“It was out of compassion; I hated injustice. I fight people’s battles. I don’t know how to fight mine. If I see someone being maltreated or being mistreated, I would come to stand on their side. That was probably what drew me to the Biafra cause. I was already active in business and also politically conscious for my age, so I followed the trend, the pogroms, the coup, the countercoup, the killings and all that was done that led to Biafra. I travelled very much by rail and there was one day we saw headless bodies of Biafrans being brought on the train from Makurdi. Some had run from Kano and by the time they got to Makurdi, they were beheaded. And when you saw such a thing, you would ask ‘what is the problem?’  Especially since the logic of Biafra was not aggression? We didn’t want to fight anybody. It is like being part of a federation and for whatever reason, justified or unjustified, whether you caused it or they caused it, people begin to kill you. What do you do? You run to your home. But it was not the first time. After a while, people went back; Chukwuemeka Ojukwu forced people to go back when he had had some discussions. So people said ‘okay, if we are no longer safe elsewhere, can we be allowed to organise and be safe?’ We didn’t say we were taking anybody’s property or wanted anybody’s land. I was a guy who also hated to be cheated. My life was not in any way troubled, except when schools were shut to enable our teachers to participate in the efforts and this gave me the window to try to enter the army. There was nothing else we could do. If you have been pushed to this point and you say let me go and somebody says no I want to bring you back so I can kill you more. That is the way we understood it. So I felt justified to join in the defence as there was no other thing we could do except to become slaves. Those were the kinds of sentiments that persuaded me to participate in the war.”

“I wanted to join the navy in 1967 when schools were closed in July. In September, I tried joining the navy in Port Harcourt. When the interviewers asked for my qualifications and saw that I was in Form 4 and that I was yet to finish secondary school, they refused to enlist me and asked me to wait till the war was over. I don’t know why anybody thought at that time that the war would end in a week or two. Then in October, Enugu was threatened and civilians ran away from the city. I think Biafran soldiers felt that if they lost Enugu, the capital of the Eastern Region, they had lost the war. So there were disputations; Nigeria was saying it had captured Enugu and Biafra was saying that it was not so. So Biafra decided to call a world conference for people to see that Enugu was under its control. But the problem was that most of the civilians had run away from Enugu because Nigerian soldiers were threatening the city. So Biafra asked for volunteers, which is where the title of my book came from. The volunteers were expected to come and pretend that they were living in Enugu so that the media would see them and say that normal lives were going on. Immediately I heard that in Port Harcourt, it presented a small opportunity for me someone who was looking for action. I volunteered and all the volunteers were taken in buses from places like Aba, Onitsha and Port Harcourt. Most of us were undergraduates and students because those who were still working couldn’t volunteer at that time because the war had not got to the point where everybody would be out of job. We tried to occupy Enugu. Our first night in Enugu, we were lodged at the University of Nigeria campus and given hostels so that the next day, they could discharge us to other parts of the city. That night, the Nigerian army shelled the campus and some people were hurt and injured. Some lost their lives. We then ran out and left Enugu. The press conference was supposed to happen the following day. We had lined up our buses again and they said we would not be taken to a popular place like the university campus again. They said it was a known target and that we would be put in some other lesser known places. So as we were about to return to Enugu on the road we took to escape the following day, we didn’t know that overnight, the Nigerian army had already come to Enugu. They had laid ambush. The luck we had was that they decided to shoot when they saw the first vehicle. If they had waited for all the 12 vehicles in the convoy to get within shooting range, we would have all been shot. So there was commotion as the vehicles tried to turn back. Eventually, we did and got to Awgwu. We settled there. Then the Biafran army was in disarray, so they brought one Col. Onwuatuegwu to reorganise the Biafran unit called Ex-Brigade. It was at that point that it was clear that Enugu had fallen and there was no more point to make again. Most of the volunteers went back to their normal lives but some of us, who were itching for action, stayed back and later found jobs for ourselves within the army formation. We began to do odd jobs, carry ammunition to the front, food to the soldiers, and created entertainment groups to entertain the soldiers.”

