this morning even though I had told them it was dangerous. The man insisted that he didn’t want to be a part of our war, so I gave him his wish and let him go. Look at what happened. The rebels shot them in the clearing. My men brought them back, and I decided to show you, so that you can fully understand the situation we are in.” The lieutenant went on for almost an hour, describing how rebels had cut off the heads of some people’s family members and made them watch, burned entire villages along with their inhabitants, forced sons to have intercourse with their mothers, hacked newly born babies in half because they cried too much, cut open pregnant women’s stomachs, took the babies out, and killed them…The lieutenant spat on the ground and continued on, until he was sure that he had mentioned all the ways the rebels had hurt every person in the gathering.

“They have lost everything that makes them human. They do not deserve to live. That is why we must kill every single one of them. Think of it as destroying a great evil. It is the highest service you can perform for your country.” The lieutenant pulled out his pistol and fired two shots into the air. People began shouting, “We must kill them all. We must make sure they never walk this earth again.” All of us hated the rebels, and we were more than determined to stop them from capturing the village. Everyone’s face had begun to sadden and grow tense. The aura in the village rapidly changed after the speech. The morning sun had disappeared and the day became gloomy. It seemed as if the sky were going to break and fall on the earth. I was furious and afraid, and so were my friends. Jumah looked toward the forest with his hands behind his back, Moriba was holding his head, Kanei stared at the ground, Musa wrapped his hands around himself, Alhaji covered his eyes with his left hand, and I stood akimbo to stop my legs from shaking. All women and girls were asked to report to the kitchen; men and boys to the ammunition depot, where the soldiers watched their movies and smoked marijuana.

As we walked toward the building, a soldier who carried a G3 weapon came out and stood at the doorway. He smiled at us, lifted his gun, and fired several rounds toward the sky. We dropped to the ground, and he laughed at us as he went back inside. We walked through the door and came upon the tents inside the building. The building was roofless except for the tarpaulin that covered the boxes of ammunition and guns stacked against the wall; and in the only common space, a huge television screen sat on top of a dilapidated drum. A few meters away from the television stood a generator, along with gallons of gasoline. The soldiers came out of their tents as the staff sergeant led us to the back of the house, where none of us had been before. There were more than thirty boys there, two of whom, Sheku and Josiah, were seven and eleven years old. The rest of us were between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, except Kanei, who was now seventeen.

A soldier wearing civilian clothes, with a whistle around his neck, stepped up to a rack of AK-47s and handed one to each of us. When the soldier stood in front of me, I avoided eye contact, so he straightened my head until my eyes met his. He gave me the gun. I held it in my trembling hand. He then added the magazine, and I shook even more.

“It seems that all of you have two things in common,” the soldier said after he had finished testing all of us. “You are afraid of looking a man in the eye and afraid of holding a gun. Your hands tremble as if the gun is pointed at your head.” He walked up and down the line for a bit and continued: “This gun”—he held the AK-47 high up—“will soon belong to you, so you better learn not to be afraid of it. That is all for today.”

That night I stood at the entrance of my tent for a while, hoping my friends would come out to talk, but no one did. Alhaji stepped out and looked in my direction for a few minutes, but he then turned and just stared at the ground. I was about to walk toward him when he reentered his tent. I inhaled the cool night breeze, which brought with it the scent of marijuana. I sighed, went back into my tent, and sat on the tarp all night unable to sleep. I just sat with my head in my hands, thoughtless. It was the first night that I was awake alone without having a migraine. As I began to ponder why this was the case, a cock started crowing, though it was still dark outside. The confused cock crowed throughout the night until morning finally arrived.

My two tent companions, Sheku and Josiah, the two youngest boys, were still sleeping when the bell rang at 6:00 a.m. for us to rise for training. “Come on, let’s go.” I tried to wake them with a gentle shake. They just rolled over on their sides and continued sleeping. I had to drag them off the mat by their legs and slap them until they woke up. The soldiers were already going from tent to tent dragging out those who were still asleep and splashing buckets of water on them.

We met at the training ground and new
crapes
were distributed, along with army shorts and T-shirts that were of all colors. Some people got Adidas and others Nikes. I got a black Reebok Pump and was happier about my new
crapes
than anything else that was going on. I took off my old pants, which contained the rap cassettes. As I was putting on my new army shorts, a soldier took my old pants and threw them into a blazing fire that had been set to burn our old belongings. I ran toward the fire, but the cassettes had already started to melt. Tears formed in my eyes, and my lips shook as I turned away.

After we had put on the new attire, we formed a horizontal line with legs apart and hands straight down at our sides. As we stood waiting, some of the soldiers returned from the front line and reloaded their guns and side packs with ammunition. Some had blood on their uniforms and faces, which they didn’t seem to notice or simply ignored. They quickly ate breakfast and were on their way back to where they didn’t look as if they wanted to return. Each soldier stood against the wall, took several deep breaths with his eyes closed, and gripped his gun tightly before beginning to run back toward the clearing.

