Ugwu said nothing; High-Tech’s laughter and the smell of gin nauseated him.
“I do rayconzar meechon,” High-Tech announced, speaking English for the first time. Ugwu wanted to correct his pronunciation of reconnaissance mission; the boy certainly would benefit from Olanna’s class.
“Our battalion is made up of field engineers and we use only the mighty ogbunigwe.” High-Tech paused and belched, as if he expected delight from his listeners. The teenager kept crying. Ugwu listened without expression. He suspected it would be important to win High-Tech’s respect, and he would succeed only by showing nothing of the fear that was crawling all over him.
“I am the one who detects where the enemy is. I move close by and climb trees and find out the exact location and then our commander will use my information to decide where to set up for our operation.” High-Tech watched Ugwu and Ugwu kept his face indifferent. “With my last battalion I used to pretend that I was an orphan and infiltrate the enemy camp. They call me High-Tech because my first commander said I am better than any high-technology spying gadget.” He sounded eager to impress Ugwu. Ugwu stretched out his legs.
“That word you call re-con-zar is reconnaissance”, he said.
High-Tech looked at him for a moment and laughed and offered the bottle, but Ugwu shook his head. High-Tech shrugged and drank and hummed “Biafra Win the War,” tapping his foot on the floor of the van. The teenager kept crying. The first soldier was at the wheel, smoking dried leaves rolled in paper and the smoke was pungent and the drive took so long that Ugwu could no longer hold his urge to urinate.
“Please, I want to piss!” he called out.
The soldier stopped the van and pointed his gun. “Step down and piss. You run, I shoot.”
It was the same soldier who, when they arrived at the training camp, a former primary school with buildings sheathed in palm fronds, shaved Ugwu’s hair with a piece of broken glass. The rough scraping left his scalp tender, littered with nicks. The mats and mattresses arranged in the classrooms crawled with vicious bedbugs. The skinny soldiers—with no boots, no uniforms, no half of a yellow sun on their sleeves—kicked and slapped and mocked Ugwu during physical training. The parade left Ugwu’s arms stiff. The obstacles training left his calves throbbing. The rope-climbing left his palms bleeding. The wraps of garri he stood in line to receive, the thin soup scooped from a metal basin once a day, left him hungry. And the casual cruelty of this new world in which he had no say grew a hard clot of fear inside him.
A family of birds had nested on the roof of the classroom. In the mornings their chirping was interrupted by the sharp trill of the commander’s whistle, a voice shouting “Fall in, fall in!” and the running and scrambling of men and boys. In the afternoons, the sun sapped energy and goodwill and the soldiers quarreled and played Biafran whot and spoke of the vandals they had blown up in past operations. When one of them said, “Our next operation will be very soon!” Ugwu’s fear mixed with excitement at the thought that he was a soldier fighting for Biafra. If only he was with a real battalion, fighting with a gun. He remembered Professor Ekwenugo describing the ogbunigwe: “high-impact land mine.” How glamorous it sounded, this Biafran-made mine, this Ojukwu Bucket, this wonder that was so perplexing to the vandals that they were said to send cattle herds ahead to understand just how the ogbunigwe killed so many. But when he went to the first training session, he stared at what was before him: a dull metal container full of scrap metal.
He wished he could tell Eberechi about his disappointment. He wanted to tell her, too, about the commander, the only one with a full uniform, sharply ironed and stiff, how he often barked into a two-way radio, and how, when the teenager tried to run away during a training session, he beat him with his bare hands until blood ran down the teenager’s nose and then screamed, “Lock him in the guardroom!” Ugwu thought most about Eberechi when the village women came with wraps of garri, thin soup, and, once in a while, win-the-war rice cooked with some palm oil and little else. Sometimes younger women came and went in the commander’s quarters and emerged with sheepish smiles. The sentries at the entrance always raised the barriers to let the women in, although they did not have to, since the women could easily walk in by the sides. Once Ugwu saw a figure with rounded rolling buttocks leaving the compound and he wanted to call out, Eberechi! although he knew it was not her. It was while looking for bits of paper on which he could write down what he did from day to day, for whenever he saw Eberechi again, that he found the book Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave: Written by Himself slipped into a tight corner beneath the blackboard. On the front page, PROPERTY OF GOVERNMENT COLLEGE was printed in dark blue. He sat on the floor and read. He finished it in two days and started again, rolling the words round his tongue, memorizing some sentences:
The slaves became as fearful of the tar as of the lash. They find less difficulty from the want of beds, than from the want of time to sleep.
