Forgive Me Baba

Home Away From Home

The D-day finally came and the Army came to gather her new recruits. From my own town, we were over 400 recruits, able-bodied men whom have no experience as regards to warfare, never shot a rifle and never actually got to know what it felt to kill a man.

I bid farewell to my father and hopped into the truck which harbours some of the recruits (There were over twenty military trucks in total so it was okay to say that that was more than enough to contain 400 of us).

The journey to the training camps in Sampele was a rough one, the driver was a rough fellow and in one or two cases, we did bumb our heads against each other (and it was really painful). On the road to the camps, we could see women and children, along with some old men who were taking refuge in an abandoned school.

After a long and stressful four hour journey, we finally reached the camps and we were all made to come down from the vehicle and stand in a single file. After writing down our names in a ledger, we were issued our rifles, uniforms and dog tags and then assigned to our different respective tents to rest our weak bones before being called upon again.

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We were five in my tent, and we're all from the same village. We all introduced ourselves to each other and I got to know their names; Faruk, Shiput, Rudowa, and Bombala.

Faruk was always engrossed in his books and rarely talked much; Shiput was the noisy mate (always bragging about how popular he is in his hometown) and Rudowa was always up to something mischievous, Bombala on the other hand was always working out (boy I wish I had the same energetic spirit like him).

The next day, all the recruits were all called out and we were sent to the barber's salon to take our haircuts (You won't necessarily need to call it a haircut as we were all given bald hair cuts).

After that, it was down to weapons handling and training, and I must admit I was never good at aiming but my instructor was a nice man and he went easy with us throughout our gun training sessions. For months we went through all the unimaginable things you could ever think of in the name of training.

Ranging from hand-to-hand combat to wallowing in the mud, carrying out mock battles and also learning how to climb hills and rocks. We were also made to jog around camp every five hours in the morning and we were also made to carryout series of pushups; it sure was hell on earth for us.

After six long months of rigorous training, we were what you may call, the true definition of a perfect soldier. The night before we got deployed to the front, we all said our prayers, drank and made merry. We all knew that death was lurking around us, but yet, for that short moment, we never did care as we drowned ourselves in Alcohol.

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The next day, 15000 of us marched to the front as reinforcement to the Federal troops stationed there. The Commanding officer in the camp, Major-General Washimba Patinki welcomed us and briefed us on what was going on the battlefield.

After that, I decided to walk around the camp and then down to the clinic; what I saw made me to freeze within those walls, I saw soldiers whom were in pain, some were amputated, some were on coma, whilst the rest were asleep or sedated.

A military police officer had to order me out of the clinic and as I walked down to my tent; the horrific images I saw within that clinic haunted me and I prayed for the strength to carry on.