Servant of Courage and Faith: The Story of a Child Soldier in the Biafran War

By Paul Ogbonna

This is a story of a fourteen-year-old boy that found himself in a brutal civil war. He and his schoolmates had no choice other than joining the military to fight in the war to save his people from being wiped out from the face of the earth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Feb 28, 2024
• ISBN: 9798889609247

Book preview

cover.jpg

Servant of Courage and Faith

The Story of a Child Soldier in the Biafran War

Paul Ogbonna

Copyright © 2024 Paul Ogbonna

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2024

ISBN 979-8-88960-914-8 (pbk)

ISBN 979-8-88960-924-7 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Prologue

Servant of Courage

Chapter 1

Memories of Damaturu

Chapter 2

A Word Called Fortune

Chapter 3

My Life in the City of Jos

Chapter 4

My First Dose of Courage

Chapter 5

A High School Education to Call My Own

Chapter 6

Our National Situation

Chapter 7

A Moment of Sweet Relief

Chapter 8

Feelings of Dread

Chapter 9

Long Waits and a Speech

Chapter 10

Life Going On

Chapter 11

Voluntarily

Chapter 12

Taking My Leave

Chapter 13

Saying a Goodbye

Chapter 14

Seeing the Elephant

Chapter 15

Keeping the Line

Chapter 16

To Hold a Village

Chapter 17

Discovery and Persistence

Chapter 18

All that Remained

Chapter 19

Returning to Life

Chapter 20

The Pieces

The Pages of History

Surviving the Peace

Prologue

I live a good life, and for everything that I have, I am supremely grateful. Every morning, I utter my thanks to the Lord as much to show my appreciation for all my gifts, to remind myself of them and to remind myself of how often it seemed those gifts were about to slip through my fingers. Only by the grace of God am I here to tell you this story.

Before I go any further, I must make a confession to you: I am not a writer. I never set out on my life's journey thinking that I was going to write a book or put my story down into words. This story has rested in my heart for too long though. It has, at times, warmed my heart and, at other times, cast a pall over it. While I would not wish to pull anyone down or to send a cloud over anyone's head, I feel that I must share my story to speak it into existence so that others can hear it and learn from it. As well, I made a pact with God, promising him that if he kept me safe, I would bear testimony to his power for all the world to see and hear.

God did keep me safe. Through war, through mayhem, through horrors unspeakable in many circles, God's providence guided me and protected me, and in honor of my pact with God—a pact that I made before my first deployment into combat—I am putting these words onto paper and preserving them for all to read. At a time when I ought to have been studying in school and playing with my friends, I was carrying a rifle.

All of what follows is true, and I begin to tell it to you with a short prayer:

Dear Almighty Father, I give forth thanks for being alive today and for being able to bear this testimony. Thank you for the miracle of life and the blessings that I could never repay. Thank you for the privilege to serve and share these blessings.

Amen.

Servant of Courage

It was midnight, and we were on the outskirts of Aba City. The air was thick with something—tension, anticipation. Although there were people moving all around me, I could almost find quiet in my own mind. If I concentrated on something, like the shoes on my feet or the fabric of my pants, I could take myself away from everything that was happening. I knew that I needed to focus on the task at hand, though. I had a job to do, and our Third Commando Brigade could not afford any mistakes.

We deployed quickly. The Aba River, which stretches far from one shore to the other, separated us from the Nigerian forces, who occupied part of Aba City south of the river. The Nigerian forces would stop at nothing to cross the river and capture more of our territory. Let me give you some background.

Biafra was an independent country formed when a former eastern region of Nigeria seceded from the rest of Nigeria. For years, the Biafran people had suffered slaughter at the hands of the government, which the Northern Nigerians dominated and through which they ruled without any mercy. Composed mostly of Hausa-Fulani people, who adhered to the Muslim faith, the Northern Nigerians had taken it upon themselves to murder many indigenous Igbo people, who mostly adhered to the Christian faith. It only made sense that Biafra would leave such senseless violence behind, but the Nigerian government would hear nothing of it. When the Biafrans formed their own nation, the Northern Nigerians responded by attacking, and although I am jumping ahead of my myself, I will tell you now that the Biafrans lost the war—in no small part due to British, Russian, and Egyptian support for the ruthless government forces. Eager to continue to purchase cheap oil from the Nigerian government, foreign powers interfered in the war between Nigeria and Biafra, cutting Biafrans off from the food and weaponry supply chains and arming the Nigerian government with even more powerful weapons.

Back to Aba City: A series of flares burst over our heads, and we all ducked down. I held my bolt-action Mack IV rifle tightly in my hands, and I breathed slowly to calm myself, hoping only that my palms would not become too sweaty for me to hold onto the weapon that I knew could save my life from our attackers. My fingers shook, but still, I thought only of my Mack IV.

Hold onto it, I urged myself silently.

The rifle weighed approximately 6.5 pounds, and in moments, it felt like more or less: more when it seemed as if nothing could save me from the chaos that was going on and less when I remembered that my rifle was the only tool that would be of any use to me in this moment, aside from my faith in God.

Before that night in Aba City, I had undergone two weeks of training. It was a crash course, the only kind of training that anyone in our brigade had received, but it was enough to teach me the basics. At the training camp, I learned how to strip, assemble, and shoot my Mack IV rifle. On the first day of training, the rifle was completely new to me, and by the end of the crash course, it had become an extension of my arms, moving it and aiming it as natural as tying my shoes.

When the flares ceased, there was a semblance of quiet once again. I could hear myself think once more, and I looked to the platoon leader, Sergeant Ifeanyi, for guidance. Ifeanyi was a confident man, and I trusted his leadership. We all trusted him.

