by Ishmael Beah
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.
17
I HAD NOT BEEN to the hospital since I had walked out a few months earlier, while the nurse was chatting with the sissy city lieutenant, and she had given up trying to get me to come back for a checkup. But one afternoon, during a table tennis match
at which the entire staff was present, I felt someone tap me on the shoulder. It was the nurse. She was wearing a white uniform and a white hat. It was the first time I had looked at her directly. Her white teeth contrasted with her dark, shiny skin, and when she smiled, her face not only increased in beauty, it also glowed with charm. She was tall and had big brown eyes that were kind and inviting. She handed me a bottle of Coca-Cola. “Come and see me whenever you feel like it,” she said, smiling, as she walked away. The Coca-Cola bottle was cold and it shocked me. I left the game hall with Alhaji and we went outside and sat on a rock drinking the soft drink. “She likes you,” Alhaji teased me. I didn’t say anything.
“Well, do you like her?” he asked.
“I don’t know. She is older and she is our nurse,” I said.
“You mean you are afraid of women,” Alhaji replied, nodding.
“I don’t think she likes me the way you are thinking about it.” I looked at Alhaji, who was laughing at what I had said.
After we finished the bottle, Alhaji left and I decided to go to the hospital. When I got to the entrance, I peeked in and saw the nurse on the phone. She motioned for me to come inside and sit. She smiled and made sure that I noticed that it was because of my presence and not her phone conversation. I looked around and saw a chart on the wall with all the names of the boys at the center. In the boxes beside most of the names there was a check indicating that they had been to at least one session. There was nothing in the boxes across from my name. The nurse took the chart down and put it into a drawer as she hung up the phone. She pulled her chair closer to me and I thought she was going to ask me a question about the war, but instead she calmly asked, “What is your name?” I was surprised, since I was certain that she knew my name. “You know my name,” I angrily said.
“Maybe I do, but I want you to tell me your name,” she insisted, widening her eyes.
“Okay, okay. Ishmael,” I said.
“Great name.” She nodded and continued. “My name is Esther and we should be friends.”
“Are you sure you want to be friends with me?” I asked. She thought for a while and said, “Maybe not.”
I was quiet for a bit, as I didn’t know what to say and also didn’t trust anyone at this point in my life. I had learned to survive and take care of myself. I had done just that for most of my short life, with no one to trust, and frankly, I liked being alone, since it made surviving easier. People like the lieutenant, whom I had obeyed and trusted, had made me question trusting anyone, especially adults. I was very suspicious of people’s intentions. I had come to believe that people befriended only to exploit one another. So I ignored the nurse and began to stare out the window.
“I am your nurse and that’s all. If you want to be friends with me, you will have to ask me and I will have to trust you first,” she said. I smiled, because I was thinking the same thing. She was perplexed at first by the sudden smile. But then she said, “You have a great smile, you should smile more.” I stopped immediately and tensed my face.
“Is there anything that you want from the city?” she asked, but I didn’t answer.
“That’s it for today,” she said.
A few days after that first conversation, the nurse gave me a present. I was watching some of the boys roll a volleyball net onto the yard. Alhaji returned from his session at the hospital and told me that nurse Esther said I should go see her. I wanted to watch the volleyball game, but Alhaji began to pull me and didn’t let go until we were at the doorway of the hospital. He then shoved me inside and ran away giggling. Lying on the floor, I looked up to see Esther sitting behind her desk, smiling.
“Alhaji said you want to see me,” I said, getting to my feet.
She threw a package at me. I held it in my hand, wondering what it was and why she had gotten it for me. She was looking at me, waiting for me to open it. When I unwrapped it, I jumped up and hugged her, but immediately held back my happiness. I sternly asked, “Why did you get me this Walkman and cassette if we are not friends? And how did you know that I like rap music?”
“Please sit down,” she said, taking the package from me, putting the battery and cassette in the Walkman, and handing it to me. I put the headphones on and there was Run-D.M.C.: “It’s like that, and that the way it is…” coming through the headphones. I began to shake my head, then Esther lifted the headphones off my ears and said, “I have to examine you while you listen to the music.” I agreed, and took off my shirt, stood on a scale, and she checked my tongue, used a flash-light to look into my eyes…I didn’t care because the song had taken hold of me, and I listened closely to every word. But when she began examining my legs and saw the scars on my left shin, she took my headphones off again and asked, “How did you get these scars?”
