A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (14 page)

“And who the fuck are you? Do we look like we are here to answer questions for
bastar pekin lek you
?” He leaned across the table and looked down on Alhaji. Alhaji got up and pushed him. The boy fell, and when he got up, he pulled a bayonet and jumped on the table toward Alhaji. All of us stood up, ready to fight. The man screamed, “Stop it, boys!” but no one listened to him. I took out my grenade and put my fingers inside the pin.

“Do you boys want this to be your last meal, or do you want to answer his question?” I threatened the other boys.

“We are from Kono district,” the boy who held the bayonet said.

“Ah, the diamond area!” Alhaji said. I was still holding the grenade.

“Did you fight in the army or for the rebels?” I sternly asked.

“Do I look like a rebel to you?” he said. “I fought for the army. The rebels burned my village and killed my parents, and you look like one of them.”

“So we all fought on the same side of the war,” Alhaji said, and we all sat down, still glaring at each other. Upon learning that we had all fought for the so-called army, in different parts of the country, we calmed down and talked about what bases we were from. Neither of us had ever heard of the others’ squad or base or the lieutenants who were in charge of the squads. I explained to the other boys that we had arrived just a few minutes before them. They told me that they had been randomly selected, too, and asked by their commander to follow the men who visited their base. None of us knew why our commanders had let us go. We were excellent fighters and were ready to fight the war till the end. One boy was telling us that he thought the foreigners gave our commanders money in exchange for us. No one said anything to this. I still had the grenade in my hand as we conversed. Sometime during the conversation I turned to the man who had brought us to the kitchen. He was sitting at the edge of the table, shaking. His forehead perspired profusely. “Do you know why our commanders gave us up to you sissy civilians?” I asked the man, pointing the grenade at him. He put his head under the table as if I was going to throw the grenade at him. He was too nervous to answer me.

“He is a sissy civilian, let’s go ask the other boys,” the boy who had pulled his bayonet suggested. His name was Mambu, and I later became friends with him. We left the man, still under the kitchen table, and headed for the verandah. As we walked up the steps, we saw the three MPs sitting at the entrance of the compound, chatting and ignoring us. The two foreigners had left. We walked up to the boys sitting quietly on the verandah.

“Do you boys know why your commanders gave you up to these civilians?” Alhaji asked, and all the quiet boys stood up and turned their angry faces to him, staring silently.

“Are you boys deaf?” Alhaji continued. He turned to me: “They don’t know anything.”

“We do not want to be bothered by anyone,” one of the boys said in a deep voice. “And we do not want to answer any questions from a civilian.”

“We are not civilians,” Mambu said angrily, walking toward the boy. “If anyone is a civilian, it is you boys. You are wearing civilian clothes. What kind of army person wears only civilian clothes? Did these sissy civilians who brought you here make you wear those clothes? You must be a weak soldier, then.”

“We fought for the RUF; the army is the enemy. We fought for freedom, and the army killed my family and destroyed my village. I will kill any of those army bastards every time I get a chance to do so.” The boy took off his shirt to fight Mambu, and on his arm was the RUF tattoo.

“They are rebels,” Mambu shouted, and before he could reach for his bayonet, the boy punched him in the face. He fell, and when he got up, his nose was bleeding. The rebel boys drew out the few bayonets they had and rushed toward us. It was war all over again. Perhaps the naïve foreigners thought that removing us from the war would lessen our hatred for the RUF. It hadn’t crossed their minds that a change of environment wouldn’t immediately make us normal boys; we were dangerous, and brainwashed to kill. They had just started this process of rehabilitation, so this was one of the first lessons they had to learn.

As the boys rushed toward us, I threw the grenade among them, but the explosion was delayed. We leaped out from underneath the stoop where we had taken cover and charged into the open yard, where we began to fight. Some of us had bayonets, others didn’t. A boy without a bayonet grabbed my neck from behind. He was squeezing for the kill and I couldn’t use my bayonet effectively, so I elbowed him with all my might until he let go of my neck. He was holding his stomach when I turned around. I stabbed him in his foot. The bayonet stuck, so I pulled it out with force. He fell and I began kicking him in the face. As I went to deliver the final blow with my bayonet, someone came from behind me and sliced my hand with his knife. It was a rebel boy, and he was about to kick me down when he fell on his face. Alhaji had stabbed him in the back. He pulled the knife out, and we continued kicking the boy until he stopped moving. I wasn’t sure whether he was unconscious or dead. I didn’t care. No one screamed or cried during the fight. After all, we had been doing such things for years and were all still on drugs.

