A Prayer for the Living by Ben Okri

Author:Ben Okri
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Akashic Books
Published: 2020-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Boko Haram (2)

They sent us out into the forests of the North. We’d never been there before. We had heard things. They didn’t bear thinking about, the things we had heard.

They sent us out with six bullets each. Most of our guns were old. Our boots were old and patched. We couldn’t waste a single bullet and we didn’t know how long the engagement would last. We didn’t know who we were fighting. We’d only heard things.

Our uniforms had holes in them. No one knows what happened to all the money allocated for our uniforms and guns and bullets and good boots. They sent us out with nothing.

We went into the forest and every sound made us jump. We didn’t even have good trucks. It was so bad sometimes only the weed consoled us. We went into the forest and nothing happened for a long time.

We went in deep. Our officer didn’t know where we were. It was awfully quiet in the forest. Six bullets each we had, and that was it.

We came to a place where we saw a man hanging. He was one of us. Hanging from a tree. His tongue cut out and his mouth black and many of us sick seeing it.

That was when they jumped out. They were wild and had machine guns and their eyes were red and they seemed happy to find us. They had been waiting. It didn’t take long for us to fire our six bullets.

Then they came at us all at once, firing their rounds without stop, making faces.

They were having quite a time of it.

We the army, the nation’s army, turned around and dropped our empty guns and ran.

You were lucky if you got out of there alive.

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