A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (15 page)

Whenever I turned on the tap water, all I could see was blood gushing out. I would stare at it until it looked like water before drinking or taking a shower. Boys sometimes ran out of the hall screaming, “The rebels are coming.” Other times, the younger boys sat by rocks weeping and telling us that the rocks were their dead families. Then there were those instances when we would ambush the staff members, tie them up, and interrogate them about the whereabouts of their squad, where they got their supplies of arms and ammunition, drugs, and food. It was also during this time that we were given school supplies—books, pens, and pencils—and told that we would have classes from 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. on weekdays. We made campfires with them, and the next morning another set of supplies was handed to us. We burned them again. The staff members kept resupplying the school materials. This time they didn’t say, “It’s not your fault,” as they usually did after we had done things they considered wrong and not childlike.

One afternoon, after the staff members had set some school supplies on the verandah, Mambu suggested that we sell them. “Who will buy them? Everyone is afraid of us,” some of the boys asked. “We can find a trader who wants to do business,” Mambu assured the boys. We loaded the supplies in plastic bags, and six of us went to the nearest market, where we sold them to a vendor. The man was excited and told us that he would buy from us anytime. “I don’t care whether you stole this; I have the money and you have the goods, we do business,” the man told us as he handed Mambu a wad of cash. Mambu counted the crisp notes with a wide smile on his face. He held the bills to our noses so that we could smell them. “This is good money. I can tell,” he said. We then ran back to the center to make it in time for lunch. Immediately after we were finished eating, Mambu gave each boy his share of the money. The halls became noisy as everybody talked about what they were going to do with their money. This was definitely more exciting than burning the supplies.

While some of the boys bought Coca-Cola, toffee, and other such things with their money, Mambu, Alhaji, and I planned a trip to Freetown. All we knew was that we had to take public transportation to the city center.

That morning we gulped our breakfast and left the dining hall one at a time. I pretended I was going for a checkup at the mini-hospital, Mambu went into the kitchen as if to get more food and climbed out the window, Alhaji walked toward the latrine. We didn’t want the other boys to know, as we were worried that they would all come along and the staff would panic. The three of us met at the junction down by the center and stood in line, waiting for the bus.

“Have you ever been to the city?” Alhaji asked us.

“No,” I replied.

“I was supposed to come to Freetown for school, but then the war came. I heard it is a beautiful city,” Alhaji said.

“Well, we’ll find out soon enough. The bus is here,” Mambu announced.

Soukous
music was blasting inside the bus, and people were chatting loudly, as if at a marketplace. We sat in the back and watched the houses and kiosks go by. A man standing in the aisle began to dance to the music. Then a few passengers, including Mambu, joined in. We laughed and clapped for the dancers.

We got off the bus on Kissy Street, a busy area near the heart of the city. People were hurriedly going about their daily lives as if nothing were happening in the country. There were big shops on both sides of the street, and vendors crowded the tiny sidewalks. Our eyes feasted on everything, and we were quickly overwhelmed.

“I told you it would be great.” Mambu jumped up in the air.

“Look at that tall building.” I pointed at one.

“And that one is so tall,” Alhaji called out.

“How do people get up there?” Mambu asked.

We walked slowly, admiring the number of cars, the Lebanese shops filled with all kinds of foods. My neck was hurting just from looking at the tall buildings. There were mini-markets everywhere, selling clothes, food, cassettes, stereos, and many other things. The city was too noisy, as if people were having arguments everywhere simultaneously. We wandered about all the way to the Cotton Tree, the national symbol of Sierra Leone and the landmark of the capital. We stared openmouthed at the huge tree that we had seen only on the back of currency. We now stood under it at the intersection of Siaka Stevens Street and Pademba Road, the center of the city. Its leaves were green, but the bark looked very old. “No one will believe us when we tell them this,” Alhaji said as we walked away.