The three MPs and the two nationals who had brought us to the center came running into the yard a few minutes into the fight. “Stop, stop,” they yelled, pushed boys apart, and carried the wounded to the side. It was a bad idea. We pounced on the MPs, pulled them to the ground, and took their guns away from them. The army boys, we, got one; the rebel boys had the other. The other MP ran away before either group could catch him.

Mambu had the gun, and before the rebel boy who had the other gun could switch the safety off, Mambu shot him. He fell, dropping the gun. Other rebel boys tried to grab it, but Mambu shot each one who attempted to. He killed a few and wounded some. But the rebel boys were persistent, and finally one of them got the gun and shot two boys on our side. The second boy, who was shot at close range, stabbed the rebel boy in his stomach before he fell. The rebel boy dropped the gun and fell to the ground as well.

More MPs were running through the gate now, toward the fight. We had fought for almost twenty minutes, stabbing and slicing each other and the men who tried to part us. The MPs fired a few rounds into the air to get us to stop, but we were still fighting, so they had to part us by force. They placed some of us at gunpoint and kicked others apart. Six people were killed: two on our side and four on the rebel side; and several were wounded, including two of the men who had brought us. The military ambulances took off, wailing into the still newborn night with the dead and the wounded. Their strobe lights made me dizzy. I had a little wound on my hand. I hid it because I didn’t want to be taken to the hospital and it was just a small cut. I washed the blood off, put some salt on it and tied it with a cloth. During the fight Mambu had blinded one boy by plucking out his eye with a bayonet. We later heard that the boy was taken out of the country for surgery and that his eye was to be replaced by a cat’s eye or something. Following the night of the fight, we praised Mambu for his lethal behavior. I would have liked him to be in my squad, I thought.

As MPs stood guard to make sure we didn’t start another fight, we, the army boys, went to the kitchen to look for food. We ate and chatted about the fight. Mambu told us that when he plucked the boy’s eye out, the boy ran to punch him, but he couldn’t see him, so he ran into the wall, banging his head hard, and fainted. We laughed and picked up Mambu, raising him in the air. We needed the violence to cheer us after a whole day of boring traveling and contemplation about why our superiors had let us go.

The jubilation was stopped by a group of MPs who walked into the kitchen and asked us to follow them. They had their guns pointed at us, but we laughed at them and walked outside to where military vehicles waited to transport us somewhere. We were so happy to have dealt with the rebel boys that we didn’t think of attacking the MPs. Plus there were too many of them. It seemed they had gotten the message that we were not children to play with. Some of the MPs stood by the vehicle holding their guns tightly and carefully eyeing us. “Maybe they are taking us back to the front,” Alhaji said, and for some reason we all started singing the national anthem, marching to the vehicles.

But we were not taken back to the front lines; instead, they took us to Benin Home, another rehabilitation center in Kissy Town at the eastern outskirts of Freetown, away from the rest of the city. Benin Home had once been called Approve School and been a government-run juvenile center. The MPs made sure to search us thoroughly before we entered. The blood of our victims and enemies was fresh on our arms and clothes. The lieutenant’s words still echoed in my head: “From now on, we kill any rebel we see, no prisoners.” I smiled a bit, happy that we had taken care of the rebel boys, but I also began to wonder again: why had we been brought here? The MPs guarded us that night as we sat on the verandah of our halls staring into the night. All I could think about was what was going to happen with my G3 weapon and what movie my squad was watching that night, what good marijuana and cocaine were at their disposal. “Hey, you fellows have any
tafe
[marijuana] for us?” Mambu asked the MPs, who ignored him. I was beginning to shake. The drugs from the previous nights, before we were brought to the city, had begun to subside in my system. I walked up and down on the verandah, restless in my new environment. My head began to hurt.

