It Happened on the Way to War Read Online Free PDF

possible sat in the back rows. Separated by a no-man’s land of barren desks, the rest of us, about eight students, sat in the front.
    It wasn’t a classic geek-jock divide. The students with me in the front rows were an eclectic and adventurous group. A friend to my left studied the plight of child soldiers in Uganda. The student on my right aspired to be a missionary in Tanzania. For those of us in the front, Swahili directly connected to our life plans.
    Professor Alphonse Mutima did the best he could teaching the bifurcated class. With his stocky build and infectious laugh, one could easily have mistaken him for a man who had lived a comfortable life. But few comfortable lives came out of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and his was not one of them. Professor Mutima didn’t speak about his upbringing in class. He was reserved and didn’t want to feel pitied. We captured only glimpses of his former life when he explained certain words with unique cultural meanings and applications, such as kanga s, the colorful wraps that hung on walls or were worn as skirts, baby carriers, and shawls. When Professor Mutima spoke of such things, the elevated, engaging tone in his voice conveyed the longing he felt for the home he had never returned to. I found him to be fascinating and often walked with him across our wooded campus after class.
    Professor Mutima devoured what little news came from press coverage of Central Africa. When we came to difficult subjects, he made light of the ironies that emerged from insecure lives, such as the absence of obesity in many parts of Africa. His laughter veiled a pain and anxiety so deep it would cripple most men. Professor Mutima dealt with the boys in the back rows, but he had little respect for them, or for anyone who he believed took the great gift of a university education for granted.
    With time, Professor Mutima told me about his home in Goma, a city perched on an active volcano at the Rwandan-Congolese border. Goma earned notoriety as home to the largest refugee camp in the world after the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Professor Mutima recommended I read a book about the genocide by a writer named Philip Gourevitch, and he pointed out a vivid excerpt from the book that described Goma as “one of the most bewildering spectacles of the century,” where “bulldozers had to be brought in to dig mass graves and plough the bodies under. Picture it: a million people, shifting through the smoke of cooking fires on a vast black field, and behind them … the Nyaragongo volcano had come to life, burbling with the flame that made the night sky red.” *
    I had also been told about the book by an army officer who served on a humanitarian assistance mission to Rwanda. The officer predicted that my military career would be dominated by American responses to ethnic conflicts that threatened to destabilize entire regions, as had occurred with the Rwandan genocide.
    For winter break that year my mother and I took a short vacation together. I spent the first two days engrossed in Gourevitch’s book. Its cover featured an intriguing photograph of a lawn chair in front of a foggy lake, and its title was the longest I had ever seen: We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families . The author’s photo was equally striking. He looked off to the side with a devilish smile, heavy bags sagging beneath his dark eyes, his hair whisking up from his forehead as if he had just stepped off a motorcycle.
    I vigorously circled and underlined entire passages of the book. It was a habit of interactive reading that I had learned from my father. Returning to some passages a half dozen times, I read many excerpts out loud to my mom. It was baffling. In Rwanda more than eight hundred thousand people were killed in one hundred days. I recalled watching the evening news as a fifteen-year-old when a segment aired with footage of a group of Rwandan boys murdering a