Filtering the dark into gray shadows, fingers still reading the Braille on my arm, I try to force my eyes to adjust, but my night vision is not very good. The forest isn’t familiar territory despite years of jungle and war, and the silence is disconcerting particularly because for the past three years I haven’t been alone at night.
I have been in a pack with the other mine diffusers. Even then, we all relied on Ijeoma to guide us. She always knew the right thing to do, and the right time to do it. God knows I miss her, love her. Loved her. But I can’t think about that now. I must move. I glance around me and sift my memory for ideas, guide points. I look up, thinking perhaps the stars will guide me, but there are hardly any and I have forgotten the names of the constellations and their relationships anyway. The only thing I can remember is the phrase, follow the big drinking gourd home. I try to make out the big dip of its shape, but clouds and treetops are occluding everything. Honing my fear to an edge, I step off, sinking into the depths of the forest.
I pause to light a cigarette, trying to make out the forest in the dying light: matches are too few and precious to be wasted solely for trying to see. I suck on the filter, singeing the tip into a red glow. In the distance I hear a nocturnal wood dove. I press on, crashing through the forest with the finesse of a buffalo. Bugs bite, sharp spear grass rip at my skin. It finally gives way to wetlands, the beginning of a swamp. The blood from my cuts attracts leechlike creatures that suck on my arms and feet as I splash deeper through what turns out to be a mangrove swamp. I must have traveled in a curve, following the forest back to where the river cut through it. I must have because that’s the only way I can be trudging through a mangrove swamp. It is not fun but we passed a mangrove swamp on the way in yesterday, so I must be retreating the right way. Into safe territory.
I hate mangroves though. The trees skate the water on roots like fingers, so human and yet so hauntingly bewitched they terrify me. The water levels aren’t uniform. Sometimes only ankle deep, sometimes thigh deep, sometimes the ground sheers away beneath my feet submerging me gasping in the chocolate thick brown water.
Exhausted, I find a tree with a few low-hanging branches and climb, high as I can, until the swamp and river below are no more than a black shimmer in the night. Building a nest of branches, something we learned from the monkeys, I tie myself carefully to the thickest one. We might have learned some tricks from the monkeys, but we aren’t monkeys. Sleep is a two-by-four catching me straight between the eyes and knocking me squarely into oblivion. Rest though is another matter. I haven’t rested since that night. There has been exhaustion; sleep even. But not rest. Not since my unit stumbled into a small village, or what was left of it, several huts falling apart at the edge of a bomb-pitted strip of tar. We saw a group of women sitting around a low fire, huddled like every fairy-tale witch we had been weaned on. Armed to the teeth with AK-47s and bags of ammo and grenades, mostly stolen from the better U.S. –armed enemy soldiers we had killed, but still wearing rags, we stood close together, watching the women, unsure what to do; or whether to approach. The women were eating and the smell of roasting meat drove us on.
“Good evening, mothers,” we said, respectfully.
The women paused and cackled, but didn’t reply, and why would they since they probably didn’t understand our crude sign language. We noted that one woman, not as old as the others, was lying on the ground. She was bleeding from a wound to her head and looked dazed.
“May we have some food?” I asked. I was the unspoken, unranked leader of the troop. “We are brave warriors fighting for your freedom.”
This time my gestures, pointing to the food and miming eating, seemed to be understood and the old women waved me over. I approached and reached down to the metal brazier with meat on it. I recoiled from the small arm ending in a tiny hand, and the tiny head still wearing its first down. It only took a minute for the women to calculate the cost of my alarm and revulsion, so that even as I was reaching for my AK-47, they were scattering in flight, not forgetting to grab onto bits of their gory feast. I emptied a clip into them, as my platoon cheered at the snapping of old bones and the sigh of tired flesh, even though they didn’t know why I was killing the women. The woman holding onto the head let go as she fell and it hit the ground and rolled back toward me.
It is that little face, maybe a few months old, that keeps me from rest.
Death Is Two Fingers Sliding across the Throat
Death is always the expectation here and when my throat was cut it was no different. Nobody explained it at first. Nobody had time; nobody cared; after 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