A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (12 page)

13

I
T 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.

14

T
HE SHARP ACHES IN MY HEAD
,
or what I later came to know as migraines, stopped as my daily activities were replaced with more soldierly things. In the daytime, instead of playing soccer in the village square, I took turns at the guarding posts around the village, smoking marijuana and sniffing
brown brown
, cocaine mixed with gunpowder, which was always spread out on the table, and of course taking more of the white capsules, as I had become addicted to them. They gave me a lot of energy. The first time I took all these drugs at the same time, I began to perspire so much that I took off all my clothes. My body shook, my sight became blurred, and I lost my hearing for several minutes. I walked around the village aimlessly, as I felt restless because I simultaneously felt a tremendous rush of energy and numbness. But after several doses of these drugs, all I felt was numbness to everything and so much energy that I couldn’t sleep for weeks. We watched movies at night. War movies,
Rambo
:
First Blood
,
Rambo II
,
Commando
, and so on, with the aid of a generator or sometimes a car battery. We all wanted to be like Rambo; we couldn’t wait to implement his techniques.

When we ran out of food, drugs, ammunition, and gasoline to watch war films, we raided rebel camps, in towns, villages, and forests. We also attacked civilian villages to capture recruits and whatever else we could find.

“We have good news from our informants. We are moving out in five minutes to kill some rebels and take their supplies, which really belong to us,” the lieutenant would announce. His face evinced confidence; his smiles disappeared before they were completed. We tied our heads with the green cloths that distinguished us from the rebels, and we boys led the way. There were no maps and no questions asked. We were simply told to follow the path until we received instructions on what to do next. We walked for long hours and stopped only to eat sardines and corned beef with
gari
, sniff cocaine,
brown brown
, and take some white capsules. The combination of these drugs gave us a lot of energy and made us fierce. The idea of death didn’t cross my mind at all and killing had become as easy as drinking water. My mind had not only snapped during the first killing, it had also stopped making remorseful records, or so it seemed. After we ate and did drugs, we would guard the perimeter while the adults rested for a bit. I shared a post with Alhaji, and we would time each other on how fast we could take out a magazine and replace it.

“Sometime I am going to take on a whole village by myself, just like Rambo,” Alhaji told me, smiling at the new goal he had set for himself.

“I’d like to have some bazookas of my own, like the ones in
Commando
. That would be beautiful,” I said, and we laughed.

Before we got to a rebel camp, we would deviate from the path and walk inside the forest. Once the camp was in sight, we would surround it and wait for the lieutenant’s command. The rebels roamed about; some sat against walls, dozing off, and others, boys as young as we, stood at guard posts passing around marijuana. Whenever I looked at rebels during raids, I got angrier, because they looked like the rebels who played cards in the ruins of the village where I had lost my family. So when the lieutenant gave orders, I shot as many as I could, but I didn’t feel better. After every gunfight we would enter the rebel camp, killing those we had wounded. We would then search the houses and gather gallons of gasoline, enormous amounts of marijuana and cocaine, bales of clothes,
crapes
, watches, rice, dried fish, salt,
gari
, and many other things. We rounded up the civilians—men, women, boys, and young girls—hiding in the huts and houses, and made them carry our loot back to the base.

On one of these raids, we had captured a few rebels after a long gunfight and a lot of civilian casualties. We undressed the prisoners and tied them until their chests were tight as drums.

“Where did you get all this ammunition from?” the corporal asked one of the prisoners, a man with an almost dreadlocked beard. He spat at the corporal’s face, and the corporal immediately shot him in the head at close range. He fell onto the ground and blood slowly leaked out of his head. We cheered in admiration of the corporal’s fierceness and saluted him as he walked by. Suddenly Lansana, one of the boys, was shot in the chest and head by a rebel hiding in the bushes. We dispersed around the village in search of the shooter. When the young muscular rebel was captured, the lieutenant slit his neck with his bayonet. The rebel ran up and down the village before he fell to the ground and stopped moving. We cheered again, raising our guns in the air, shouting and whistling.

“If anyone starts any funny business, shoot him.” The lieutenant eyed the prisoners. We set the thatched roofs on fire and left, taking the prisoners with us. The flames on the thatched roofs waved us off as they danced with the afternoon breeze, swaying as if in agony.

“We”—the lieutenant pointed to us—“are here to protect you and will do all we can to make sure nothing happens to you.” He pointed to the civilians.

“Our job is a serious one and we have the most capable soldiers, who will do anything to defend this country. We are not like the rebels, those riffraffs who kill people for no reason. We kill them for the good and betterment of this country. So respect all these men”—he pointed to us again—“for offering their services.” The lieutenant went on and on with his speech, which was a combination of instilling in the civilians that what we were doing was right and boosting the morale of his men, including us, the boys. I stood there holding my gun and felt special because I was part of something that took me seriously and I was not running from anyone anymore. I had my gun now, and as the corporal always said, “This gun is your source of power in these times. It will protect you and provide you all you need, if you know how to use it well.”

I cannot remember what prompted the lieutenant to make this speech. A lot of things were done with no reason or explanation. Sometimes we were asked to leave for war in the middle of a movie. We would come back hours later after killing many people and continue the movie as if we had just returned from intermission. We were always either at the front lines, watching a war movie, or doing drugs. There was no time to be alone or to think. When we conversed with each other, we talked only about the war movies and how impressed we were with the way either the lieutenant, the corporal, or one of us had killed someone. It was as if nothing else existed outside our reality.

The morning after the lieutenant’s speech, we proceeded to practice killing the prisoners the way the lieutenant had done it. There were five prisoners and many eager participants. So the corporal chose a few of us. He picked Kanei, three other boys, and me for the killing exhibition. The five men were lined up in front of us on the training ground with their hands tied. We were supposed to slice their throats on the corporal’s command. The person whose prisoner died quickest would win the contest. We had our bayonets out and were supposed to look in the faces of the prisoners as we took them out of this world. I had already begun staring at my prisoner. His face was swollen from the beating he had received, and his eyes looked as if they were watching something behind me. His jaws were the only tense part of his facial expression; everything else seemed calm. I didn’t feel a thing for him, didn’t think that much about what I was doing. I just waited for the corporal’s order. The prisoner was simply another rebel who was responsible for the death of my family, as I had come to truly believe. The corporal gave the signal with a pistol shot and I grabbed the man’s head and slit his throat in one fluid motion. His Adam’s apple made way for the sharp knife, and I turned the bayonet on its zigzag edge as I brought it out. His eyes rolled up and they looked me straight in the eye before they suddenly stopped in a frightful glance, as if caught by surprise. The prisoner leaned his weight on me as he gave out his last breath. I dropped him on the ground and wiped my bayonet on him. I reported to the corporal, who was holding a timer. The bodies of the other prisoners fought in the arms of the other boys, and some continued to shake on the ground for a while. I was proclaimed the winner, and Kanei came second. The boys and the other soldiers who were the audience clapped as if I had just fulfilled one of life’s greatest achievements. I was given the rank of junior lieutenant and Kanei was given junior sergeant. We celebrated that day’s achievement with more drugs and more war movies.

I had a tent to myself, which I never slept in because sleep never came to me. Sometimes late in the night, the quiet wind brought to my ears the humming of Lansana. It seemed as if the trees whispered the tunes of the songs he had sung. I would listen for a bit and then fire a few rounds into the night, driving the humming away.