Over dinner that night we were introduced to the local commanders. They had noms de guerre as comic as they were lethal: Dragon Master, Bush Dog, Jungle Root and Nasty Duke all held court in this decrepit fiefdom. Despite their unorthodoxy, the rebels displayed a surprising degree of organisation and discipline. I’d seen that the commanders expected, and received, salutes; orders were followed; rank obeyed and respected. The younger fighters exuded an unsettling nervous energy.
Plates of rice and spicy stewed cassava leaf appeared. Dragon Master (a 27-year-old brigadier general whose real name was Sekou Kamara, and who, with Deku, jointly outranked everyone else in town) chatted at length about the rebels’ command structure. Gone was the reticence of the Big Men in Zorzor and Voinjama. Dragon Master and Deku were able to give a frank and surprising account of their army’s capabilities.
‘Lor’ Forces ge’ two brigade’. De foi’ brigade divahdeh in two battaliahn’, an’ each battaliahn ge’ abou’ tree or fou’ companie’,’ Deku reckoned, ‘an’ each companie ge’ abou’ fifty man. De secon’ brigade de same, boh dey ge’ eigh’ battaliahn’.’
‘We also ge’ two battaliahn’ o’ Special Forces, an’ each o’ dem ge’ two companie’ o’ fifty man,’ Dragon Master continued. His red beret and smart fatigues were rendered orange in the dirty lamplight, making him look like a cartoon devil. ‘I de commanner de Executive Manshan securidy force uni’ an’ also de strike force commando. Special Forces take order direc’ fro’ de nationa’ chairmon.’
Nick and I both jotted down notes, trying to unscramble their accents. I suspected Frank in Conakry would give his eye teeth for this information. Tubmanburg was part of ‘Cobra Movement’.
‘De area where we are nah, da’ de Jongle Lion base,’ continued Dragon Master. Seo’s troops in Zorzor were the ‘Voltage Movement’, and Foya was the ‘University of Bullet’.
‘Everywhere i’ Liber’a i’ de University o’ Bulleh.’
One of the older commanders laughed, slapping his AK. We all laughed and then Deku did what any self-respecting Liberian battle-front commander would do when considering an imminent onslaught by the enemy: he lit a joint.
In Voinjama, Joe Wylie had given the official number of LURD fighters at 14,000, which was ridiculous. On the basis of the figures that Deku and Dragon Master were touting, it was reasonable to assume that LURD’s total number of men-at-arms was likely around 2,500 men, with an unknown number of porters and assistants. That such a tiny army could control a third of Liberia spoke volumes about the vulnerability of President Taylor’s regime.
As if to underline the unreliability of any statistics in Liberia, Dragon Master guessed the rebels’ strength in the town was now at about 1,000. Given that he also thought that everyone within a mile radius had spilled onto the streets to celebrate our arrival (or, more accurately, as I now realised, the arrival of the ammunition in the ambulance), I revised that down to around 500 – still about a fifth of their entire army. In amongst them, I’d seen at least fifty fighters on the wrong side of puberty.
The commanders left an hour later in high spirits after Deku ran out of grass. I’d been tempted to ask for a drag, but I was already light-headed from the heat and lack of food. Besides, I didn’t want Nick to see me get high. It would have been like skinning up in front of my dad.
‘What do you reckon their Special Forces are like?’ I asked later that night, as Nick and I lay side by side on the double bed.
‘There’s a bit of confusion, I think,’ he replied, too tired to laugh. ‘They seem to think that if you give someone a special task to do, that makes them Special. They have no training.’
We lay in silence, and then he continued.
‘Deku and, ah, fokken, er, what’s his name? Dragon Master? They seem to think you’ll see some fighting here.’ He paused again. ‘It’s a straight walk from here to Monrovia. The president is not going to like that much.’ Nick managed to chuckle to himself.
I wanted more than anything to get into the war, to see it at first hand, to understand it, and to film it. I was motivated by simple curiosity, too. The ‘war’ had become a personality about whom we spoke, but never really saw: the absent A-list star supporting thousands of extras in an unfinished, unfathomable production. I lay awkwardly beside Nick. It was always hard saying goodnight, announcing as it did, albeit politely, I’m too knackered to want to talk to you any more.
