A Long Way Gone_ Memoirs of a Boy Soldier - Ishmael Beah [64]
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 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