A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (13 page)

15

T
HE VILLAGES THAT WE CAPTURED
and turned into our bases as we went along and the forests that we slept in became my home. My squad was my family, my gun was my provider and protector, and my rule was to kill or be killed. The extent of my thoughts didn’t go much beyond that. We had been fighting for over two years, and killing had become a daily activity. I felt no pity for anyone. My childhood had gone by without my knowing, and it seemed as if my heart had frozen. I knew that day and night came and went because of the presence of the moon and the sun, but I had no idea whether it was a Sunday or a Friday.

In my head my life was normal. But everything began to change in the last weeks of January 1996. I was fifteen.

I left one morning with twenty members of my squad for Bauya, a small town a day’s walk south of us, to get ammunition. My friends Alhaji and Kanei came, too. We were excited to see Jumah, who was now stationed there. We wanted to hear his war stories, hear how many people he had killed. I was also looking forward to seeing the lieutenant. I hoped we might find some time to talk about Shakespeare.

We walked in two lines on the sides of a dusty path, looking into the dense bushes with our bloodshot eyes. We arrived at the outskirts of Bauya just before sunset and waited in the bushes as our commander went ahead to make sure our colleagues wouldn’t shoot at us. We sat against trees and watched the path. The commander returned after several minutes and motioned for us to move into town. I hoisted my gun on my shoulder and walked next to Kanei and Alhaji as we entered the base. The cement houses in the town were bigger than the ones I had seen in other villages, and everywhere we looked were unfamiliar faces. We nodded to acknowledge other soldiers as we walked around town looking for Jumah. We found him sitting in a hammock on the verandah of a cement house that faced the forest. There was a semiautomatic machine gun next to him and he seemed lost in thought. We slowly walked up to him, but before we could scare him, he heard our footsteps and turned toward us. His face seemed to have gotten older and he had stopped nodding when he spoke. We shook hands with him and examined his gun.

“I see that you carry heavy weapons these days,” Alhaji joked with him.

“Well, what can I say, I am moving up from the AKs,” he replied, and we all laughed.

We told him that we would return to sit with him in a few minutes and went to load our bags with ammunition and food to take back. While we were in the ammunition house, our commander told us that the lieutenant had asked us to stay the night and that dinner was ready. I wasn’t hungry, so I returned by myself to see Jumah while Kanei and Alhaji went to eat. We sat quietly for a while before he started talking.

“I am going on a raid tomorrow morning, so I might not see you before you leave.” He paused, fingered the side of the machine gun, and continued: “I killed the owner of this gun in our last raid. He took out a lot of us before I could get him. Since then I have used it to do some damage myself.” He chuckled, and we high-fived each other and laughed. Immediately after that, we were ordered to report for the nightly gathering in the yard at the center of town. It was a social event for commanders to mingle with everyone else. Jumah picked up his gun and put his arm around my shoulder as we walked to the yard. Alhaji and Kanei were there; they had already started smoking. Lieutenant Jabati was present, too, and he was a little jovial that night. Most of his colleagues, Staff Sergeant Mansaray and Corporal Gadafi, had died, but the lieutenant had miraculously managed to stay alive unscarred. He had also been able to replace his dead colleagues with other men who were fierce and disciplined. I wanted to talk to the lieutenant about Shakespeare, but he was busy going about the gathering, shaking everyone’s hand. When he finally stood in front of me, he held my hand tight and said, “Macbeth shall never vanquished be until great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane hill shall come against him.” He nodded at me and said loudly to everyone, “I shall take leave of you fine gentlemen.” He bowed and waved as he left. We raised our guns in the air and cheered. After the lieutenant had gone, we began singing the national anthem, “
High we exalt thee, realm of the free, great is the love we have for thee…
” and marching, smoking and sniffing the cocaine and
brown brown
that was in abundance at Bauya. We chatted all night, mostly about how good the drugs were.

Before morning, Jumah and a few others left for their raid. Alhaji, Kanei, and I shook hands with him and promised that we would catch up more on our next visit. Jumah smiled, clutched his machine gun, and went running into the darkness.

