The panorama is one of irresistible beauty, and the minaret’s towers shimmer in the morning light.
A marabou stork takes off with a flap of wings, while the beautiful sound of the muezzin’s call penetrates the silence in the far distance. The call to prayer whispers, falls and murmurs with the wind as it has done for centuries; it is God’s voice coming from the muezzin.
It appears to kiss the Somali soil then lifts off and bounces over the scrubland brush and heads towards the sea, welcoming the fishermen (and the pirates too) back from their risky night’s work; it politely massages the Indian Ocean, reminding the lapping waves of that third day of creation.
It then plunges into the deep warm waters and blesses the sea creatures, the lobster and the mackerel, the shrimp and the whale, the shark and the red snapper. And then from the deep it rises again back inland to my lonely location, a solitary soldier in a foreign land on overnight duty, thirsting for prayer.
It is ironic that my place of prayer is in a dangerous location far from home. Though naturally air conditioned, it is isolated and also partly under the ground. It could easily be my grave.
My place of prayer is in a foxhole on Somalia’s war front.
The foxhole, trench, bunker or handaki as it is called in Kiswahili, is a pit dug in the ground where a soldier in combat shelters to give him some level of protection from the enemy’s direct fire.
In the handaki
I have been in the handaki for the past four months as part of the Burundi contingent in the African Union Mission in Somalia (Amisom). Amisom’s mandate is to liberate Somalia from the Al Shabaab, an extremist group that imposes and spreads its hardline brand of Islam.
The engagements against the enemy combatants have been few and short; but they have been intense and deadly when they occur. And so, we, the soldiers, while away the hours, waiting in total silence.
But silence speaks loudly to me, as I lie struggling to stay awake under a brooding night sky. Here, the urge to pray comes of its own volition from the deeps of the soul; it comes as naturally as the unexplained emptiness that sweeps me above and beyond the realities of life and wipes out the physical need for food or warmth or rest.
All great religions have been founded from such silences, as the hunger for communing with the divine springs up.
In a war theatre, you don’t have to be old. The experience ages you. You find yourself learning so much, so fast; you learn the smell of blood, the sound of pain, the gasp of death, the anger of combat and many other things that could never be taught in training.
You also learn how to pray.
Indeed, confronted daily with the spectre of untimely death, one really has few choices. To pray is the only choice.
Prayer came back to me so naturally, the familiar yearning and stirring once so embedded in my childhood experiences. It is the quest for God. It can’t be hidden; it leaps out and reveals itself under pressure bursting forth like water in a dry wadi.
The thirst for God always exists, and daily, the muezzin’s call brings it to the fore. It cannot fail to do so, when the deepest human questions seem so urgent within me. How did humanity come into being? Are we human beings truly all alone? What is the truth? How long is eternity? What is love? Is there life after death? Is there a backlash in playing God by killing a fellow human being?
You never forget your first love and you will never forget your first kill in combat. And my first killing in the field of battle disturbs me in a special way; something brewing deep down in my subconscious.
It was during an ambush set by the enemy and I fired several bullets at a militia man who, seemingly, barely out of his teenage years, made a suicidal dash in my direction with his weapon blazing. He died open mouthed; probably without pain.
The encounter brought some unexplained emotional euphoria. I was thrilled with what I had done.
No mistake about this, the euphoria had nothing to do with ending this unknown person’s life. I felt euphoric because in the engagement, I had not panicked, I had subdued instinct, I had conquered my fears as the military training and discipline had conditioned me to. I had not let down my platoon, my friends or my commander.
I have never done hard drugs, but I am yet to believe that there is anything that would ever equal that first encounter in battle.
After killing
This feeling of exhilaration is particularly disturbing to me as I know that there is, within most men — even soldiers in combat — an intense resistance to killing a fellow human being.
My attempts to examine my emotions have come up against well …emptiness; As if my core had become numb. I still cling to the subconscious delusion that this state is temporary, that proper penance later will purge my pain and misery and make me whole again.
My introspection persists in the handaki. I realise that beyond the terror of being at the front, there is that special fullness that I am living now that no other experience in the remainder of my life will ever equal, that beyond doubt, the rest of my life will be spent remembering in flashes the intensity of emotion that was Somalia.
It is evening; the darkness falls suddenly like a curtain. It promises to be a dark night, a cloaked moon appears as the sun disappears to the west. I tie my shoe laces, grab my rifle and slither into the handaki.
But then, I pause as I feel that particular yearning to make my peace, to commune with that unexplained, all-powerful being. The prayers then flow, not from the guts or the head or the heart, but from deep within the soul. It is as meek as it is quietly liberating. The prayer for the soldier on the warfront does not bother to seize the moment; it lets it be.
My foxhole comrade nods in meditative silence; he finds himself also bowing reverently to that unknown powerful spirit. He too communes.
There are no atheists in foxholes.
The writer, who does not wish to be named, is a soldier serving in Somalia.
