three years of a civil war nothing is strange anymore; choose the reason that best satisfies you. There are many ways to say it, but this is the one I choose: they approached me and said I had been selected for a special mission. I had been selected to be part of an elite team, a team of engineers highly trained in locating and eliminating the threat of clandestine enemy explosives. Even though I had no idea what clandestine enemy explosives were, I was thrilled. Who wouldn’t be after three weeks of training and all the time marching for hours in the hot sun doing drills with a carved wooden gun while waiting for the real thing—either from the French who had promised weapons or from the front, where they had been liberated from the recently dead. That was what determined your graduation date: when a gun could be found for you; ammunition was a luxury, sometimes it came with the gun, sometimes it didn’t, but you had to graduate nonetheless. Armed with our knowledge of marching in formation and with a sometimes loaded weapon, we were sent off to the rapidly shrinking front or to pillage nearby villages for supplies for the front. It didn’t matter which, as long as you were helping the war effort. So when an officer approached me and said I had been chosen to be part of an elite team, I was overjoyed.
I should have been suspicious of the training. I mean I am a smart person; I grew up in a city, not like one of the village fools that hung around us and were baffled by the simplest things like how to open the occasional sardine tins we were lucky to get with the strange-shaped keys—especially as the tins didn’t have keyholes. Stupid village and bush shits, almost as stupid as the northern scum we are fighting. How could I know what the training for diffusion of clandestine enemy explosives consisted of? But the officer was reassuring. Major Essien his name tag said. That he was an officer of considerable influence was reinforced by the fact that he was one of the few who had been in the actual army before the war, and he was one of the few who still wore a clean crisp uniform with gleaming brown boots: cowboy boots. We would later nickname him John Wayne, but I am getting ahead of myself.
This is how we were trained: first our eyes were made keen so we could notice any change in the terrain no matter how subtle: a blade of grass out of place, scuffed turf, a small bump in the ground, the sharp cut of a metal tool into earth—any sign of human disturbance to the ground soon became visible to us. The funny thing though is that as keen as our eyesight grew in the day, we were blinder than most at night. Ijeoma, who was smarter than all of us combined, said it had to do with the fact that we burned our corneas in the intense sunlight straining to see. I didn’t know what a cornea was even though I was in secondary school when the war started; none of us did. So she caught a frog, squeezed its eyes from its head, and showed us.
Having trained our eyes, they began to train our legs, feet, and toes. We learned to balance on one leg for hours at a time, forty-pound packs on our backs in so many odd and different positions that we looked like flamingos on drugs, all the while supervised by John Wayne, who walked among us tapping a folded whip against his thigh. Whenever we faltered, that whip would snake out like it had a mind of its own, its leather biting deep and pulling skin with it.
And all the while he would chant: “This is from the manual, the same manual that they use in West Point, the same one they use in Sandhurst; the military manual for the rules of engagement—the rules of war, for want of a better phrase. These are rules even you can understand. Now move out and follow orders!”
Once, Ijeoma asked to see the manual. John Wayne looked at her for a long time.
“You are lucky I was trained in West Point, otherwise I would just blow your brains out for challenging me. But I am a civilized man. You want to see the manual? It is here”—he tapped his forehead—“that way it can never be lost, nor we. We can never be lost as long as we follow the manual. The manual is like the rules of etiquette for war. Follow the protocols I shall show you from it and you will survive. As for seeing it, the only way that can happen is if you split my head open. Do you want to split my head open?”
Ijeoma shook her head.
“Good. If you don’t want me to split your head open, you should follow orders!”
That was that. We followed orders, did what we were told, even when the training seemed at odds with what we thought soldiers should know, like the feet exercises, mostly from ballet. To make our feet sensitive, we were told, which was funny because we weren’t going to be issued boots. The rebel army didn’t have any, but even if we did, we wouldn’t get them because they needed our toes to be exposed all the time. Then we were taught to use our toes almost like our fingers. One exercise which was cruelly ironic was tying our training officer’s shoelaces with our toes.
Having learned to walk across different terrain with my band of fellow elite, feeling for the carefully scattered lumps in the ground, being careful not to step on them as per instruction, clearing the earth around the buried mines with our toes, we learned to bend and insert a knife under the firing mechanism and pull out the valve. We practiced on live mines and we realized the value of the one-legged balancing when we accidentally stepped on one, arming it. We balanced on one foot, reached down, and disabled the mine. We were discouraged from helping each other in these situations—if things went wrong it was better to lose one instead of two mine diffusers, John Wayne explained, almost kindly.
A week before graduation he took us all into the doctor’s office. One by one we were led into surgery. It was exciting to think that we were becoming bionic men and women. I thought it odd that there was no anesthetic when I was laid out on a table, my arms and legs tied down with rough hemp. John Wayne was standing by my head, opposite the doctor. I stared at the peculiar cruel glint of the scalpel while the doctor, with a gentle and swift cut, severed my vocal chords. The next day, as one of us was blown up by a mine, we discovered why they had silenced us: so that we wouldn’t scare each other with our death screams. Detecting a mine with your bare toes and defusing it with a jungle knife requires all your concentration, and screams are a risky distraction.
What they couldn’t know was that in the silence of our heads, the screams of those dying around us were louder than if they still had their voices.
Memory Is a Pattern Cut into an Arm
I wake up confused. It is dark and I have to remind myself it is still the same night. As soon as I can, I should make some kind of calendar. The branches I am sleeping in are safe but uncomfortable. I can’t place the sound that has woken me at first, but there it is again: the soft put-put of a motor. Carefully I look through the net of leaves and see a small motorboat gliding past. There are several men sitting in it, all heavily armed. One is in the prow operating a small searchlight that is sweeping the banks. They are all smoking, and from the smell of the tobacco I can tell it is top-grade weed. I inhale deeply, cautious not to make any noise. God I could use some of that weed; my head is pounding. It is an enemy vessel; but it could just as easily have been taken over by one of us rebels. Although, since the men in the boat are searching for anyone hiding in the water or the thick grass on the shore, it is unlikely. Not because we are not capable of it, but because this was most recently rebel territory and we wouldn’t be killing our own, and murder is clearly the intent of the search. Unsettled, I rub my arm as I watch the boat circle under me then move on. It only lasts for a few moments but it feels longer.
As they depart, I reach for my knife. If Nebu had survived the explosion—which was unlikely since he was standing right over the mine when it went off, and so took the full blast—he couldn’t get far, wounded as he must be. Without a doubt the patrol I have just seen will find him and finish him off. With my knife tip I cut a small cross into my arm for Nebu, wincing as the blood blisters up. I reach behind me and cut into the tree and collect sap with the knife tip and smear it into the small cut. It should help with the healing, I think, but almost immediately it starts to burn and I know this is not a good thing, so I take out my prick and piss all over my arm, feeling it stinging and cooling at the same time. In basic first
