The Easy Day Was Yesterday (28 page)

Rob Lucas accompanied Burageya on the flight back to Kigali. Burageya was the boy we’d worked on earlier and thought was dead. Rob had to carry the boy and, as we were getting the boy settled on Rob’s lap, a female journalist pointed to a lot of blood coming from the bottom of the blanket wrapped around the boy. We couldn’t work out where it was coming from. I thought we had missed a substantial injury. On closer inspection I realised that the femoral IV cannula had come out. I pulled it all the way out, much to Carol’s annoyance, and Rob put pressure on it during the trip back. Jon was sitting in the back of the ambo waiting to stretcher his mate with the cut throat when some journos started asking him some questions. Jon answered diplomatically, without giving too much away, when one of them shoved a microphone into his face. This was the end, and he simply told the journo to ‘fuck off’ in his drawn-out way. After the RPA Major’s display of power, he eventually allowed me to evacuate all the injured IDPs and journos in three helicopters and, by 5.00 pm, the job was complete. The journos couldn’t wait to get out and tell their stories to the world.

At the same time the IDPs ran through the wire into the compound and the infantry found themselves alongside the Zambians pushing the IDPs back over the wire. Some IDPs had grenades, which caused some concern to the infantry soldiers. Lieutenant Tilbrook told me over the radio to stay at the helipad a bit longer because they were still fighting off the IDPs. The infantry lads had fixed their bayonets in order to push the panicked IDPs out of the compound.

As the last helicopter took off, the RPA company which we’d earlier seen walking down the road, began firing into the crowd. This caused about 2000 IDPs to stampede down the re-entrant away from the camp — they were running for their lives. The RPA had anticipated this and had pre-positioned themselves up on the high ground around the re-entrant where they fired rifles, machine-guns, rockets and mortars onto and into the fleeing IDPs. It was a massacre, absolute carnage. We watched hundreds of people fall under the hail of fire, mortars and rockets and decided it would be best to get back inside the compound given that the helipad was so open. Jon and I loaded everyone into the back of the ambulance, made a hasty trip back to the compound and took cover behind the sandbag walls.

From behind the sandbag walls, we watched everything, and could do little more. Fortunately for the IDPs, it had started to rain and it really came down, which provided some cover for the IDPs to escape. RPG rockets landed among the stampeding crowd and 10 people would fall and not get up again. Mortars continued to fall and there were dead and wounded all over the place. The noise of the barrage and machine-gun fire was unbelievable. It was just a constant roar of explosions and gunfire as the death toll rapidly climbed.

An old woman stood up 50 metres to our front; an RPA soldier was the same distance beyond her. We yelled and pleaded with the woman to come to us for safety, but she just stood there looking at us, then at the RPA soldier. We thought the soldier was going to shoot the old woman right in front of us and, given the poor marksmanship of the RPA, the bullets would miss and travel in our direction. Instead, the RPA soldier called the woman over to him as we did the same thing trying to get her to come to us. But, to our astonishment, she went to him. He put his arm around her shoulders and walked up the hill towards the helipad. He got to the top of the rise where the road bent towards the helipad and turned and looked at us; then he threw the woman to the ground and shot her. This was the RPA at its finest. Basically this was a sign that the UN forces had no power and couldn’t do anything to stop them. Unfortunately, they were right.

As the rain died off, so did the firing. There was no-one running down the re-entrant anymore; they were all either dead or dying. I moved to the other side of the compound to help the infantry lads hold the perimeter. I was standing alongside the building watching the crowd when I heard a loud crack above me and felt the crumbled brickwork fall onto my head. My natural reaction was to duck, but it would obviously have been far too late. I looked up and saw that the brick on the corner of the building about 10 centimetres above my head had disintegrated. The RPA soldiers standing nearby thought the incident was hilarious. I felt like showing them something funny by shooting their kneecaps. I wondered who had taken a shot at me — the RPA or an IDP. I moved to a different spot and looked for the prick who had shot at me when I saw a young boy walk through the barbed wire, straight past the RPA and towards me. I thought this kid was showing some real balls; the RPA saw his wounds and let him continue. He was wearing a blood-soaked T-shirt and had an obvious facial injury. I put on my gloves and, as the boy approached me, he extended his hand. I shook it and he pointed to where a bullet had entered his left nostril and was sitting in his upper jaw. I took the boy to the ambulance and, given that it was getting dark and all the firing was directed in the opposite direction to the way we were going, we decided to make a break for it. At the same time, a man was brought in with an abdominal injury. He’d been shot through the abdomen and his small intestine was exposed. If we had stayed in the camp we would have been working for the next 24 hours straight, there were so many wounded who needed the medics’ care. But we had to go and go now.