High-Tech liked to sit next to him while he read. Sometimes he would hum Biafran songs in an annoying monotone, and other times he would chatter about this and that. Ugwu ignored him. But one afternoon the women did not bring any food, and a whole day went by with the grumbling of men. High-Tech nudged Ugwu at night and held out a tin of sardines. Ugwu grasped it. High-Tech laughed. “We have to share it,” he said and Ugwu wondered how he managed to get it, how a child so young seemed so flexibly in control. They went to the back of the building and shared the oily fish.
“The vandals eat well, oh!” High-Tech said. “The last camp I infiltrated, when I was with the battalion at Nteje, their women were cooking soup with big-big pieces of meat. They even gave some to our men when they stopped fighting for one week to celebrate Easter.”
“They stopped fighting to celebrate Easter?” Ugwu asked.
High-Tech looked pleased to have finally caught his attention. “Yes. They even played cards together and drank whisky. Sometimes they agree not to fight so that everybody will rest.” High-Tech glanced at Ugwu and laughed. “Your haircut is so ugly.”
Ugwu touched his head, with the odd tufts of hair that the jagged glass had missed. “Yes.”
“It is because they shaved it dry,” High-Tech said. “I can do it better for you with a razor and soap.”
High-Tech produced a bar of green soap and lathered Ugwu’s head and shaved it with a razor blade until it was smooth and soft to the touch. Later, when High-Tech told him, “Operation in two days,” in a whisper, Ugwu thought about the people who shaved their hair off as an act of mourning. Shaving as a memorial to death. He lay face up on his thin mattress and listened to the ugly sounds of snoring around him. He had proved himself to the other men by how well he did at training, how he scaled the obstacles and shimmied up the rough rope, but he had made no friend. He said very little. He did not want to know their stories. It was better to leave each man’s load unopened, undisturbed, in his own mind. He thought about the upcoming operation, about blowing up vandals with his ogbunigwe, about Professor Ekwenugo’s blown-up body. He imagined himself getting up in the moonlit quiet, leaping out, running until he got back to the yard in Umuahia and greeted Master and Olanna and hugged Baby. But he would not even try, he knew, because a part of him wanted to be here.
In the trench, the earth felt like soaked bread. Ugwu lay still. A spider clambered up his arm but he did not slap it away. The darkness was black, complete, and Ugwu imagined the spider’s hairy legs, its surprise to find not cold underground soil but warm human flesh. The moon floated out once in a while, and the thick trees ahead became dimly outlined. The vandals were somewhere there. Ugwu hoped for a little more light; the moon had been more generous earlier when he buried his ogbunigwe about thirty yards ahead. Now the darkness brooded. The cable felt cold in his hand. Next to him, a soldier was mumbling prayers in the softest voice, so soft that Ugwu felt he was whispering in his ear. “Mother of God pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.” He shook the spider off and
stood up when the vandals started shooting. The rattle of gunfire was scattered, loud then faint; the infantry was returning the vandals’ fire from different directions and those vandals, those dirty cattle rearers, would be confused and would have no idea that the ogbunigwe mines were waiting for them.
Ugwu thought of Eberechi’s fingers pulling the skin of his neck, the wetness of her tongue in his mouth. The vandals began to shell. There was first the whistle of a mortar in the air and then the boom as the mortar fell and hot shrapnel flew around. A patch of grass caught fire, lit up, and Ugwu saw a ferret by the cluster of trees ahead, hunched like a giant tortoise. Then he saw them: crouched silhouettes moving forward, a herd of men. They were in his killing range and it felt too soon, he had expected more to happen before they delivered themselves to him, before he detonated his ogbunigwe and it pushed outward in a spray of violent metal. He took a deep breath. Carefully, firmly, he connected the cable and the plug in his hands and the immediate forceful blow-up startled him, although he had expected it. For the briefest moment, fear clenched his bowels. Perhaps he had not calculated well enough. Perhaps he had missed them. But he heard somebody close to him shout, “Target!” The word reverberated in his head as they waited for long minutes before hauling themselves out of the trench and going over to the scattered corpses of the vandals.
