OF WAR AND WAVES
It’s hard to focus on anything else when there’s a live grenade jiggling up and down in the pocket of the man next to you. The two foot long hunting knife he rearranged to get seated in the jeep is long forgotten. Even the occasional bullet or mortar shell whistling overhead becomes background noise. All that matters is whether the rusty pin lurching up and down will stay in place, keeping your limbs intact.
It was an old World War Two grenade, the type with the bevelled edges. I kept expecting the thing to go off any minute as we drove down the rickety potholed roads.
The man seated next to me was Commander I-Jah-Mon, a self-styled military leader, or a deranged lunatic. It was hard to tell which in amongst the madness that gripped Liberia at the time. The commander was the only one who would escort me to the dilapidated bridge on the outskirts of Monrovia, where Charles Taylor’s troops were locked in battle with rebels looking to overthrow his government. Taylor’s soldiers were infamous for the bands of children they kidnapped, then armed with