‘Ja, well … Sleep well.’
Nick shifted his weight onto his side, and we drifted off together.
In the morning we were collected from our room and taken across town for an excursion by an excited cluster of rebels. As we walked through waterlogged streets, and then tall wet grass, the remaining townsfolk viewed us with a mixture of amusement and incomprehension. Children caught our eye and vanished behind bullet-drilled doors; a wrinkled old woman shook her stick at us, croaking incomprehensibly in tribal language.
‘I wonder what they make of us?’ I asked.
‘They probably think we’re mercenaries,’ Nick postulated, ‘though neither of us is getting paid so far.’
A sickly smell hung in the air, like the tang of a forgotten steak at the back of a refrigerator. It wasn’t long before we found the source. A corpse straddled our path. He was stripped naked, lying on his back. Dark congealed blood on his left shoulder showed where he’d been opened up by a bullet. The boy had been twenty, or younger, and was handsome. He looked serene. A few paces on another man lay dead, his cheek prised open, the back of his skull missing. A deceptively small hole had been bored neatly into his chest by a high-velocity rifle round. He wore jeans; a bloodstained T-shirt lay knotted up in the grass nearby. He was not serene, but angry. They both stank. Like an obscene chef wheeling out the day’s specials trolley to expectant customers, the war had served me up an intriguing, indigestible entrée. I wanted something to lighten the mood and the sadness in front of me.
‘He would have been okay,’ I broke the silence, ‘if only he hadn’t lost his head.’
My words evaporated into the putrid air. Nick said nothing, and took in the scene quietly, examining the corpses, considering the area. He was impassive. The rebels looked at me. I understood why they had brought me here. This was evidence of their power.
I started to film. The mangled face of the second body leaped into the viewfinder. It wasn’t like looking at it with air and space around it; now all I could see was torn flesh and broken bone. The lens was supposed to be a filter – I’d heard that said so many times, and accepted it as true. It was, but it did not lessen the impact: it distilled and magnified it. I lowered the camera, and then the rebels smiled, and promised me plenty more in the days to come.
‘We wi’ ki’ all o’ dem,’ one fighter assured me.
I had seen dead bodies before, but this was the first time I had seen people whose deaths spoke intimately about my own situation: they had been killed in the centre of town as we had marched towards it the day before. We had heard the shots. Now all I could do was take refuge in forced humour.
Later that day, as the weather closed in, threatening a storm, I called a senior BBC producer from under the citrus tree in our courtyard. I hoped he might be interested in our film. The bodies were good news, of sorts.
‘I heard shots, but, ah, I’ve seen no combat yet. It’s getting closer, though. The war’s near. We’re definitely onto something here. I’ve seen casualties.’
I was being grilled about what I had on tape.
‘Well, that’s bad news for you but great news for us, James! It sounds like you’re getting the film,’ came the cheerful reply, ‘but we really need the bang-bang. Let me know when you get some. Right now it’s, er, well, we still can’t pledge anything up front.’
I hung up and went on the balcony to write up my notes. It was an uncomfortable truth: in order to get paid, I needed to see combat. At least I now knew what was expected of me.
Mid-morning the following day, little pops and whistles jump
ed above the usual soundtrack of life in town. Nick and I had ambled over to what remained of the local market to film stallholders. Despite the previous fighting, the centre of town was bustling with skittish children and large women selling cracking corn, old torch batteries and fat, edible snails. I cocked my ear towards the south end of town. It sounded as if the rebels were firing in the air again. Then two explosions boomed in the distance, their flat resonance rumbling down the street towards us. No – it’s a battle. The rebels were being shot at. I froze as Nick scanned the road ahead. Within seconds the street was empty of everyone except fighters; rice had been spilled on the floor, shoes lost in the rush to flee for cover. A chill ran through me. This was it – and I had no idea what to do.
