A Long Way Gone_ Memoirs of a Boy Soldier - Ishmael Beah [75]
Two soldiers came into the house and told the sergeant doctor that the lieutenant had sent them to help take me back to our former base. They took me off the bed, placed me in a hammock, and carried me outside. The sun blinded me at first, and then the treetops of the village began to spin around as they carried me out of the village. The journey felt as if it took a month. I fainted and awoke many times, and each time I opened my eyes, it seemed as if the voices of those who carried me were fading into the distance.
Finally, we got to the base and the sergeant doctor went to work on me. I was injected with something. I had no idea we had needles at the base, but in my condition I couldn’t ask what was happening. I was given cocaine, as I frantically demanded it. The doctor started operating on me before the drugs took effect. The other soldiers held my hands and stuffed a cloth into my mouth. The doctor stuck a crooked-looking scissors inside my wound and fished for the bullet. I could feel the edge of the metal inside me. My entire body was racked with pain. My bones became sour. Just when I thought I had had enough, the doctor abruptly pulled the bullet out. A piercing pain rushed up my spine from my waist to the back of my neck. I fainted.
When I regained consciousness, it was the morning of the next day and the drugs had kicked in. I looked about the room and saw on the table the instruments that had been used for my operation. Next to the instruments was a piece of cloth soaked with blood and I wondered how much blood I had lost during the operation. I reached my hands down to my foot and felt the bandage before I stood up and limped outside, where some soldiers and the sergeant were sitting. “Where is my weapon?” I asked them. The sergeant handed me the G3 that was on top of the mortar, and I began cleaning it. I shot a couple of rounds sitting against a wall, ignoring the bandage on my foot and everyone else. I smoked marijuana, ate, and snorted cocaine and brown brown. That was all I did for three days before we left for the new base we had captured. When we left, we threw kerosene on the thatched-roof houses, lit them with matches, and fired a couple of RPGs into the walls. We always destroyed the bases we abandoned so that other squads wouldn’t be able to use them. Two soldiers carried me in the hammock, but this time I had my gun and I looked left and right as we traveled the forest path.
At the new base, I stayed put for three weeks and appointed Alhaji to be in charge of my expedition squad. I busied myself with drugs and cleaning my gun. The sergeant doctor cleaned my wounds and would always say, “You are lucky.” At that time I didn’t think I was lucky, I thought I was brave and knew how to fight. Little did I know that surviving the war that I was in, or any other kind of war, was not a matter of feeling trained or brave. These were just things that made me feel I was immune from death.
At the end of the three weeks, we had the first batch of attackers; the lieutenant knew they were coming. I tightened the bandage around my foot, picked up my gun, and followed my squad to ambush the attackers before they got anywhere near our village. We killed most of them and captured a few whom we brought back to base. “These are the men responsible for the bullet holes in your foot. It’s time to make sure they never shoot at you or your comrades.” The lieutenant pointed at the prisoners. I am not sure if one of the captives was the shooter, but any captive would do at that time. So they were all lined up, six of them, with their hands tied. I shot them on their feet and watched them suffer for an entire day before finally shooting them in the head so that they would stop crying. Before I shot each man, I looked at him and saw how his eyes gave up hope and steadied before I pulled the trigger. I found their somber eyes irritating.
When I finished telling Esther the story, she had tears in her eyes and she couldn’t decide whether to rub my head or hug me. In the end she did neither, but said,