by brainpanhandler » Tue Jun 17, 2008 6:00 am
[Memoir]
ENDLESS REASONS
TO DIE
By Anthony Loyd, from Another Bloody Love
Letter, published last year in the United Kingdom
by Headline Review. Loyd, a former infantry officer
in the British Army, has covered wars in Iraq,
Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Bosnia, and Kosovo as
a correspondent for the Times of London. Allieu
was Loyd's interpreter in Sierra Leone; Morris
Kallon and Gibril Mass04uoi were commanders of
the Revolutionary United Front. Loyd's "In Balance
with This Life, This Death" appeared in the
November 1999 issue of Harper's Magazine.
Sierra Leone, 2001. We drove through civil
militia lines, through a government army area,
then past the new U.N. breakwater of Kenyan
troops at Rogberi. We entered the rebel zone. A
few miles before Makeni, the surface of the road
improved, and our driver, Twin, pressed his foot
down on the gas. On either side patches of jungle
gave way to small, badly tilled fields and farmland
left desolate by war. Allieu put a new tape in
the stereo. I leaned back and began to doze in
the heat. The speed was hypnotic.
A report like a gunshot snapped me awake. As
the jeep began to slew across the road, my first
thought was: ambush. But there was no follow-up
fire.A tire had blown. Twin jumped on the brakes,
and we spun like a Catherine wheel. As we lost
the road, our first roll was from end to end, bonnet
to boot. It ripped the entire roof off like a
ring-pull on a Coke can, hurling the torn metal
away into the sky. The impact did nothing to slow
us, and the vehicle continued to somersault across
a wasteland of rocks and earth. Light, ground,
and metal whipped around me in strobe,
a sensation suddenly terminated in absolute darkness.
Consciousness returned with the immediate
awareness that my eyes and nose were stinging
with fuel. I was soaked in it, upside down and
wrapped in twisted steel, a state that took my
brain some time to comprehend. After a few seconds
struggling in my cage, unable to accept that
my head was where my feet should be, I noticed
that below me glowed a small area of paler shade.
I crawled toward it and fell upon the earth.
There was blood all over the ground, and I
stared at it dumbly for a moment, confused, until
I realized that it was dribbling down from my
wrists and misshapen head. From my left eyebrow
up to my crown, the flesh was a swollen rubber
lump, totally numb, roughened by bits of grit and
stone dug into the skin. I turned back and saw
Twin, unconscious and bleeding, still trapped in
the driver's seat. It was difficult to make sense of
the vehicle's mangled form-belly up, roof gone,
buckled doors splayed open, the steering wheel and
dashboard muddled with the back seats, the ripped
tires hanging like black rags against the sky.
I shook Twin. He moaned and opened his eyes.
One of his hands was hooked on a jagged shard of
metal. The spare jerricans of fuel that we had
been carrying in the back had broken open and
drenched the wreck. Fearing the whole thing
would ignite, I apologized vacantly, tore Twin's
hand free, and pulled him out of the vehicle. He
shrieked, then lurched suddenly to his feet and ran
off, a mad doll with arms swinging and jointed in
all the wrong places. Stumbling, he fell to the
ground and crawled toward a tree, where he finally
halted, panting and immobile.
Circling the wreck, I finally saw Allieu, lying
amid the scrub on a patch of gravel. He was motionless,
stretched out with his legs straight and
arms by his sides. His T-shirt and frayed shorts were
not even rucked. It seemed as if he had merely lain
down for a nap. I ran toward him, but the horizon
began to wobble, so I slowed to a walk. "Come on,
Allieu, we've got to get out of here." Allieu never
moved. I bent over him. He had no pulse and
was not breathing, though blood and froth were
running from his lips. His eyes were wide open.
As soon as I knelt to resuscitate him, I saw not
a friend but a young West African male with a rapacious
lifestyle who came from a city with a
climbing HIV rate. His blood was bright scarlet.
The moment lasted only a second before probability
and necessity, the governing principles of life
at base level, kicked in. I could hardly leave him
to certain death for fear of possible infection. But
as kisses go, I will not forget that one. Mouth-to-mouth
resuscitation is not a simple or clean affair.
It was exhausting, and my mouth ended up slick
with Allieu's blood.
As I worked on him, between twenty and thirty
people appeared from the bush and nearby
fields, some of them armed with Kalashnikovs
and pangas, others carrying hoes and rakes. "Help
us," I mumbled. Instead, they began to rob us,
clustering around the upturned car carcass and
sweeping up our scattered possessions: the food and
supplies we had carried for the venture that now
lay tumbled in a wide arc around the jeep. There
were two exceptions. I do not recall their faces, as
I do not think I ever looked at them, but the
hands of a man and a woman sometimes appeared
in my peripheral vision to check Allieu's pulse.