“Naked them! Take the trousers and shirts!” somebody shouted.
“Boots and guns only!” another voice shouted. “No time. No time. Ngwa-ngwa! Their reinforcements are on the way!”
Ugwu bent over a lean body. He yanked off the boots. In the pockets, he felt a cold hard kola nut and warm thick blood. The second body, close by, stirred when Ugwu touched it and he moved back. There was a forced gasping breath before it became still. Ugwu shivered. Beside him, a soldier held up a few guns and was shouting.
“Let’s go!” Ugwu called out, wiping his bloodied hands on his trousers.
The others thumped him on the back and called him “Target Destroyer!” as they trooped to headquarters to hand in their cables. “You learn this from that book you read?” they teased. Success hauled him up above the ground. He floated through the following days as they played Biafran whot and drank gin and waited for the next operation. He lay face up on the ground while High-Tech rolled up some wee-wee, the leaves crisply dried, in old paper and they smoked together. He preferred Mars cigarettes; the wee-wee made him feel disjointed, created a thin slice of space between his legs and hips. They didn’t bother to hide their smoking because the commander was happy and the news was hope-filled now that Biafra had recaptured Owerri from the vandals. Rules relaxed; they could go out to the bar near the expressway.
“It’s a long walk,” somebody said, and High-Tech laughed and said, “We will commandeer a car, of course.”
When High-Tech laughed, Ugwu remembered he was a child. Only thirteen. Among nine men he looked incongruously small, Ugwu thought, as they walked along. The sound of rubber slippers echoed on the silent road. Two of them were barefoot. They waited awhile before a dusty Volkswagen Beetle drove toward them and then spread across the road and blocked it. The car stopped, and a few of them banged on the bonnet.
“Get out! Bloody civilians!”
The man who was driving looked stern, as if determined to show that he could not be intimidated. Beside him, his wife began to cry and plead. “Please, we are going to look for our son.”
A soldier was violently hitting the bonnet of the car. “We need this for an operation!”
“Please, please, we are going to look for our son. They told us he was seen in the refugee camp.” The woman stared at High-Tech for a while, her brows furrowed. Perhaps she thought he might be her son.
“We are dying for you and you are here driving a pleasure car?” a soldier asked, pulling her out of the car. Her husband climbed out himself, but still stood by the car. His fist was tight with the key inside.
“This is wrong, officers. You have no right to take this car. I have my pass. I am working for our government.”
One of the soldiers slapped him. The man staggered and the soldier slapped him again and again and again and he crashed to the ground and the key slipped out of his hand.
“It is enough!” Ugwu said.
Another soldier touched the man’s neck and wrist to make sure he was breathing. The wife was bent over her husband as the soldiers squashed into the car and drove to the bar.
The bar girl greeted them and said there was no beer.
“Are you sure you don’t have beer? Are you hiding it because you think we will not pay you?” one of the soldiers said to her.
“No, there is no beer.” She was thin and sharp-featured and unsmiling.
“We destroyed the enemy!” he said. “Give us beer!”
“She has said there is no beer,” Ugwu snapped. The soldier’s loudness annoyed him; this was a man who had abandoned his ogbunigwe and run off long before the vandals were close. “Let her bring kai-kai.”
As the girl set out the local gin and small metal cups, the soldiers talked about the Nigerian officers, about how they would hang Danjuma, Adekunle, and Gowon upside down after Biafra’s victory. High-Tech began to roll some wee-wee. Ugwu thought he made out something familiar on an unrolled portion of paper, the word narrative, but it could not be. He looked again. “What paper is that?” he asked.
“It is only the first page of your book.” High-Tech smiled and offered Ugwu the joint.
Ugwu did not take it. “You tore my book?”
“It is only the first page. My paper finished.”