A score of fighters abandoned their radios and tore off noisily in their flip-flops towards the gunfire. I fumbled with my camera, replacing the battery, trying to clean the lens but smearing sweat across the glass instead. Nick took the AK off his shoulder, and we ran with the fighters.
‘By the time we get there, the contact will be over.’
Nick knew how far away the bangs were. I didn’t, and I didn’t want to believe him, either. I wanted to see, to film, a fight. Even Nick’s language was exhilarating: a ‘contact’ was his way, the army’s way, of describing a shoot-out.
Up ahead of us, about fifty yards down the stony path, a rebel soldier jumped to his feet from the wooden seat he’d been perched on, yelling support for the others passing him. We ran towards him as he cocked his rocket-propelled grenade launcher. As he stood up, the four-foot wooden bazooka tube slipped between his hands, and dropped hard on the floor. The jolt detonated the charge. The primed grenade sitting in the end of the launcher roared up to the sky in a blaze of flame and an ear-splitting bang. The soldier disappeared in a cloud of smoke and swirling debris, and then fell backwards. The grenade exploded above us, scattering shards of burning metal into the zinc roofs of the houses about us. When I looked back at the ground again, I saw that the back-blast – the powerful exhaust emitted from the bottom of the tube when the grenade was launched – had sucked up the shale from the path and turned it into shrapnel. His legs had been blown off.
Nick and another man dragged him into a house, and laid him on a rickety wooden table. The other man was a medic, and took bandages and white gloves out of his pockets. Nick helped put an intravenous line in the rebel’s arm. There was nothing I could do to help. I filmed. Here was real evidence of the war. Sinew and shredded flesh clung to his thigh bone. One leg was pared down to a skeletal strip of calcium and gristle. His genitals had been obliterated.
After a minute of struggling to frame and expose black people in a dark room with a bright white door opening behind them, while not getting Nick on camera, I gave up and just watched. The fighter rolled from side to side, his mouth gasped in air, but there was no screaming. Nick shook his head and I went outside. I struggled to light a cigarette. My hands were shaking. The contact was over, the rebels jubilant at repelling the attack. Nick emerged.
‘Is he dead?’
I took a long draw on the pungent smoke. My nerves settled a little.
‘Ja, very soon. In a few minutes he must be. There’s nothing to be done.’
I struggled to absorb what I had witnessed. The unfilmed images sloshed around my mind, swimming at the edge of my consciousness. I had seen a few seconds of war, and it was vile, pointless and deeply unsettling.
As we walked back to town, I reflected on the complexity of filming the moment, too. I had struggled with the camera even though we were in no immediate danger. What would I do if I was being shot at?
It wasn’t only a question of technical competence. With no commission to fulfil, no editorial brief to work to, I had no idea what to film. With a very limited supply of tape and fuel for the generator, I had to make big decisions about when to switch on and film. When I did, it had to count.
I decided to switch on shortly afterwards for Lee Watson. Born in 1922, Lee had been a resident of Bomi Hills all his eighty years. I found him in the midst of the congregation at the town’s Catholic church. In a dusty hall to one side of the market place, Lee and his fellow worshippers had come together for their daily prayers a hundred yards away from where the young fighter had just fallen. Lee’s rosary and smart blue jacket were at marked odds with the fantastic uniforms of the rebels. Deep lines on his face framed the eyes of a generation that had seen Liberia emerge triumphant from its dark age of colonial exploitation, and then watched it disintegrate into butchery.
As I walked into the church, no one stirred. It was only when I cleared my throat and said hello that anyone asked who I was, or what I wanted. Almost all of them were blind.
Lee sat in front of my lens and gave me his history, the history of his people and the history of their wars.
When Lee was a child, a kind of slavery was still legal, and widely practised, in Liberia until 1936. People from tribes like his were forced to work against their will by the descendants of the original freed slaves from America who settled the country a hundred years before he was born. They governed until 1980. For the rebels (who were predominantly Mandingos), President Taylor represented the re-birth of this colonial hegemony: they said they wanted to remove him in favour of a government of Liberia’s indigenous tribes. In his lifetime, Lee had seen Bomi Hills re-christened Bomi Holes, as enough iron ore was extracted to make Liberia the third-largest exporter in the world. And now, after twenty-two years of upheaval, he sat in the ruins of the Liberian dream, surviving on a handful of rice a day. Partially sighted, he helped his fellow parishioners get to and from church.