Pointing to a high point in front of us, a horizon over which no one could have imagined what awaited us, Sergeant Ifeanyi then whispered, I'll go up the middle. Do not engage. We're to spot the enemy and figure out their coordinates. I'll meet you back here in a half hour. Then he asked, Are there any questions?

There were none. Although we couldn't see too far ahead because the forest was overgrown with thick bushes, palm trees, and abandoned cassava plants, we knew that Sergeant Ifeanyi would do us no wrong. We waited patiently as he ventured off, putting himself in danger to figure out what our next move was. When he returned a half hour later, he spoke with Lieutenant Utomi, and they conferred about the plan for our brigade.

We have snipers that have pinned down the Reconnaissance Platoon, C Company of the First Infantry Battalion, Sergeant Ifeanyi said. He spoke coolly, calmly, showing no sign of fear in his voice.

There were dangers every way that we looked, but Sergeant Ifeanyi showed us the meaning of courage: he showed us how to act now that we were soldiers. Thinking rationally and analyzing the situation, he was viewing the battle before us from a real-world perspective. Signaling to a squad of commandos, Sergeant Ifeanyi gave his next orders silently, telling some of the commandos to take the left flank and engage the Nigerian forces. To the rest of us, he signaled an extended line formation, ordering us—again, never opening his mouth, never speaking a word, his gestures and his motions enough to keep us in life and send us into action—to start firing only after we heard the lieutenant let fly a single shot from his weapon.

It was around 5:00 a.m. that the action started. We all waited with bated breath for the lieutenant to give us his signal. The moment came, and we all looked forward, unblinking, watching as the Nigerian soldiers fired their weapons from far across the river. They stood on the shore, and some of them were in boats on the river's edge. They were firing every which way, sending a scattershot of bullets in our direction. There was nothing that we could do but fire back at them; no way for us to take fire and still do the job that we knew we had to do.

As our heavy machine gun sprang up, spraying its bullets at the Nigerian forces, I felt a rush of feeling inside myself that I had never felt before and that I have never felt since. It was as if the air was moving all around our brigade, and although action filled every moment completely, time stopped in between each second, the minutes stretching on like whole years. For more than an hour, we fired our rifles at the Nigerian soldiers, and they fired their rifles at us. We gritted our teeth and bore the madness of it all. Overhead, artillery shells were flying, and they exploded directly behind us, sending rushes of air across our necks and up our sleeves.

Firing round after round, I reloaded my weapon more times than I could count. I buried my head inside our trench and fired without thinking about where my bullets were going. The Nigerian forces were like a single mass, and as long as I was firing toward them, I was doing my duty. I had no way to know if I was hitting anything or if my bullets were flying up into the clouds, disappearing never to be seen again. At one point, I felt a throbbing pain in my shoulder, and I realized what it was: because the gun jumped up so viciously every time I pulled the trigger, it was like a pounding force on my muscles. My rifle was so powerful that it felt like someone was standing over me and punching me in the arm, leaving me bruised and battered but failing to break my will to keep on fighting.

As we neared the end of one hour, it seemed that the Nigerian forces were firing fewer bullets in our direction. The gun boat, we saw, had taken off down the river, avoiding the complete destruction that surely awaited it if we had continued to send such a barrage into its sides much longer. It stuck close to the shoreline, and that was when we knew: They were running out of ammunition. We had worn their supplies down so low that they could not continue to fight us.

The lieutenant signaled us to advance close to the river's edge, staying down while we did so. We crawled on our stomachs, trying to remain low to the ground while also trying to move quickly. We could not say if there was an ambush waiting for us, but we trusted our instincts—and trusted the lieutenant.

Plucking a grenade out of his waistband, the lieutenant signaled for Sergeant Ifeanyi to do the same. The dual explosions of their grenades were deafening, loud even among all the clatter and bang of the gunshots that we had heard over the last hour. The grenades detonated close to the remaining boats in the river, and to escape the blasts, the boats hurried away. Afterward, there was no sound at all. We heard no gunshots, and we saw no movement.

A thought occurred to me: We stopped them.

That was the way it looked to all of us too. It appeared that we had foiled the advance they had planned. We had pushed them back and maintained our ground. Incredibly, only five soldiers had sustained minor injuries, and as we learned later, the injured soldiers had been the ones who had dropped down and frozen in their places. Lying still, they had never fired a single round from their rifles.

I had gone through my first combat experience, and there were more to come.

Baptism by fire, I thought to myself.

As Hemingway once put it, I had seen the elephant. We all had. Even those who had laid on the ground could say that they had seen battle. They were the same age that I was—fourteen.

Chapter 1

Memories of Damaturu

During the mid and late 1950s, my family and I lived among the Hausa citizens in Northern Nigeria. We were Christians, but the tensions that would come to change my life had not heated up to a boil yet. Operating their own restaurant in a small town named Damaturu, my parents earned a living for us, acting as their own bosses. This is not to say that the groundwork for the conflict was not already there because it was. Still, the first part of my childhood was quiet, relatively speaking.

In Damaturu, most of the local families were subsistence farmers. They herded cattle and migrated from one grassy area to another in order to keep their livestock healthy. Their lifestyle was nomadic, which made it very different from our own. At night, they would form their cattle in circles to create makeshift shelters for themselves. This way, they could protect themselves from the lions and other wild animals that roamed the area. To anyone who has seen Lagos, this lifestyle would be strikingly out of place, but we were not in Lagos—and we were not in the modern era. Times were different then.

Although the rural citizens of Northern Nigeria were able to feed themselves, they were not able to do much else. The pastoral economy dictated their lives, from the time they woke up to the time they went to sleep, and they never stopped moving and never stopped seeking out new grassy areas for