Jon drove this time and I got in the back with Carol. Nico jumped in the front with Jon. As we left the camp, Jon and Nico saw a little girl who was about two years old clinging to the body of her dead mother. Jon opened the driver’s door of the moving ambo, grabbed the kid by the shirt and threw her through the window joining the driver’s compartment and the back of the ambo. This presented a couple of problems for Carol and me; we were busy working on two serious patients and didn’t have time to deal with a screaming kid who smelt strongly of urine. The kid had no injuries and we knew that when the RPA did their search, any IDP who wasn’t injured would be returned to the camp or killed. If this happened, the RPA wouldn’t allow us to take any more injured IDPs out of the camp and possibly not even let us back in. So saving this little orphaned, uninjured girl from this nightmarish place was bloody risky — but worth it. I decided to bandage the girl’s arm and slide the end of an IV line under the bandage. Despite her appearance and smell she was a sweet little girl. She stared at both Carol and me not knowing what the hell was happening or who we were. I gave her the sweet sugar-coated jelly from the French ration pack and she forced a weak smile. Then it hit me; this kid wasn’t just another patient. She was a little girl who had sat with her mother while she was murdered. She probably expected her mother to get up and look after her. What must her mother have thought when she died? She would have been so concerned for her little girl. Now this poor little thing, who hadn’t seen soap and water for maybe a month and hadn’t eaten real food for more than a week, was sitting in the back of an ambulance with two white people. Actually, compared to the others in the camp, she was pretty lucky. She would go to the orphanage and wait for the unlikely event of a distant relative arriving to save her when all this was over.

As I got her settled and Carol worked on the boy with the bullet in the nose and the man with the bullet in the guts, I got a call from Jon up front and stuck my head through the window. Jon motioned with his head to the scene in front. I think he just couldn’t find the words to describe the scene. Dead bodies littered the road. They were everywhere. Jon negotiated as best he could and was forced on a number of occasions to reverse and manoeuvre the ambo so he didn’t run over arms or legs. It was now dark and we were still trying to get out of Kibeho.

The first time we were searched, the girl spoke and waved to the RPA while Carol and I tried to drown her voice out with stories of the terrible injuries she had suffered. The RPA accepted this and off we went to the next roadblock. We couldn’t risk this girl talking to the RPA again, so we put her up in the blanket rack and strapped her in. Carol gave her an injection to make her sleep and she screamed her head off, so we gave her a biscuit and, when we were next searched, the girl just stayed still and the RPA never knew she was there. The girl slept the whole way to Butare and I would say that it was probably the best sleep she’d had in 12 months.

After being held up at one of the roadblocks for an hour the convoy, including all the NGO people, made its way out of Kibeho and went to another Zambian company compound. This one was three-quarters of the way back to the Zambian Headquarters location near Gikongoro. The boy who’d been shot in the nose was simply incredible. He knew just how serious his injuries were. Carol had me doing suction on him to clear all the blood from his mouth. When I’d done this twice he knew what was going on and decided to do it himself. After each suction, he’d pull out different pieces of his upper jawbone and put them in the contaminated waste bag (a large yellow plastic bag). Then he’d lie down and rest until he needed suction again.

