A Long Way Gone_ Memoirs of a Boy Soldier - Ishmael Beah [70]
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