A few hours later a truck came to the village. Four men dressed in clean blue jeans and white T-shirts that said UNICEF on them in big blue letters jumped out. One of them was a white man and another was also light-skinned, maybe Lebanese. The other two were nationals, one with tribal marks on his cheeks, the other with marks on his hands just like the one my grandfather gave me to protect me from snakebite. The men were all too clean to have been in the war. They were shown to the lieutenant’s house. He had been expecting them. As they sat talking on the verandah, we watched them from under the mango tree, where we sat cleaning our guns. After a while, the lieutenant shook hands with the two foreigners and he called over the private who was guarding the meeting. The private ran toward us and told us to form a line. He went around the town gathering all the boys, exclaiming: “This is an order from the lieutenant!” We were accustomed to taking orders and did what we were told. We formed a horizontal line and waited.

The lieutenant stood before us and we saluted him, expecting to hear about our next raid on a rebel camp. “Stand at ease, boys,” he said. He slowly walked along the line, the visitors a few paces behind him, smiling.

“When I point at you, fall out and form a line by the private. Understand.” The lieutenant gave his orders from the far end of the line. “Yes, sir,” we shouted, and saluted. The smiles on the visitors’ faces disappeared. “At ease.”

“You, you…” the lieutenant pointed as he walked down the line. When the lieutenant picked me, I stared at his face, but he ignored me and continued his selection process. Alhaji was also picked, but Kanei was left behind, maybe because he was older. Fifteen of us were chosen. The lieutenant then ordered us, “Remove your magazines, put your weapons on safety, and put them on the ground.” We laid our weapons down, and the visitors, especially the two foreigners, began smiling again. “Attention. Forward march,” a private ordered us, and we followed the lieutenant toward the truck the visitors had arrived in. We stopped when the lieutenant turned around and faced us. “You have been great soldiers and you all know that you are part of this brotherhood. I am very proud to have served my country with you boys. But your work here is done, and I must send you off. These men will put you in school and find you another life.” That was all he said; then he smiled and walked away, asking the other soldiers to strip us of our military equipment. I hid my bayonet inside my pants and a grenade in my pocket. When one of the soldiers came to search me, I pushed him and told him that if he touched me I would kill him. He walked away and searched a boy standing next to me instead.

What was happening? Our faces followed the lieutenant as he walked to his house. Why had the lieutenant decided to give us up to these civilians? We thought that we were part of the war until the end. The squad had been our family. Now we were being taken away, just like that, without any explanation. A few soldiers gathered our weapons and others guarded us, to make sure that we didn’t try to run for our guns. As we were ushered to the truck, I stared back at the verandah where the lieutenant now stood, looking in the other direction, toward the forest, his hands crossed behind his back. I still didn’t know what was going on, but I was beginning to get angry, anxious. I hadn’t parted with my gun since the day I became a soldier.

In the truck were three MPs—city soldiers. I could tell by how clean their uniforms and guns were. Their pants were tucked inside their boots and their shirts were tucked into their pants. Their faces weren’t hardened, and their guns were so clean I assumed they hadn’t fired a shot. The weapons were on safety. The MPs jumped off the truck and motioned for us to climb in. We divided ourselves onto two long benches in the truck that faced each other, and two of the men, the one with the marks on his cheeks and the Lebanese-looking foreigner, climbed in back with us. Then the three MPs swung up on the back door panel, one foot inside the truck, the other hanging out.

As the truck began to pull away from the base, I started boiling with anger, because I couldn’t make sense of what was happening. Alhaji looked at me with a puzzled face. I looked at the guns the MPs carried and envied them. The men who had come to get us smiled as the truck sped along the dirt road, raising light brown dust that covered the bushes on the sides of the road. I had no idea where we were going.

