A Long Way Gone_ Memoirs of a Boy Soldier - Ishmael Beah [71]
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