‘We have not laugh’,’ he said, when he had finished, ‘we have never smile’, boh we are always cryin’. Tears ronnin’ down!’
And as he said it, tears spilled down his cheeks into his grey-flecked goatee.
Back at the house, Deku dropped in to ask a favour. I’d been standing on the balcony watching children playing football with the rebels, as women scoured aluminium cooking pots in the shade of the citrus tree. I resented the intrusion.
Could I call the BBC and tell them that the LURD had captured Klay Junction – a strategic crossroads on the way to Monrovia – that morning?
‘Have you?’ I asked, forcing a smile, handing him a cigarette.
‘No,’ he admitted. And then, after a pause, ‘Boh we soon ged i’.’
My heart sank. Deku was asking me to broadcast propaganda for the LURD. I had wondered when this would happen – but I hadn’t expected it to be so direct. Nick’s face broke out into a grin. This was going to be tricky.
‘You see, the thing is, Deku,’ I began cautiously, ‘what makes my reports so useful for you is that I can prove they are true. If I say that Klay is in LURD hands, and it’s not, and the BBC happens to have their guy in Monrovia visit Klay at the time, then no one will believe anything I say, ever again.’
Deku hunched his shoulders, and listened intently.
‘This is very powerful,’ I said, nodding at the shortwave radio in his hand, ‘but you have to use it carefully. Any time you want me to call them about something I can see with my own eyes, or anything you or the national chairman want to tell them, just let me know. That’s what I’m here for.’
Privately, I accepted that my reporting on the radio was almost useless. At any given time I could see about a mile of the war – the view from the exact spot on which I stood. Martians could have landed over the next hill, and I would have been none the wiser.
Deku nodded and reluctantly accepted my argument. He lit a joint and ambled off back into town.
I was relieved Deku had backed down without an argument. Nick looked disturbed, though. The real significance of Deku’s request had passed me by. Nick laid it out for me.
‘Klay is in Government hands – but we’ve always been led to believe the LURD occupied it. That means they – we – are, in fact, almost cut off. There were only two routes in from the north, one down the main road fr
om Bopolu, the other a bush track too narrow for a vehicle. If they cut the back road, we are really fokken trapped.’
It wasn’t funny, but he rolled the ‘r’ on really so hard I laughed.
‘So what do we do?’
‘Let me ask them about another route out, maybe to the coast. Let’s hope they put some ambushes out and stop them coming into town.’
I dreamed that night of maps and battles with blind men, of old Lee Watson and the slaves who became free to enslave, and were in turn brutalised. Lee Watson’s story made Conrad’s Heart of Darkness look like a cheap romance. I didn’t dream of the dying rebel, though; nor the Government corpses. I struggled to bring their faces into focus. Their identities were already a blur.
Breakfast the next morning was nothing short of a miracle. One of the commanders’ wives had cooked us banana bread, which we devoured like men possessed. In addition, Deku’s ‘small-sol’iah’ had brought us a present: three pineapples. Nick was already shucking the skin of the ripest one with his Gerber before the boy-soldier could put the others down. Running through our ever-shaggier beards, the juice of the heavy fruit was the most perfect thing I had ever tasted. I had eaten no sugar for two weeks, eaten almost exclusively rice and cassava leaf for nearly a month. It seemed impossible that the day could improve. And then one of the younger commanders, a captain whose name is lost in the smudged margins of my diary, popped his head above our parapet.
‘My man Jay, y’ tink y’ wan’ to com’ wi’ os to lay ambush?’
In the pouring rain, Nick and I squatted with the captain by the side of a concrete shack on the edge of the Monrovia Highway. The battle plan was impossible to follow – orders were incomprehensible. They seemed to be waiting for an attack.
‘Let them go first,’ advised Nick. ‘We can come out if they’re winning.’
My Friend The Mercenary Page 11