When we arrived at the Zambian company position, we met the second CCP which had come from Kigali to help. Jon pulled up in front of one of the buildings and Nico opened the back of the ambo. Kathleen Pyne, a RAAF Nursing Officer, got into the ambulance to lend a hand while we took the opportunity to eat for the first time since breakfast. Jon and I grabbed a handful of rations from the bin over the cabin, gave some to Carol, and went inside to eat. Suddenly I felt the desperate need to piss, realising that I hadn’t pissed all day. I had a quick look for a toilet, but couldn’t find one, so I found a suitable tree in the darkness. The feeling amongst everyone as we ate inside the building was euphoric. Secretly, I think we were all happy to have left Kibeho so we could breathe easier for a few hours. Once we’d finished eating we continued on to the headquarters location. Carol and I climbed back into the ambo and I told Kathleen to stay as well. Before we left, the boy with the bullet in the nostril surprised Kath by getting up. I said, ‘It’s okay, he just wants to use the suction,’ but he didn’t. The boy indicated that he wanted to get out of the ambo. So I unhooked the drip and followed him. All he wanted was to have a piss.

Kath continued to ride in the back of the ambulance for the rest of the trip and we laughed at everything, which was a great tension release. I stood up at one stage to get some water and knocked the giving set out of the boy’s IV. We reconnected it, but it continued to fall out of the drip and would always end up in the contaminated waste bag, which looked like we’d just killed a sheep in it. We’d simply reconnect because we had no other giving sets to replace it with. Kath was initially shocked by it all, but quickly understood the situation and laughed along with Carol and me. She probably thought we’d lost it — maybe we had. I’d always imagined Kath to be a bit soft, but during the next few days I realised that she could handle any situation and could tough it out as much as the rest of us — a good officer.

The boy was the ideal patient, he never complained once. It was truly amazing. He had shown enormous bravado by walking past the RPA and straight through the perimeter in the first place. Then, in the ambo, he handled himself with what I can only describe as extraordinary determination to survive. I admired him. The bloke with the abdominal wound bitched the whole time about his pain despite the fact that we’d given him enough morphine to drop an elephant. In the end we told him that, if he didn’t stop whinging, we’d take him back to Kibeho — after that we didn’t hear a word out of him. Imagine doing all that complaining just because half your gut is resting on the outside of your body, what a wimp! Poor bastard. The little girl continued to sleep peacefully with a biscuit tightly clutched in her hand.

Once we’d arrived at the Zambian Headquarters, the second CCP took the ambo with the casualties to the Butare hospital (good luck) and the little girl to the CARE Australia orphanage. Before the ambo left, Jon and I grabbed our sleeping gear from the bin over the cabin and moved in with the infantry section in one of the buildings. We assembled our stretchers and found a small space near the door. We finally managed to get our heads down at around 11.00 pm. We were totally shattered. I’m sure I fell asleep while I was putting my stretcher together. I lay down and dreamed …

My lungs scream for more air as I sprint down the hill. There isn’t enough air at this altitude. I have to keep going hard and fast to survive. One mortar lands just to my left and a family of four goes down and doesn’t move again, their bodies violently ripped to pieces by the flying pieces of serrated metal. The explosive wave carries pieces of hacked flesh and bone in each direction. A small brown hand that only moments before had been attached to a living, breathing child, slaps my leg with such force that my leg is thrown out from under me and I fall. I stand quickly and notice the bloody stain left by the hand on my right trouser leg
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There are hundreds of people fleeing the attack. Mortars slam into the earth every few seconds and the fertile brown soil is thrown into the air. The noise is indescribable. Every mortar is like a bowling ball getting a strike as the people drop like pins. But they don’t drop — they’re ripped into unrecognisable pieces. There are mutilated bodies everywhere. Some bodies still have some life in them and they grab at my legs as I run past — a pitiful, last-ditch grasp for survival. I hear their screams and cries, but I can’t help them, there are too many. I hear more mortars being given their wings. They are being fired by an unseen aggressor, but they’re hitting their marks with certain accuracy
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Mortars drop like hail in a storm and more people collapse onto the blood-soaked ground. I jump bodies as I run, but the sheer number of bleeding piles of butchered meat makes it difficult to continue at a fast pace. A 50 calibre machine-gun set on fixed lines opens up from the high ground and begins to sweep across the stampeding mass as if waving a wand of death over all in its path, until only the stragglers remain. The 50 cal stops and I can hear the small arms begin to pick off the targets that remain
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