Sheku and Josiah stood next to me as if sharing a tent with them meant that I had become their big brother. They watched me during the exercise and followed what I did instead of the soldier who had introduced himself as Corporal Gadafi. He was a young fellow, younger than the lieutenant and the staff sergeant, but he was bald and his countenance made him look much older. He had an intense face that looked, even smiling, as if he were chewing something sour.

First we ran around the building for a few minutes, and then we began to learn how to crawl in the bushes nearby. Corporal Gadafi would hold his fist up, and when he brought it down, we fell into the bushes and crawled quickly, without producing much sound, until we reached a designated tree. Then we immediately got up and crouched to take cover behind other trees. Afterward, we would run back to the training ground. The corporal didn’t say much during the initial stage of training. All he said was “Not bad,” “Terrible,” and “Faster.” He mostly used hand gestures, which he said was the only thing that would be used once we were out there. He would point to the clearing, where “words could cost you a bullet in the head.” He would then smile drily and widen his eyes for us to laugh with him. After we had done the running, crawling, and crouching many times, we were allowed to have some bread and custard. The corporal gave us one minute to get the food and eat it. Whatever we hadn’t eaten was taken away at the end of sixty seconds. None of us was able to finish eating on the first day, but within a week we could eat any food in a minute. It was the only part of the training that we mastered.

After the late breakfast, we lined up facing the corporal, who handed us AK-47s. When it was my turn, he looked at me intensely, as if he was trying to tell me that he was giving me something worth cherishing. He poked my chest with his finger and walked around me. When he came back to the front, he stared at me some more, his red eyes and dark face twitching. He bared his teeth as if he were preparing to attack, and my legs began to shake, when he started to smile. Before I could smile with him, he had stopped, and the veins on his forehead stood up. Still looking straight at me, he reached into a wooden crate and pulled out the gun. He took out the magazine and handed me the AK with two hands. I hesitated for a bit, but he pushed the gun against my chest. With trembling hands I took the gun, saluted him, and ran to the back of the line, still holding the gun but afraid to look at it. I had never held a gun that long before and it frightened me. The closest thing to it had been a toy gun made out of bamboo when I was seven. My playmates and I carved them and played war games in the coffee farms and unfinished buildings at my grandmother’s village.
Paw paw
, we would go, and whoever did it first would announce to the rest whom he had killed.

We continued the training exercises we had been doing earlier in the morning, but this time we carried with us AK-47s that didn’t contain any ammunition. We crawled with the guns on our backs, in our hands, and ran around the building with them. The guns were a little heavy for Sheku and Josiah, who kept dropping them and picking them up as we went along. We broke for a minute lunch and began a different drill. We were taken to a nearby banana farm, where we practiced stabbing the banana trees with bayonets. “Visualize the banana tree as the enemy, the rebels who killed your parents, your family, and those who are responsible for everything that has happened to you,” the corporal screamed. “Is that how you stab someone who had killed your family?” he asked. “This is how I would do it.” He took out his bayonet and started shouting and stabbing the banana tree. “I first stab him in the stomach, then the neck, then his heart, and I will cut it out, show it to him, and then pluck his eyes out. Remember, he probably killed your parents worse. Continue.” He wiped his knife with banana leaves. When he said this, we all got angry and drove our knives in and out of the banana trees until they fell to the ground. “Good,” he said, nodding and pondering something that made him smile longer than usual. Over and over in our training he would say that same sentence:
Visualize the enemy, the rebels who killed your parents, your family, and those who are responsible for everything that has happened to you
.

That afternoon we learned how to put the magazine into the gun and other such basics. Ignore the safety pin, they said, it will only slow you down. That evening we learned to fire our guns, aiming at plywood boards mounted in the branches of tiny trees at the edge of the forest. Sheku and Josiah weren’t strong enough to raise their weapons, so the corporal gave them each a high stool to keep the weapons from falling. At the end of the shooting exercise, we were taught how to dismantle our guns and oil them, because the AKs were so old that they would misfire randomly and sometimes would stop working altogether. That night, as soon as we got under the tent, my tent companions passed out. Instead of smiling in their sleep, Sheku went “
Paw paw, boom,
” and Josiah went, “One, two,” the numbers we had recited as we stabbed the banana trees. But even though I was exhausted, I couldn’t sleep. My ears rang with the gun sounds, my body ached, and my index finger was sore. There had been no time to think all day, but now I could. I could become angry, yes, begin to visualize scenarios of shooting or stabbing a rebel. “The rebels are responsible for everything that has happened to you.” I imagined capturing several rebels at once, locking them inside a house, sprinkling gasoline on it, and tossing a match. We watch it burn and I laugh.

I was distracted by the humming of a boy named Lansana. He was three tents down from me and he sometimes hummed melodies of songs I had never heard until he fell asleep. He started doing this after our first shooting exercise. His voice would echo in the dark forest, and whenever he stopped, the night got quieter.