“Bullet wounds,” I casually replied.
Her face filled with sorrow and her voice was shaking when she spoke: “You have to tell me what happened so I can prescribe treatment.” At first I was reluctant, but she said she would be able to treat me effectively only if I told her what had happened, especially about how my bullet wounds were treated. So I told her the whole story about how I got shot, not because I really wanted to, but because I thought that if I told her some of the gruesome truth of my war years she would be afraid of me and would cease asking questions. She listened attentively when I began to talk. Her eyes were glued to my face, and I bowed my head as I delved into my recent past.
During the second dry season of my war years, we were low on food and ammunition. So, as usual, we decided to attack another village. First, I went with my squad to spy on a village. We watched the village all day and saw that there were more men than us and that they were well armed and had newer guns. I am not sure if they were rebels, because they had fewer boys than any of the other groups we had attacked. Half wore army uniforms and half civilian clothes. We returned to base and I reported my squad’s findings to the lieutenant. We immediately left for the village, which was about three days’ walk. The plan was to first secure the village, then remain there and form a new base instead of bringing the goods back.
We left our village that night, alternately walking fast and jogging on the path all night. During the three-day journey, we stopped once a day to eat, drink, and take drugs. We carried with us all the ammunition, guns, and semiautomatic machine guns. Each of us had two guns, one strapped to our back, the other held in our hands. We left only two men behind to guard the base. On the morning of the third day, the lieutenant made us rest longer than we had during the previous days. Afterward, we walked all day and into the evening until the village was in sight.
There were many mango, orange, and guava trees in the village, and it looked as if it had been a farm. Surrounding it, we waited for the lieutenant’s command. As we lay in ambush, we began to realize that the place was empty. I was lying next to the lieutenant and he looked at me with a puzzled face. I whispered to him that the village had been full of gunmen a few days ago, even though it now looked deserted. As we continued to watch, a dog strolled across the village, barking as it went down the path. About an hour later, five gunmen entered the village. They took buckets from the verandah of one of the houses and headed toward the river. We were beginning to suspect that something was amiss when a shot was fired from behind us. It was clear now: we were being ambushed. The attackers wanted to push us toward the village so they could have us in the open.
We exchanged fire all night, until morning arrived, at which point we had no choice but to retreat into the village where they wanted us. We had already lost about five men, and the rebels were coming at the rest of us. They were up in the mango, orange, and guava trees, ready to rain bullets down on us. My squad scattered, running from one end of the village to the other, crouching behind houses. We had to get out before it was too late, but first we had to get rid of the attackers in the trees, which we did by spraying bullets into the branches to make the rebels fall off them. Those who didn’t immediately die we shot before th
ey landed on the ground. To avoid the open area and regroup in the nearby forest, we had to make an opening for ourselves; there was too much firepower surrounding us. So we concentrated our firepower on one area of the forest until everyone was dead. As soon as we had time to gather, the lieutenant once again gave us his little talk about how we had to fight fiercely to capture the village, otherwise we would have to roam the forest looking for another base.
Some people were injured, but not so severely as to keep them from fighting; others, like myself, had received many bullet wounds that they ignored. Our first counterattack was carried out in order to secure ammunition from the dead. Then we launched a second fierce attack to gain some control of the village. For more than twenty-four hours we retreated and attacked, using the arms and ammunition from those we had killed. Finally it seemed we had overpowered our rivals. The gunshots had stopped. The bushes behind the mango trees were still. The village, it seemed, was ours.
I was filling my backpack with ammunition from a hut when bullets began to rain on the village again. I was hit three times on my left foot. The first two bullets went in and out, and the last one stayed inside my foot. I couldn’t walk, so I lay on the ground and shot into the bush where the bullets that hit me had come from. I released the entire round of the magazine into that one area. I remember feeling a tingle in my spine, but I was too drugged to really feel the pain, even though my foot had begun to swell. The sergeant doctor in my squad dragged me into one of the houses and tried to remove the bullet. Each time he raised his hands from my wound, I saw my blood all over his fingers. He constantly wiped my forehead with a soaked cloth. My eyes began to grow heavy and I fainted.