We walked around all day, buying ice cream and Vimto drinks. The ice cream was difficult to enjoy, as it melted too quickly under the hot sun. I spent most of my time licking the sticky residue on my elbows and between my fingers instead of eating it from the cone. As we walked around the city center, the numbers of people and cars increased. We knew no one and everyone seemed to be in a hurry. Mambu and Alhaji walked behind me the whole time and consulted with me about which way to proceed, when to stop…It seemed as if we were still in the front line and I was their squad leader.

It was almost evening and we had to return to the center in time for dinner. As we walked back to catch the bus, we realized that we didn’t have money to pay the fare. “We should sit in front and when we get to our stop, we can jump off and run away,” Mambu told us. We quietly sat on the bus, eyeing the apprentice (the conductor) who collected the fare before every stop. When the bus was about to reach our destination, the apprentice asked those getting off to raise their hands. He walked down the aisle collecting money. Then the bus stopped and the apprentice stood at the doorway, to make sure that no one got out without paying. I walked toward him, my hand in my pocket, as if I was pulling out the cash. Then I shoved him to the side and we ran away laughing. He chased us for a bit and then gave up. That night we told all the boys about the tall buildings in the city, the noise, the cars, and the markets. Everyone was excited and wanted to go to the city after that. The staff had no choice but to arrange weekend trips to the city center so that we would stop going on our own. But that wasn’t enough for some of us, who wanted to visit the city more than once a week.

I do not know what happened, but people stopped buying our school supplies. Even when we offered them for a cheaper price, we were unable to get buyers. Since we didn’t have any other means of getting money, we could no longer go into the city center on our own, or as frequently as we wanted. Also, attending class became the requirement for the weekend trips to the city. Because of these things, we began going to class.

It was an informal school. For mathematics, we learned addition, multiplication, and long division. For English, we read passages from books, learned to spell words, and sometimes the teacher read stories out loud and we would write them in our notebooks. It was just a way of “refreshing our memories,” as the teacher put it. We didn’t pay attention in class. We just wanted to be present so we wouldn’t miss the trips to the city. We fought each other during lessons, sometimes stabbed each other’s hands with pencils. The teacher would continue on and we would eventually stop fighting. We would then start talking about the ships we had seen from the banks of Kroo Bay, the helicopter that flew by as we walked on Lightfoot Boston Street, and at the end of class the teacher would say, “It’s not your fault that you cannot sit still in class. You will be able to do so in time.” We would get angry and throw pencils at him as he left the hall.

Afterward, we would have lunch, then busy ourselves playing table tennis or soccer. But at night some of us would wake up from nightmares, sweating, screaming, and punching our own heads to drive out the images that continued to torment us even when we were no longer asleep. Other boys would wake up and start choking whoever was in the bed next to theirs; they would then go running into the night after they had been restrained. The staff members were always on guard to control these sporadic outbursts. Nonetheless, every morning several of us were found hiding in the grasses by the soccer field. We didn’t remember how we had gotten there.

It took several months before I began to relearn how to sleep without the aid of medicine. But even when I was finally able to fall asleep, I would start awake less than an hour later. I would dream that a faceless gunman had tied me up and begun to slit my throat with the zigzag edge of his bayonet. I would feel the pain that the knife inflicted as the man sawed my neck. I’d wake up sweating and throwing punches in the air. I would run outside to the middle of the soccer field and rock back and forth, my arms wrapped around my legs. I would try desperately to think about my childhood, but I couldn’t. The war memories had formed a barrier that I had to break in order to think about any moment in my life before the war.

The rainy season in Sierra Leone falls between May and October, with the heaviest rainfalls in July, August, and September. My squad had lost the base where I had trained, and during that gunfight Moriba was killed. We left him sitting against the wall, blood coming out of his mouth, and didn’t think much about him after that. Mourning the dead wasn’t part of the business of killing and trying to stay alive. After that, we wandered in the forest searching for a new base before the wet season started. But we couldn’t find one early enough. Most of the villages we came upon weren’t suitable, since we had burned them or another group of fighters had destroyed them at some point. The lieutenant was very upset that we hadn’t found a base, so he announced that we would keep walking until we found one.