16

I
T WAS INFURIATING
to be told what to do by civilians. Their voices, even when they called us for breakfast, enraged me so much that I would punch the wall, my locker, or anything that I was standing next to. A few days earlier, we could have decided whether they would live or die. Because of these things, we refused to do anything that we were asked to do, except eat. We had bread and tea for breakfast, rice and soup for both lunch and dinner. The assortment of soups consisted of cassava leaves, potato leaves, okra, and so forth. We were unhappy because we needed our guns and drugs.

At the end of every meal, the nurses and staff members came to talk to us about attending the scheduled medical checkups in the mini-hospital at Benin Home and the one-on-one counseling sessions in the psychosocial therapy center that we hated. As soon as they started speaking, we would throw bowls, spoons, food, and benches at them. We would chase them out of the dining hall and beat them up. One afternoon, after we had chased off the nurses and staff members, we placed a bucket over the cook’s head and pushed him around the kitchen until he burned his hand on a hot boiling pot and agreed to put more milk in our tea. Because of these things, we were basically left to wander aimlessly about our new environment for the entire first week. During that same week, the drugs were wearing off. I craved cocaine and marijuana so badly that I would roll a plain sheet of paper and smoke it. Sometimes I searched in the pockets of my army shorts, which I still wore, for crumbs of marijuana or cocaine. We broke into the mini-hospital and stole some pain relievers—white tablets and off white—and red and yellow capsules. We emptied the capsules, ground the tablets, and mixed them together. But the mixture didn’t give us the effect we wanted. We got more upset day by day and, as a result, resorted to more violence. In the morning, we beat up people from the neighborhood who were on their way to fetch water at a nearby pump. If we couldn’t catch them, we threw stones at them. Sometimes they dropped their buckets as they ran away from us. We would laugh as we destroyed their buckets. The neighbors stopped walking near our center, as we had sent a few of them to the hospital. The staff members avoided us all the more. We began to fight each other day and night.

We would fight for hours in between meals, for no reason at all. During these fights, we destroyed most of the furniture and threw the mattresses out in the yard. We would stop to wipe the blood off our lips, arms, and legs only when the bell rang for mealtime. At night, after we had exhausted fighting, we would bring our mattresses outside in the yard and sit on them quietly until morning arrived and it was time for breakfast. Every time we returned from breakfast, the mattresses we had brought outside the previous night were back on our beds. We would angrily bring them out again in the yard, cursing whoever had taken them inside. One night, as we sat outside on the mattresses, it began to rain. We sat in the rain wiping it off our faces and listening to its sound on the tile roof and the gushing of torrents onto the ground. It rained for only about an hour, but even after it had stopped, we continued sitting outside all night on the wet sponges that were once our mattresses.

The following morning, when we returned from breakfast, the mattresses were still outside. It wasn’t much of a sunny day, so they didn’t dry by nighttime. We became angry and went to look for Poppay, the man in charge of storage. He was an ex-military man with a wandering eye. When we found him, we demanded dry mattresses.

“You will have to wait for the ones you left outside to dry,” he said.

“We cannot allow a civilian to talk to us like that,” someone said, and we all shouted in agreement and rushed at Poppay. We unleashed blows on him. One of the boys stabbed his foot and he fell down. He put his hands over his head as we kicked him relentlessly and left him lying on the floor bleeding and unconscious. We shouted in excitement as we walked back to our verandah. Gradually, we became quiet. I was angry, because I missed my squad and needed more violence.

A security guy who watched the center took Poppay to the hospital. Several days later, Poppay returned during lunchtime, limping but with a smile on his face. “It is not your fault that you did such a thing to me,” he said, as he strolled through the dining hall. This made us angry, because we wanted “the civilians,” as we referred to the staff members, to respect us as soldiers who were capable of severely harming them. Most of the staff members were like that; they returned smiling after we hurt them. It was as if they had made a pact not to give up on us. Their smiles made us hate them all the more.

