Excerpts From Two Weeks in the Trenches: Reminiscences of Childhood and War in Eritrea By Alemseged Tesfai Red Sea

Press, Trenton, NJ, 2002 (Two Weeks in the Trenches is a collection of stories, war diaries and essays based mainly on the writers personal experience. The following excerpts come straight from his notes taken during his participation in a fierce battle between EPLF (Eritrean Peoples Liberation Front) and Ethiopian troops for control of the strategic northern Eritrean town of Nakfa. Here, he encounters two remarkable people, a company commander and a former student, who were to die in action within a few hours of each other, just a few days after the entries were made.) 6th August 1985. Assahaita We left Kertzet late last night and we are in Nakfa today. Assahaita is the commander of the first company - ours is the third. Assahaita is his nickname. It means very cold, biting wind. The nickname implies that his fighting ways send a chill down the enemys spine. He has a long, lean and strikingly handsome face. His eyes are sharp, but sad at the same time. His physique is proportionate and well structured. He was lying under the shade of a tree when I joined him. We sat for a while without talking, watching the whole battalion moving around to settle for the day. Some had already gone to the outskirts of Nakfa and were coming back with loads of prickly pears, or beles in Tigrinya, on their shoulders. Suddenly, he started talking in a sing-song voice. Is the Front in its right senses? Why has it suddenly decided to send all you educated and professional people here? Werent you where you should be? I did not know how to reply to that. I just mumbled something in response, something indicating approval of the decision. Come on, he said, interrupting my incoherence, I am not happy, not happy at all. Look, everyone is here. Engineer, teacher... are we all going to perish together? This is simply not good.

I did not say anything, neither did he continue with the topic. After a while, he called someone from one of his platoons and said, Why are you being so unfair to us? How can you eat all that beles by yourselves? Couldnt you, at least, be generous to my guest here? How about Assahaita the Poor, has he ever said that he does not like beles? The young tegadalai1 laughed, obviously enjoying Assahaitas feigned feelings of hurt. We are cooling juicy ones for you in a large container of water, he said, running to another shade. In a few minutes, we were enjoying the coolness of the fruits. I am not much of a beles eater, but I ate until I belched its taste a couple of times. Assahaita must have eaten double mine. Beles is nice to eat, but it creates problems on its way out! We were lying side by side staring at the slightly moving leaves above us, when Assahaita said, Describe the base area to me. They tell me Ararib is like a city. I looked at him in surprise. Have you never been there? How can I ever be there? Look at our life. It is always from one trench to the other, one battle to the next. When there are lulls in fighting, it is always digging new trenches or repairing old ones. Add to this intensive academic lessons and political education and what do you have? No leisure time at all. You cant go to the base areas unless you are wounded and the damned bullet just keeps avoiding me. You pray for a bullet just to see Ararib? He smiled mischievously, You know, the one that just grazes you on the flesh but hurts enough to send you to Ararib and back? Thats what I mean. I couldnt stand permanent disability. But tell me about those places. I tried to describe Ararib for him. The underground boarding school that hosts about four thousand students; Orota Hospital which visitors have nicknamed the longest hospital in the world; the pharmaceutical factory, the metal and wood workshops...etc. Some of these, I had not even seen myself, so I included in my list what I had merely heard about. His appetite for knowledge seems insatiable. His questions extended into current international affairs, the latest inventions and even the workings of satellites. Some of your questions are too tough for me. I dont know the answer to many of them.
1

Tegadalai, freedom fighter, male. The female equivalent is tegadalit and the common plural form is tegadelti.

You carry this big head on your shoulders and with all your hair and beard, you cant answer my questions? I am going to milk every bit of knowledge inside you while you are with us. How else can Assahaita the Poor gain any education? What does he know apart from shooting guns? You are saying this for the second time. Why do you keep calling yourself Assahaita the Poor? But, I am poor, he answered good-naturedly. When I came here, I brought only one thing along with me, my soul. When the time comes, Ill take it with me. Do you have a better definition of poverty? You may be poor in the material sense, I insisted, partly to provoke him, but you do not seem to suffer from any spiritual poverty. Hey, hey, dont ever let spiritual poverty near you. That will mean degeneration. That will mean being despised and discarded like those decayed beles we have refused to eat. The wealth of tegadalai is his perseverance and his spiritual purity. We lose that, we are no more. But in other ways we are poor my friend...and Assahaita is the poorest of them all. He was sitting up when he said this. He then lifted his head towards the sky and started to sing to some tune I could not recognize. His words were clear, Poor, oh, you poor Assahaita... He repeated the phrase several times. I laughed deeply and sincerely and liked him very much. I would have loved to hear him talk some more, but one of the platoon leaders called him over and he left me where I was. I wrote this immediately after he left.