Rage pumped through Ugwu. His slap was swift, powerful, furious, but High-Tech avoided the full impact because he moved back at the last second and Ugwu’s hand only scraped his cheek. Ugwu raised his hand again but the other soldiers held him, dragged him away, said it was just a book after all, told him to drink some more gin.
“Sorry,” High-Tech mumbled.
Ugwu’s head ached. Everything was moving so fast. He was not living his life; life was living him. He drank steadily and watched the others, their mouths opening and closing, rancid jibes and conceited boasts and magnified memories coming out of them. Soon the bar itself, the benches placed around a table, became a sour-scented blur. The bar girl changed the bottles one after the other; Ugwu thought the gin was probably brewed in their backyard down the road. He got up to urinate outside and, afterward, leaned against a tree and breathed in the fresh air. It was like sitting in the backyard in Nsukka, looking at the lemon tree and his herb garden and Jomo’s manicured plants. He stayed there for a while until he heard loud shouts from the bar. Perhaps somebody had won some bet or other. They tired him. The war tired him. When he finally went back inside, he stopped at the door. The bar girl was lying on her back on the floor, her wrapper bunched up at her waist, her shoulders held down by a soldier, her legs wide, wide ajar. She was sobbing, “Please, please, biko.” Her blouse was still on. Between her legs, High-Tech was moving. His thrusts were jerky, his small buttocks darker-colored than his legs. The soldiers were cheering.
“High-Tech, enough! Discharge and retire!”
High-Tech groaned before he collapsed on top of her. A soldier pulled him off and was fumbling at his own trousers when somebody said, “No! Target Destroyer is next!”
Ugwu backed away from the door.
“Ujo abiala o! Target Destroyer is afraid!”
Ugwu shrugged and moved forward. “Who is afraid?” he said disdainfully. “I just like to eat before others, that is all.”
“The food is still fresh!”
“Target Destroyer, aren’t you a man? I bukwa nwoke?”
On the floor, the girl was still. Ugwu pulled his trousers down, surprised at the swiftness of his erection. She was dry and tense when he entered her. He did not look at her face, or at the man pinning her down, or at anything at all as he moved quickly and felt his own climax, the rush of fluids to the tips of himself: a self-loathing release. He zipped up his trousers whil
e some soldiers clapped. Finally he looked at the girl. She stared back at him with a calm hate.
There were more operations. Ugwu’s fear sometimes overwhelmed him, froze him. He unwrapped his mind from his body, separated the two, while he lay in the trench, pressing himself into the mud, luxuriating in how close and connected he was to the mud. The ka-ka-ka of shooting, the cries of men, the smell of death, the blasts of explosions above and around him were distant. But back at the camp his memory became clear; he remembered the man who placed both hands on his blown-open belly as though to hold his intestines in, the one who mumbled something about his son before he stiffened. And, after each operation, everything became new. Ugwu looked at his daily wrap of garri in wonder. He read pages of his book over and over. He touched his own skin and thought of its decay.
One afternoon, the commander’s jeep drove in with a sickly goat lying on its side, legs tied together. It had been commandeered from an idle civilian. It bleated meekly and the soldiers gathered, excited at the thought of meat. Two of them killed it and made a fire and when the large-cut chunks had been cooked, the commander asked that all of it be brought to his quarters. He spent long minutes checking through the basin to make sure the goat was complete: the legs, the head, the balls. Later, two village women came and were taken in to the commander’s quarters; much later, the soldiers threw stones at them as they left. Ugwu dreamed that the commander had given half of the goat to the soldiers and that they had chewed everything and swallowed the bones.
When he woke up, a radio was turned on high and High-Tech was sobbing. Umuahia had fallen. Biafra’s capital was lost. A soldier threw his hands up and said, “That goat, that goat was a bad omen! All is lost! We have to surrender!” The other soldiers were subdued. Even the commander’s saying that he was aware of a secret counterattack plan to recover Umuahia did not lift their spirits. But the announcement that His Excellency would be visiting did. The soldiers swept the compound, washed their clothes, lined themselves on benches to welcome him. When the convoy of jeeps and Pontiacs drove into the compound, they all stood up and saluted.