My hands had begun to shake uncontrollably and my migraines had returned with a vengeance. It was as if a blacksmith had an anvil in my head. I would hear and feel the hammering of metal in my head, and these unbearable sharp sounds made my veins and muscles sour. I cringed and rolled around on the floor by my bed or sometimes on the verandah. No one paid any attention, as everyone was busy going through their own withdrawal stages in different ways. Alhaji, for example, punched the cement pillar of one of the buildings until his knuckles bled and his bone began to show. He was taken to the mini-hospital and put to sleep for several days so that he would stop hurting himself.

One day we decided to break the glass windows in the classrooms. I do not remember why, but instead of finding rocks to break the windows like everyone else, I punched the glass with my fist. I managed to break several panes before my hand got stuck in the glass. I drew it out and began to bleed uncontrollably. I had to go to the hospital. My plan was to steal a first-aid kit and treat myself, but the nurse was there. She made me sit on the counter as she removed pieces of glass from my skin. She twisted her face whenever she was removing a piece of glass that was buried deep in my skin. But when she looked at me, I was still. She searched my face to see if I was in pain. She was confused, but continued to gently remove the pieces of glass from my bleeding hand. I didn’t feel a thing. I just wanted to stop my blood from flowing.

“This is going to hurt,” the nurse said when she was about to clean the cuts.

“What is your name?” she asked as she dressed my hand. I didn’t answer her.

“Come back tomorrow so that I can change the bandage. Okay?” She began to rub my head, but I pushed her hand away and walked out.

I didn’t go back to the hospital the next day, but on that same day, I fainted from a migraine while I was sitting on the verandah. I woke up in bed in the hospital. The nurse was wiping my forehead with a soaked cloth. I caught her hand, pushed her away, and walked out again. I sat outside in the sun, rocking back and forth. My entire body was aching, my throat was dry, and I felt nauseated. I threw up something green and slimy, then fainted again. When I woke up hours later, the same nurse was there. She handed me a glass of water. “You can go if you want to, but I suggest that you stay in bed tonight,” she said, pointing her finger at me, the way a mother would talk to a stubborn child. I took the water from her and drank it, then threw the glass against the wall. The nurse leapt from her chair. I tried to get up to leave, but was unable to sit up in bed. She smiled and walked over to my bed and injected me. She covered me with a blanket and began sweeping up the broken glass. I wanted to throw the blanket off, but I couldn’t move my hands. I was getting weaker and my eyelids grew heavier.

I woke to the whispers of the nurse and someone else. I was confused, as I wasn’t sure what day or time it was. I felt my head pulsating a little. “How long have I been here?” I asked the nurse, banging my hand on the side of the bed to get her attention.

“Look who’s talking, and be careful with your hand,” she said. When I sat up a bit, I saw that there was a soldier in the room. I thought for a minute that he was there to take me back to the front lines. But when I looked at him again, I knew he was at the hospital for other reasons. He was clearly a city soldier, well dressed and without a gun. He was a lieutenant and supposedly there to check on how we were being treated medically and psychologically, but he seemed more interested in the nurse. I was once a lieutenant, I thought, a “junior lieutenant,” to be precise.

As a junior lieutenant I had been in charge of a small unit made up of boys to carry out quick missions. The lieutenant and Corporal Gadafi had selected all my remaining friends—Alhaji, Kanei, Jumah, and Moriba—to form the unit, and once again we were back together. Only this time we weren’t running away from the war. We were in it and went out scouting potential villages that had food, drugs, ammunition, gasoline, and other things we needed. I would report our findings to the corporal, and then the entire squad would attack the village we had spied on, killing everyone so that we would stay alive.

