Excerpt 1

Mr. Taylor offered these teenagers uniforms, guns, drugs, power. Everything was for the taking if the revolution was successful. It was a chance to finally get rich. So out of the bush they joined up with the rebels, ignoring their parents. Their comrades in arms became their new families. 

Charles Taylor was Liberia’s Pied Piper, leading the children away from home. Instead of a magical flute, he held a magical Kalashnikov. Children, both boys and girls—as young as seven—were given guns with little instruction. They fell into ranks and marched along with their peers.

And just like the story of the Pied Piper, most of these children would never go home again. Initially, the fighting was fierce against the government troops. The children playing soldiers were slaughtered. The youngest ones had little training. They were too small to understand the officers’ instructions and became cannon fodder. 

In the beginning, these children were sad uncounted victims. Abandoned from Monrovia to Nimba County, they were a pathetic lot with maimed or amputated limbs, wretched little creatures no one cared about. They had nothing to show for their grand adventure with the Pied Piper of Liberia. Like the corpses I saw littering the roadside, these children were also discarded garbage. They just happened to still be alive.

Excerpt 2

It was as if my body floated. I was weightless. They jerked me hard up and out of the armchair. The force must have torn my shirt because I heard a rip. I felt my feet bouncing across the floor, through the front door, across the porch, and down the steps.  

My short weightless journey abruptly ended. Once in the front yard, they dropped me. I tried to use my arms to break the fall, but they wouldn’t respond. I remembered the saying about dropping something like a sack of rice. Now I knew what that meant.  

I fell face forward straight down onto my chest and tasted grass as my head bounced. My eyes saw the bottom half of a small figure approaching. The two larger rebels who dragged me were walking away. The approaching figure had small skinny legs and mismatched oversized boots.  

I guessed the child to be about twelve years old. As I started to lift my head, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a sudden blur. The concussion from the butt end of the assault rifle snapped my head back to the ground. My right temple started to throb.

Excerpt 3

Suddenly, the women abruptly stopped. Startled, I stopped also, turning to look at her. Her face registered a shocked look of surprise. The expression never changed as, if by slow motion, she fell face forward and hit the ground squarely. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Why did she do that? I wondered. I stared down at her.  

Her stunned family rushed around her and turned her over. She had taken the bullet directly into her chest. A spreading pool of blood formed on the ground beneath her. She gasped for air but only produced a gurgling sound as blood filled her lungs. Her eyes, unblinking and staring straight up into the sun, still recorded disbelief.  

Excerpt 4

Thick-skinned prisoners exhibited bright red, raised welts that intersected across their backs. Some of the welts oozed a clear liquid that shone in the dimness when the light hit it just right.  

One prisoner with thin skin seemed to be painted with an abstract portrait of colors, textures, and geometric shapes. In some places his skin was laid open as if sliced by a surgeon’s scalpel, while in others the cuts were jagged and uneven. His back was a range of colors mixing in different hues against his dark skin. His blood, now dried and crusty, had flowed from one gouged-out valley and stopped at the next. It then took a jog left or right before continuing its journey. In short, his back looked like raw meat.

The contrast between thick and thin skin was great. Distinct lines on the thick-skinned back could have been a roadmap. A thick-skinned back could be read much like a palm reader examines the hand. Had the back been a palm, the experienced reader could use the intersecting stripes and creases to predict the future.

Likewise, one look at the back of the thin-skinned prisoner, and I was certain that I could predict his future. Though his back bore no resemblance to a roadmap, his injuries presented a clear picture of his destination.