Sebastian Junger: A World Made of Blood

“Andre?”

Nothing.

“Andre, this is bad.”

Daniel says this into the new darkness that has come in suddenly, with strange birdcalls and a restless murmuring of the forest. A few of the soldiers turn their heads, but Daniel can barely see their faces now. He doesn’t know them by name anyway. There’s nothing left of the long, blazing day behind them but the West African heat. It sits heavily amid the palm trees and radiates from the pitted asphalt road. Daniel lights a cigarette to see if anyone will tell him to put it out. For a minute or two, no one says anything, and he’s tempted to think maybe they’re not in such a bad spot until the captain makes a hissing sound from across the clearing. Daniel looks up and nods and stubs it into the sandy soil.

The soldiers are strung along the road in no particular formation. They’ve backed the armored personnel carrier up into the clearing and thrown some palm fronds over it. For some reason, the stubby little barrel points out toward the road, though Daniel can’t imagine anyone trying to approach that way. They’d come quietly through the trees and then suddenly the darkness would explode. Or at least that’s how Daniel imagines it. He’s never been in anything like that—few of them have, despite the cocktail-party stories that come later. Andre finally walks over. Andre’s the photographer. Andre’s been through all of this before.

“What’s happening, mate?” he says. Andre’s Australian. He and Daniel have been together for a couple of weeks now.

“Apparently this is a nonsmoking flight.”

“It’s ridiculous. We’re miles away.”

“Maybe we’re not. Maybe they’re right over there.”

Andre looks around and shrugs. “You got any water?”

Daniel pulls a plastic water bottle out of his pack and hands it over. It’s half empty; they bought three bottles in town this morning before they came out here, and two are already gone. “We’re obviously not going back tonight.”

Andre doesn’t answer, just settles down in the dirt beside Daniel. Andre’s had malaria twice, and so he’s back on the Lariam pills that prompt a famously psychotic reaction in him. The pills give him bad dreams or bad ideas about the darkness. Once he woke up shouting because an old lady was standing over him trying to put something in his mouth—a beetle or something. The old lady disappeared when Daniel jumped up and turned the light on. Andre got up and went to the bathroom and washed his mouth out anyway.

That was back in the rotting little capital that everyone is fighting over. The fighting is at least twenty miles outside of town, but the presidential palace has anti-aircraft batteries on the roof, and all the embassies have been abandoned. The country is free to do whatever it wants to itself.

When they left the capital this morning, taxi drivers refused to take Daniel and Andre past the first cluster of charred cars that mark the high-water point of the offensive; beyond that, the villages were gutted and the animals were dead. Once in a while there was a body in the ditch, undulating with vermin and stinking up a half-mile of road. They drove as far as they could and then got out of the taxi and started walking. Everyone else was headed the other way: beautiful young women with babies on their hips and children carrying bags and old ladies with aluminum pots on their heads for cooking and old men with skin like ruined parchment. The old men had no expression, no comment on what was happening, but the old women were angry and they would rattle at you in the native Krio if you looked at them. The soldiers were the worst; they were nothing but teenagers, and they drifted back from the fighting in small groups and then larger groups, out of bullets, out of food, out of whatever narrow sense of duty put them out here in the first place. There were no officers among them and no radios and no discipline; even the villagers kept their eyes down when they walked past.

Andre and Daniel eventually got a ride from a captain who was leading a detachment of forty kids in baggy uniforms. They were regular army but looked even shabbier than the rebels they were fighting. The captain himself was rigid and old-school in a way that suggested implacable loyalty to whoever was calling the shots. He was about fifty, and his uniform was immaculate and absurdly pressed in the jungle heat. His men walked double file behind the armored personnel carrier, and the captain brought his machine to a stop and told his soldiers to check their papers and then waved Andre and Daniel into the vehicle. The double steel doors opened in the back and they stepped in. They drove another hour until they could hear gunfire up ahead. The APC stopped and the kids spread out along the flanks of the road, then continued slowly for another half-mile.

The gunfire got louder and more insistent. The sound turned Daniel’s insides heavy as lead but seemed to make Andre come alive. He and Andre had worked together several times in the past few months, but this was the first time they’d been in combat. Everyone was saying it was going to be ’99 all over again—a three-week rampage of slaughter and mass rape—but Andre shrugged the idea off. Either he didn’t think so or he didn’t care. At the sound of gunfire, he double-tied his shoelaces and rechecked his cameras and zipped up the pockets on his photographer’s vest. He looked the part, and he seemed to enjoy looking the part, but he wasn’t the sort of arrogant prick that Daniel had braced himself for. He worked hard and he cared about people—which was more than you could say about a lot of journalists—and people liked him. Children gathered around him and laughed at things he did, and teenage girls in town shot him shy, challenging looks as he walked through the market. Even the whores at the hotel seemed taken by him.

Daniel tried taking notes, but there wasn’t much to say, and his hands were shaking anyway. At one point the gunfire had suddenly become very heavy and very close, and the APC stopped again and the gunner swept the turret barrel from left to right and back again to survey the jungle around them. The gun shot big, fat rounds that exploded on impact, and it could clear a lot of ground, but this was open palm forest with undergrowth along the road, and the rebels could be anywhere. The soldiers were tensed in a half crouch with their guns pointing ahead of them. They looked tentative and confused and utterly unready for whatever was about to happen. The captain said something in Krio and the APC started up again and the soldiers advanced, their faces blank now and sweat making their foreheads gleam in the high sun. Daniel felt like throwing up.

It turned out to be just celebratory fire in the town of Masiaka. Government militia—more kids, really, given guns and told to point them toward the enemy—had stormed in this morning, but of course no one had radios, so the captain had no idea who was doing the shooting up ahead. Apparently the militias had been expecting more of a fight, and so when they got into town there was too much ammunition left. It was only a matter of time before someone started shooting it into the air.

The APC stopped at the edge of the main plaza, and Daniel watched things get steadily out of hand. The captain looked powerless to do anything about it and didn’t even try. He told his men to keep their guns cocked. There were a few bodies clustered by what must have been an old colonial administrative building, and Andre wandered through the gunfire to take photos, but Daniel didn’t want to leave the vicinity of the APC. He was the writer, and he could see what was happening quite well from there. An argument developed between two of the commanders—Daniel later found out it was over who had done the most fighting—and very quickly guns were leveled and the plaza cleared, and the captain backed the APC up and put his men in defensive position on the edge of town. The various government militias disliked one another almost as much as they disliked the rebels—in fact, some of them were rebels not that long ago—and the regular army kept a healthy distance from all of them.