A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

by Ishmael Beah

  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.

  “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 command
ers 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

  IT 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 c
ould 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.