“We were in the camp; there was food. The other things needed were cigarettes and other things and we could share them. When Onwuatuegwu was organising the army because the commander then had defected and crossed over to the Nigerian army, he saw some names on the list belonging to that brigade but without a corresponding army number. Every soldier had a name and army number. Our names were on the list but with no numbers. He asked ‘who are these people’? So they had to send for us. We were about 25 in number. We were wearing army uniforms because to go to front to drop ammunition, we had to look like soldiers.”

“We didn’t take any pictures. It is one of my greatest regrets. Pictures were not popular then. I don’t have pictures of the war. So we told him how we got there that we were volunteers and didn’t want to go back. He looked at us and said ‘what great foolish patriots’ we were. That if we had died, there would have been no official recognition, our parents, wards and dependents would have received no compensations and so forth. When he checked and found out that most of us were either undergraduates or other students, he gave us recommendations to go to the school of infantry to be trained as army officers. That was how I joined the Biafran army.”

“It was supposed to be for three months but I didn’t complete it. About two weeks to the end of the 12 week training, I went there as a serving soldier along with some others who were there as serving soldiers. In the school, we had fresh cadets who were civilians, and then there were people from the military who were sent there on promotion or bravery. Fresh cadets spent an extra month. We already had some military exposure. But on the ninth or tenth week, we were woken up around 2am. One of our instructors was just saying what seemed like a crazy joke. He said tomorrow now, you would tell me that you captured an armoured car with your bare hands, you would tell me that you alone stopped a brigade from moving, you will tell me that you did this and that. If you think that you are qualified to command a platoon, come out here. We were wondering what he meant. He asked the question three times and I think after the third time, one boy came out. But the guy who came out was someone we were sure was not going to qualify as an officer. He was a lay about and was indisciplined. Then the man asked him, do you know any other person that can command a platoon. Then he mentioned my name. I was commanding my company as a student then; it was just like being a prefect of a class. And he wasn’t having life easy with me because of his style. I called another person, another person called another person. People like Capt. Emmanuel Iheanacho, a former minister, who owns Genesis Shipping Worldwide, was one of my mates. That night, 21 of us came out and were taken to the commandant of the college. They told us that we were needed for battle, and we were moved that night to Umuahia, where we were commissioned by Ojukwu. By 6am, I was already fighting on the battle field. When I arrived on the war front, the people that formed the unit that was going to fight were from different sides and as luck would have it, I was chosen as company commander. Then some of my colleagues were made platoon commanders. I was given three platoon commanders, and troops. We moved to the front from the deployment point. The person we met who was our commander for that sector was Col. Joe Achuzia. We met him at the command post. He said a few things but the one that stuck was ‘Gentlemen, I like to tell you that you have two enemies that you have to face here. One enemy is in the front and one enemy is behind. The enemy in front can kill, maim, hurt, or wound you and you can also kill him or wound him and that is what you need to do- kill him and move forward. But the enemy behind, the only thing he will do is to kill you.”

“That means ‘no retreat, no surrender’. Just move forward. Don’t run back. By the end of that day, I had lost two of my officers. The third one had used his gun to fire his hand so that he could leave the war front. I caught him in the act. I almost killed him but God prevented me from committing murder. And that was how I went from one battle to another. At a point, I believed that I was not going to survive the war. At a point, my brigade thought that I was either a suicide bomber or had suicidal intentions. So the following week, I was removed from A company, which was on the road to D company, which was on the flank. At the time, D company had been on holiday. There had been no battle in their area. But the second day I got to D company, battle started there and ceased in A. When war started for D, I could not believe it. I said God, is it because I inflated my age to join the army? In 1968, when I was joining, I was 18 years. But I claimed that I was 21 years to merit being an officer. So I was thinking: are these my crimes and sins catching up with me? I was going from battlefield to battlefield. So that was how I fought until I survived the war. I got injured in December 1969.”

– Culled from PUNCH