We were on the road for hours. I had gotten used to walking to places and hadn’t sat in a truck or been in one place idly for this long in a while. I hated it. I thought about hijacking the truck and driving it back to Bauya. But whenever I was ready to snatch a gun from the MPs, the truck slowed down at a checkpoint and the soldiers jumped off. I had forgotten about the grenade in the side pocket of my army shorts. I was restless throughout the journey and actually began to look forward to the checkpoints (there were many of them, too many) so that I could get up from the boredom of the truck. We didn’t speak to each other at all. We sat quietly, except at times when I winked at Alhaji as we waited for the right moment to take the guns from the MPs and push them off the truck.

The last checkpoint we passed that day was manned by soldiers well dressed in complete army gear. The brown polished wooden panels of their AKs were shiny and new. They were city soldiers who, like the MPs who were in the truck with us, hadn’t yet been to war. They had no idea, I thought, what was really happening in the bushes in the entire country.

We drove past the checkpoint, off the dusty road, and onto a busy tar street. Everywhere I looked there were cars going in every direction. I had never seen that many cars, trucks, and buses in my life. Mercedes, Toyotas, Mazdas, Chevrolets were impatiently honking, music blasting. I still didn’t know where we were going, but I was sure now that we were in Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital. But I didn’t know why.

It was getting dark outside. As the truck slowly rocked along the busy street, streetlights flickered on. Even the shops and kiosks were lit. I was amazed at how many lights there were without the sound of a generator. I was marveling at the glittering cityscape when the truck turned off the street and began galloping so heavily that we were all shaking as if we’d been placed on a vibrating machine. This went on for a few minutes, and then we stopped. The MPs asked us to get out of the truck and follow the four beaming men in the UNICEF shirts.

We entered a fenced compound that had several rows of houses. There were lights on in the houses and boys our age, fifteen and above, sat on the verandahs and stoops. They ignored us, as they, too, looked baffled about why they were there. The Lebanese-looking foreigner motioned for us to follow him into the house, his face glowing. It was an open hall and there were two rows of twin-size beds. He excitedly showed each of us the bed that was going to be ours and lockers that contained soap, toothpaste, toothbrush, a towel, a clean shirt, and T-shirts. The beds had pillows, clean sheets, and blankets. None of us were as interested in the things he showed us as he seemed to be. “We have a bale of new
crapes
for you. Tomorrow you will pick your size.” He left us in the room and went outside, whistling a melody. We just stood there looking at the beds as if we had never seen anything like them.

“Come with me to the kitchen for some food,” the Sierra Leonean man with the tribal marks said. We followed him past the curious faces of boys who had arrived before us. Their eyes were as red as ours, and even though they wore civilian clothes, they looked dirty and had intense expressions like us. I could smell the forest on them.

In the kitchen we sat on one side of the long dining table. The man went into a little room at the end of the kitchen, where he hummed a familiar song, dished out rice into many bowls, and brought them out on a tray. We took a bowl each and started eating. He went back into the little room, and by the time he returned to the table with his own bowl of food to eat with us, we had already finished. He was shocked and looked around to see if we had done something else with the food. He pulled himself together, and as he was about to take his first bite, the two happy-face foreigners walked into the dining room and asked him to come with them. He took his bowl of rice with him and followed the foreigners, who were already walking out of the kitchen. We sat quietly for a minute before Alhaji asked if anyone happened to bring some marijuana or cocaine. One of the boys had some marijuana that we passed around, but it wasn’t enough. “Where can we get ourselves some good drugs in this place?” one of the boys asked.

As we pondered this question, the man who had brought us to the kitchen returned, bringing with him another group of boys, over twenty of them. “These are the new arrivals,” he said to us. Turning to the new boys, he said, “I’ll bring you some food, and please, take your time. There is no need to eat fast.” The boys sat on the opposite side of the dining table and ate as fast as we had. The man sniffed the air and asked, “Who was smoking marijuana in here?” But no one paid him any attention, so he sat down and kept quiet. We stared at the new boys and they at us.

Alhaji broke the silence. “Where are you boys from?” he asked. The boys widened their eyes and stared at Alhaji as if he had just asked them the wrong question. One of the boys, who looked a little older and had no hair on his head, stood up, clenching his fist.