The camouflaged fighter roared over us in a south-easterly direction following the trace of the muddy Imo River. Several kilometres downstream, the plane suddenly turned in a wide sweeping arc on the other side of the river, tilted on to one wing and swung low as it performed one orbit over us, engines roaring and flew back. It aligned itself with the dirt road, flying so low that we could clearly see the grim-faced, heavily goggled and helmeted white pilot peering down at us. His thin lips were drawn even thinner in a wicked grin. His stern and unfriendly visage neither frightened nor disturbed me because we children knew that white "aeroplane drivers" normally throw down bags of money to children. So believing that this was certainly my luckiest day (having escaped death by drowning just a few minutes earlier) and that my second miracle for the day was about to unfold, Uche and I raised our voices in song to the unknown pilot,
"Aeroplane, turalum akpa ego-oo..." which by interpretation means, aeroplane drop bags of money for us. However, our song was cut short abruptly when the unmistakable crackle of high velocity gunfire reached our ears: horror of horrors, the smiling white man was actually firing at us! Was it real or was I imagining things?
The wheezing sound of high caliber bullets told me that we were in real danger and that I was not imagining anything at all.
“Jesus Christ,” I wondered, “what have we, innocent, half starved children done to draw the ire of a strange, white man?”
However, I did not wait for the white man or any other person to give answers to my barrage of questions before my emergency military training and wartime survival instincts spurred me into action.
“Take cover”, I yelled pushing Uche down on to the ground and crawling away from the centre of the dirt road in one fluid movement with all the speed and agility of a green ‘olila’ snake. Milliseconds later, the place where we had been standing was riddled with bullets as the fighter pockmarked the dirt road with its pellets of death in a straight line from the water’s edge to and across the Owerri – Aba highway.
We lay absolutely still, watching with thumping hearts in our ‘take cover’ positions as the plane howled down along the dirt road, swept out over the village and disappeared to the west. We lay in our undignifying but life-saving posture long after the winged merchant of death’s roar had died away in the distance, hoping that the bloodthirsty, mercenary pilot would not change his mind and come back. Finally, after a long wait and believing that he would not come back, we picked up our buckets and calmly walked back to the river to replenish our spilled water.
In its retreat over the village and directly over our hut, the fighter never let off pumping out hot lead. A six-inch bullet slug that was found on the wooden bed in the room evidenced this. It had come in through a gaping hole in the thatch roof. Fortunately, nobody was inside the room when it came calling as all the occupants had fled into the adjoining bushes for cover...
https://youtu.be/bi-7XquvxPI?si=auWKdE3zgMX-ieir
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