“Sabon Gari was the strangers’ ‘new town’ where we were supposed to be safe and free. All that changed. It became like a corral where some of the early atrocities announced themselves brazenly. As the killings overwhelmed the ad hoc resistance, panic spread – and the homeward flights to the East. To us, then and forever, home would always be more than an address in some strangers’ quarters. Much more. I too fled from the North, but I had already lost my heart in the charred ruins of Sabon Gari. Those ruins made a soldier of me.

“I became a foot-soldier in Biafra, and I worked with a relief agency. But that was later, after I lost my firing arm at Opi. We were at the fore of the sector that was meant to stop any military invasion from the North.  If I had made the choice myself, that was where I would have chosen. The war knocked that sleepy area awake in a bad sort of way. It was the setting for some of the fiercest firefights. But it gave me a good chance to get back at some of those who had emptied out my life. Every bullet that found its target was like a personal victory. I was young, bitter and rather reckless, a very dangerous mix. But the past, as I re-learnt, is ever beyond recovery, beyond vengeance even.

            “One of my colleagues then was Achike – my best friend, as you know. He had fled from Lagos at the beginning of the war and had promptly volunteered. He fought as well as the rest of us, but the great thing about him was that he held on tenaciously to his humor, like a spinning dancer carried on by the momentum of a dance that had ended. Of course, there were several times that he too lost his humor, but he always recovered ahead of us.

“Another of my colleagues was Christopher. He was a poet. When he came to Opi, I had never read anything that he had written. After Opi, after his death in the war, I have not been able to bring myself to do any such reading. He was a colorful character, with both a great passion for life and the ultimate dare to be himself. He said he had come to Opi through a labyrinth of blood to trigger the poetry of bullets. He had such a great passion for Biafra that he wanted to be right there in the front. ‘The federal troops will have to march over my dead body to get beyond Opi,’ he would say. Very sadly, they did just that.

“When Christopher fell, a certain spirit ebbed away among us. He had tried to be all things, and he left a deep impression on all of us. He was a great one for marching songs that fired the spirit. For him, the war was so personal that he sang ‘O my home’ as ‘O mine home.’ He was only a lieutenant and the war was still in its early days, but his spirit lasted through those years of carnage. He had named the Opi sector the ghost line. ‘Any federal soldier who aspires beyond this point is on his way to ghosthood,’ he would say. We called him the Ghost-killer, following Achike’s example, the sort of dry humor that sometimes helped us to rise above our recurring fears. Make no mistake, son, the typhoon of war can also make the most courageous of men cringe. We fought for life. We sang about death. But we would rather not have been forced to choose between life and death.

“Christopher was the first and only person I’ve ever met who said that he had credits in his dreams, like in the horror films especially. The great dream he had then was of a glorious Biafra. Almost every time he recounted this dream, it had a different director. If the war ended on the negotiating table, the director would be a committee of diplomats. If it ended on the battlefield, it would be Ojukwu the leader. Never, in those dreams, did the war end in our defeat.

            “He had his in-between phase though, as we called it, when a great loneliness of the spirit descended on him. He would speak to no one then but pace about, his gun always near at hand, reciting lines of poetry:

            So would I to the hills again

            So would I

            to where springs the fountain

            there to draw from

He seemed to live in the past-future at such times. He was indeed a man who could move in fascinating ways across time zones. I believe now that he had the premonition that he would not survive the war and was so restless because he wanted to get so much done in the time he still had.

“I lost my arm in the same night raid that claimed Christopher’s life, and then I spent some time in a makeshift military hospital recovering. I floated about in those days, almost forever lost in a world of dreams – each one directed by Christopher himself. This probably kept me sane. The worst thing about that period was the howling. There was ever a steady supply of wounded soldiers and a biting scarcity of everything else. Surgery was common. Anesthesia was not. So, you can imagine the howls of several wounded soldiers being cut up by hard-pressed doctors, like in an ancient abattoir. Death was as ugly as it was often ungenerous with speed. There was enough pain in the air to make one deaf.”

            He paused and began to clear his throat again. I wiped my brow, heaved a sigh, and waited patiently.

“One night, they brought in a soldier who howled so very horribly that it was such a relief when he suddenly ceased in mid-trajectory. He was dead. He was a huge man, more than an adequate deterrent to any enemy soldier, if all that had been required was physical strength, but the federal soldiers had better – and more – guns. I dreamt about him afterwards, even bigger than his huge self, leading a major assault deep into enemy lines, through a labyrinth that had been charted by Christopher himself – and succeeding where we had failed.

“And then I had to leave the hospital. I had not healed, but I was no longer bleeding and the space was required for the freshly wounded. Things were already at that stage even in the early phase of the war. We were rich in defiance or spirit, never in provisions. For me, the war was technically over. But I wouldn’t have it that way. I went to work with a relief agency. It was a different kind of war, not the one I would have chosen, but it was an important war effort. We toured the villages trying to get food and medicines across to people. And it seemed to me that the deeper we went into our new country, the greater the number of children with stomachs distended by kwashiorkor.