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By Root 978 0

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.

We would fight for hours in between meals, for no reason at all. During these fights, we destroyed most of the furniture and threw the mattresses out in the yard. We would stop to wipe the blood off our lips, arms, and legs only when the bell rang for mealtime. At night, after we had exhausted fighting, we would bring our mattresses outside in the yard and sit on them quietly until morning arrived and it was time for breakfast. Every time we returned from breakfast, the mattresses we had brought outside the previous night were back on our beds. We would angrily bring them out again in the yard, cursing whoever had taken them inside. One night, as we sat outside on the mattresses, it began to rain. We sat in the rain wiping it off our faces and listening to its sound on the tile roof and the gushing of torrents onto the ground. It rained for only about an hour, but even after it had stopped, we continued sitting outside all night on the wet sponges that were once our mattresses.

The following morning, when we returned from breakfast, the mattresses were still outside. It wasn’t much of a sunny day, so they didn’t dry by nighttime. We became angry and went to look for Poppay, the man in charge of storage. He was an ex-military man with a wandering eye. When we found him, we demanded dry mattresses.

“You will have to wait for the ones you left outside to dry,” he said.

“We cannot allow a civilian to talk to us like that,” someone said, and we all shouted in agreement and rushed at Poppay. We unleashed blows on him. One of the boys stabbed his foot and he fell down. He put his hands over his head as we kicked him relentlessly and left him lying on the floor bleeding and unconscious. We shouted in excitement as we walked back to our verandah. Gradually, we became quiet. I was angry, because I missed my squad and needed more violence.

A security guy who watched the center took Poppay to the hospital. Several days later, Poppay returned during lunchtime, limping but with a smile on his face. “It is not your fault that you did such a thing to me,” he said, as he strolled through the dining hall. This made us angry, because we wanted “the civilians,” as we referred to the staff members, to respect us as soldiers who were capable of severely harming them. Most of the staff members were like that; they returned smiling after we hurt them. It was as if they had made a pact not to give up on us. Their smiles made us hate them all the more.

My hands had begun to shake uncontrollably and my migraines had returned with a vengeance. It was as if a blacksmith had an anvil in my head. I would hear and feel the hammering of metal in my head, and these unbearable sharp sounds made my veins and muscles sour. I cringed and rolled around on the floor by my bed or sometimes on the verandah. No one paid any attention, as everyone was busy going through their own withdrawal stages in different ways. Alhaji, for example, punched the cement pillar of one of the buildings until his knuckles bled and his bone began