On one of our scouting expeditions, we accidentally came upon a village. We had thought that the village was more than three days away, but after only a day and a half of walking, we began to smell the scent of cooking palm oil in the air. It was a beautiful day, as summer was giving us its last sunshine. We immediately got off the path and walked in the bushes toward the village. When we began to see the thatched roofs, we crawled until we were closer to the village, to be able to look at what was going on. There were a few gunmen lazily lounging about. Also, there were piles of bundles outside every house. It seemed that the rebels were getting ready to move out of the village. If we had gone back to base to get the rest of the squad, we would have missed capturing their supply of food. So we decided to attack. I gave orders for everyone to deploy around the village at strategic positions from where they could see the entire place. Alhaji and I gave the three other boys a few minutes to take their positions before we started crawling even closer to the village to initiate the attack. The two of us went back to the main path and started crawling on either side of it. We had two RPG tubes and five propelled grenades. We had gotten close enough, and I had aimed my gun at the group that I intended to start with, when Alhaji tapped me on my shoulder. He whispered that he wanted to practice his Rambo moves before we started firing. Before I said a word, Alhaji was already rubbing mud on his face, using a combination of saliva and some of the water from his backpack to wet the mud. He tied his gun to his back and took out his bayonet, rubbing his finger on the flat edge, holding it in front of his face. He began to crawl slowly under the midday sun that illuminated the village one last time before we brought darkness to it.

When Alhaji was out of sight, I aimed the RPG at the village where most of the gunmen sat, to cover him. A few minutes later, I saw him crawling and crouching behind and among houses. He would quickly sit against walls to avoid being seen. He crawled slowly behind a lazy guard basking in the sunlight with his gun on his lap. Alhaji grabbed the guard’s mouth and sliced his neck with his bayonet. He did the same to a few more guards. But he had made one mistake: he didn’t hide the bodies of those he had successfully killed. I was enjoying his maneuver when one of the guards, upon returning to his post, saw the body of his colleague and began running back to tell the others. I couldn’t let him do that, so I shot him with my G3 and quickly released two RPGs among the gunmen.

We began exchanging fire. I didn’t know where Alhaji was, but as I was shooting, he crawled toward me. I almost shot him, but recognized his dirty Rambo face. We went to work, killing everyone in sight. We didn’t waste a single bullet. We had all gotten better at shooting, and our size gave us an advantage, because we could hide under the tiniest bushes and kill men who wondered where the bullets were coming from. To gain complete control of the village, Alhaji and I shot the remaining RPGs before we descended on it.

We walked around the village and killed everyone who came out of the houses and huts. Afterward, we realized that there was no one to carry the loads. We had killed everyone. So I sent Kanei and Moriba back to base to get help. They left, taking some ammunition from the dead gunmen; some of them still clung to their guns. The three of us remained in the village. Instead of sitting among the dead bodies, the bundles of food, crates of ammunition, and bags of drugs, we took cover in the nearby bushes and guarded the village. Also, we took turns going down to the village to get something to eat and some drugs. We sat quietly under the bushes and waited.

Two days later, Kanei and Moriba returned with the corporal, some soldiers, and civilians who carried the bundles of food, drugs, and ammunition back to base.

“We have enough of everything to last us for a few months. Good job, soldiers,” the corporal congratulated us. We saluted him and were on our way. Because of this raid, Alhaji acquired the name “Little Rambo,” and he did all he could in other raids to live up to that name. My nickname was “Green Snake,” because I would situate myself in the most advantageous and sneaky position and would take out a whole village from under the tiniest shrub without being noticed. The lieutenant gave me the name. He said, “You don’t look dangerous, but you are, and you blend with nature like a green snake, deceptive and deadly when you want to be.” I was happy with my name, and on every raid I made sure I did as my name required.

There was a crack on the white ceiling of the room, and I could faintly hear the deep voice of the city lieutenant and the quick laughs of the nurse. I turned my head to the side and looked in their direction. The nurse had a wide smile on her face and seemed to be interested in the lieutenant’s jokes. I got up and started walking out of the hospital.

“Drink a lot of water and you will be fine. Come back tomorrow night for a checkup,” the nurse called after me.

“How do you like being here?” the lieutenant asked.

I looked at him with disgust and spat on the ground. He shrugged. Just another sissy city soldier, I thought as I walked back to the hall. When I got there, two boys were playing table tennis on the verandah. Everyone seemed to be interested in what was happening. It had been more than a month and some of us had almost gone through the withdrawal stage, even though there were still instances of vomiting and collapsing at unexpected moments. These outbreaks ended, for most of us, at the end of the second month. But we were still traumatized, and now that we had time to think, the fastened mantle of our war memories slowly began to open.