At first it began to rain on and off. Then it started to rain continuously. We walked into the thickest forest and tried to escape the downpour by standing under big trees, but it rained to the point where the leaves couldn’t hold off the water anymore. We walked through damp forests for weeks.

It was raining too hard one morning, and all of a sudden we were under fire. The RPGs we had failed to explode when they were fired. As a result, we retreated. The attackers didn’t follow us far enough, so we regrouped again and the lieutenant said we had to counterattack immediately so that we could follow the attackers. “They will lead us to their base,” he said, and we advanced toward them. We fought all day in the rain. The forest was wet and the rain washed the blood off the leaves as if cleansing the surface of the forest, but the dead bodies remained under the bushes and the blood that poured out of the bodies stayed on top of the soaked soil, as if the soil had refused to absorb any more blood for that day.

At about nightfall, the attackers began to retreat. As they were running back, they left one of their wounded men behind. We came upon him, and the lieutenant asked him where their base was. He didn’t answer, so someone dragged him, with a rope around his neck, as we chased the attackers. He didn’t survive the drag. At night the attackers stopped retreating. They had come to the outskirts of their base and were fighting fiercely, because they didn’t want to give it up. “Hit-and-run
kalo kalo
tactics,” the lieutenant ordered. We made two groups and launched the attack. The first group opened fire and pretended to retreat. The attackers chased after them, running past the ambush formed by the second group. We quietly got up and ran after the rebels, shooting them from behind. We repeated these tactics throughout the night and severely weakened the rebels. In the morning we entered the village and killed the remaining fighters, who didn’t want to leave. We captured eight of their men, tied their hands and legs, and left them in the rain.

There were fireplaces in the village and lots of wood and food. The rebels had stocked up for the rainy season, but now we were the beneficiaries of the looted food and provisions. We changed into the dry clothes we could find and sat around the fire, warming ourselves and drying our shoes. I clutched my gun and smiled for a second, happy that we had found shelter. I extended my toes toward the fire to warm them and saw that they were pale and had begun to rot.

We had been in the village for only a few minutes when the rebels attacked again. They didn’t want to give up the village easily. We looked at each other sitting around the fire and angrily changed our magazines and went out to get rid of the attackers for good. We fought them throughout the night and the following day. None of us wanted to give up the village to the other, but in the end we killed most of the rebels and captured a few more. The others ran away into the cold and rainy forest. We were so angry with the prisoners that we didn’t shoot them but, rather, decided to punish them severely. “It will be a waste of bullets to shoot them,” the lieutenant said. So we gave them shovels and demanded, at gunpoint, that they dig their own graves. We sat under the huts smoking marijuana and watched them dig in the rain. Each time they slowed down, we would shoot around them and they would resume digging faster. When they were done digging, we tied them and stabbed their legs with bayonets. Some of them screamed, and we laughed and kicked them to shut them up. We then rolled each man into his hole and covered him with the wet mud. All of them were frightened, and they tried to get up and out of the hole as we pushed the dirt back on them, but when they saw the tips of our guns pointed into the hole, they lay back and watched us with their pale sad eyes. They fought under the soil with all their might. I heard them groan underneath as they fought for air. Gradually, they gave up, and we walked away. “At least they are buried,” one of the soldiers said, and we laughed. I smiled a bit again as we walked back to the fire to warm ourselves.

By the fire, I realized that I had bruises on my arms, back, and foot. Alhaji helped me attend to them with some bandages and medical supplies that the rebels had left behind. It turned out that the bruises were from bullets that had merely torn my flesh as they missed killing me. I was too drugged and traumatized to realize the danger of what had just happened. I laughed as Alhaji pointed out the number of bruises on my body.

In the morning I would feel one of the staff members wrap a blanket around me saying, “This isn’t your fault, you know. It really isn’t. You’ll get through this.” He would then pull me up and walk me back to the hall.