7th August 1985 Chu Chu We spent the night at Embalko, the same place we stayed the first night. It is about 45 minutes walk northwest of Nakfa. All companies of our battalion have assembled together. I have been meeting quite a number of people I know from before. One of them is Chu Chu.

Her actual name is Semainesh Ghebreweldi, but we call her Chu Chu. In 1976, she came to Sahel to study at the Revolution School. Her parents stayed behind in the refugee camps of Sudan. She was about 12 years old at the time. Today, she may be 21. She is short and of stocky build. She has very short and dark hair and a light, round face to match it. I noticed she still retained the charming smile of her childhood. She was one of my favourite pupils when I taught at the school in the late seventies and very early eighties. As the years passed by, she developed quite a tough attitude towards life and the rough environment she was growing up in. She was stubborn in whatever she believed to be the truth and she was always at the forefront even in the most tasking physical work. One day, an adolescent who had been bullying all the boys and girls in the school tried to harass her. Without even hesitating, she challenged him to a wrestle and knocked him down in front of a number of onlookers. The whole school heard about this and, from then onwards, she walked tall amongst her peers. I mentioned this to her when she came to see me this afternoon. She smiled. We talked about the Revolution School and the time they passed there. She seemed to miss even the worst aspects of life in that school. She felt particularly nostalgic and sad when she went down the list of those of her classmates who had died in the fighting. Are you married, yet? I asked her, probably to change the topic. She laughed and stared into my eyes imitating my gestures. She quickly turned serious and said, Dont talk to me about marriage. My focus is not there. Why not? Do you know who I am left with here? Look at them, she said, pointing to the tegadelti who were jumping and kicking all over the place. Almost everyone here came after the Sixth Offensive in 82. Many joined us after Selahta2 in 83. Everyone has gone and I hate every minute that I live after them. You talk about marriage... You want everyone to die, right? I find it ridiculous whenever you people say that.

Selahta, meaning Stealth, is the 7th and most secret offensive that the Ethiopian Dergue regime launched against the EPLF in 1983.

She smiled pensively and said, Surviving your peers, your fellow students and your friends is the worst that can happen to you. She fell silent for a while and then changed the subject, Are they serious about mobilizing you to the frontlines? Of course. Why dont they let you be in the base areas? Why dont you just stay there and lay the foundations for the future? She was also teasing me. But you need some respite here. In fact, I have come to take your place for a few weeks, I teased back tapping her shoulder. Now? At your age? She said ruffling my hair and shaking her head, You are all grey already, its incredible. I wish that you had not come here. Why not? Because you have come to bury your children. It was as if she had pierced my heart with a spear. I sprang at her in quick response and grabbed her by the hand. What kind of talk was that? I said angrily, but she easily freed herself from my grip and ran a few metres in playful panic. If we dont leave early in the morning, Ill come and see you. Ill bring a bar of soap along to wash your hair and remove the lice in there. She left. The sun is setting. It is getting too dark for me to write more. I feel as if a heavy load is just sitting on my chest. I am almost choking and her words keep ringing in my ears. She did not utter those words out spite or any malice. But for her to take her own death for granted and my survival as guaranteed is just too much to swallow. I feel as if she is accusing me while still alive. No wonder she feels guilty for having survived her own peers and friends. Maybe she feels that she has lost her right to stay alive. She is blaming herself for having been outpaced in the rush towards the ultimate sacrifice. If, tomorrow, they tell me she is dead, I will probably feel the same way and say the same thing.

Naughty, naughty Chu-Chu. She is making me blabber in raw philosophy. So it is a combination of such heartrending little incidents and encounters that makes death something to yearn for.