Life clawed its way weakly back into Allieu's
body, signified by the reappearance of a racing
heartbeat and ragged breathing. "Got you, you're
back," I heard myself say. "You're not going to
fucking die on me." But the signs never lasted
more than a minute or so before fading again, a
stuttering engine requiring continual restart. At
a moment when he appeared to be breathing unaided,
I staggered through the looters in search of
my sat-phone. I knew I had to get a call out quickly
if there was to be any chance of saving Allieu.
But the situation was deteriorating. The looters'
preoccupation with our belongings was diminishing
with the available spoils, and as they turned
their attention to us, I saw among them two men
armed with machetes who stood aside from the
pack, cold, predatory, as if considering finishing
what the crash had not.
I found my rucksack, hidden by chance from the
crowd under the jeep's severed roof. Most of its
contents were smashed: my camera in pieces, even
my supply of Biros reduced to piles of shattered
plastic. Somehow the sat-phone was still intact.
Between bouts of renewed resuscitation, spitting
Allieu's blood and saliva out of my mouth, I rang
the U.N. headquarters in Freetown, gave them my
approximate position, and requested assistance.
Unconvinced that any aid would arrive in time
from that quarter, I then called Gibril Massaquoi
in Makeni, a short distance up the road. A voice
I did not recognize took my call for help. Our
brief conversation afforded a precious shield from
the growing attention of the crowd.
"That was Massaquoi," I loudly lied, hoping
the looters might think twice about harming us
now that the rebel leadership was involved. "RUF.
He's coming. RUF. Understand?" The words
checked them, and they loitered sullenly as I continued
tending to Allieu.
Minutes later, an RUF jeep arrived. Looking up
at our unlikely saviors, seeing the rebels jumping
down from the vehicle's sides and the driver's
door open, I felt the dim burn of relief. Yet the thin
figure that stepped out choked the breath in my
throat. Radio in one hand, pistol in the other,
aviator shades hiding his eyes from the world,
Morris Kallon walked up to me.
"Do the U.N. know you are here?" he asked,
staring over my shoulder into the distance.
"Yes, I've called them," I replied.
He barked a few words to the crowd, who began
to disperse, and then at his men, who bundled
the three of us into the rear of their vehicle.
Squashed in a tangle of bloody limbs, unsure if Allieu
was still alive, I continued with the resuscitation,
distracted by the callused soles of a rebel's
feet resting casually on Allieu's shoulders. Lacking
medical aid of their own or unwilling to
involve themselves further, the RUF disgorged
us after a short ride at the gates of the Nigerian base
in Makeni, rolling us out of the jeep and spinning away as we lay in the dust.
A group of Nigerian soldiers carried us
through the gates to an open earthen yard. They
scarcely looked at Allieu before placing him to one
side on a stretcher in a shaded, three-walled shack.
I lurched over and started working on him once
more, between railing at the onlooking soldiers.
"Don't just stand there, get him a fucking doctor.
Get him some oxygen. A drip. Anything.
He's going to die. Jesus Christ. Help me."
There were five of them, and they moved not
an inch but stood motionless in a row looking
down upon me, their eyes blank, faces devoid of
any expression. What I saw in those placid brown
pools was a listless overfamiliarity with death, and
it enraged me. Fuck you all, I thought, spitting
more of Allieu's blood from my mouth in preparation
for the next breath into him; fuck your
awful continent where children's deaths are so
commonplace as to be boring; fuck your mutilations
and your mumbo jumbo and your jungle
and your disease and your poverty and your heat
and your hunger. Fuck your endless reasons to
die. Would that I could defy them all and save at
least this one man's life.
Then one of them bent down wordlessly and
stayed my arm. It was a profound gesture, full of
grace and compassion. I stopped what I was doing
and accepted its message, the madness leaving
me. I closed Allieu's eyes and folded his hands
across his chest, as one of the soldiers sighed.
"Yes," one murmured. I looked up. "l'm sorry,"
each quietly said in turn.
I stood up. They put their hands on my
shoulders and shook me, gently and persistently,
with a soft incantation of a low, repeated,
"Hey, hey, hey, hey," a sound loaded with the
deep understanding of sorrow, the echoed communication
of the universal nature of death and
loss. I leaned down and held one of Allieu's
hands for a while, resting my other palm first on
his chest, then on his forehead. His skin was
just beginning to cool. He looked like a little
boy again: a thin, brown wisp in his raggedy
shorts and T-shirt. A dead African boy who had
survived much and had just had what little he
possessed taken from him by coming down the
road with me for sixty dollars a day. "Goodbye,
Allieu," I said, and walked away.
"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." - Martin Luther King Jr.
