Bloody Civilians - by Matthew Okibe

The wedding was supposed to start at 11 AM.By noon, the chairs were full and the pastor had already wiped his forehead twice. The invitations had gone out months ago. The date had been set since the beginning of the year. Four years together, a whole community dressed and seated and waiting. This was not something that could be quietly rescheduled. Postponing was never a real option. Which meant the only option was to get him here.He arrived in the state around 1:30. Got to the venue just after 2 PM.When he walked in, he was dressed sharp. Pressed, composed, posture straight in the way that becomes permanent after enough years in uniform. To anyone who didn't know, he looked fine. But I knew. My father is a soldier. I grew up reading the space between what a soldier shows and what a soldier carries. What I saw on that man's face was not composure. It was the particular stillness of someone who has spent every drop of himself just getting to the room.He had come from Maiduguri — Borno State, northeast Nigeria, where the army has been fighting Boko Haram for over a decade. A war the news sometimes remembers and sometimes forgets, but that soldiers stationed there never get to forget. Not even for a wedding. Not even for their own.Before he could leave, he needed a pass. My father, a non-commissioned officer, tried to help facilitate it and was sharply rebuked — told he had no business requesting the movement of a soldier from an active duty post. That he should know his place. So my father went to his own commanding officer, who happened to be a coursemate of the groom's CO from their Nigerian Defence Academy days. That old thread of shared history was what finally opened the door. The pass came through late. Twenty-two hours on the road. His own wedding.You practically become a guest in your own personal occasion.Duty does not negotiate with your calendar. It does not care that the invitations went out in January, that she has been waiting four years, that two hundred people came dressed in their best. Duty calls, and you answer, and everything else has to wait by the door.I am a soldier's son.We lived in the barracks — designated military quarters, a world within a world. By Primary 6, my father had flown out of the country for a four-year course. He did not really come home before he left. He passed through, packed bags, gathered documents, and was gone. I would not see his face again until the long holiday after JSS 3, standing at the edge of senior secondary school, looking back at years that had passed entirely without him.Even that return was brief. Within months he was back on duty. And even in the years he was stationed in the same city as us, there were stretches of three full months where the only version of my father I had was a voice on a phone.I used to think this was normal. Children who grow up inside something tend to think it is the shape of all things. It was only later, watching friends with fathers who simply existed in the same rooms as their children on unremarkable evenings, that I understood what the absence looked like when held to the light.I thought, when he finally came back, that time had softened him. I had already written the story in my head — the old soldier, slowed by years of absence. I thought: he looks like I could beat him.One morning we went for a jog around the barracks. He ran past me before we hit the first corner. My youngest brother fell behind. My father, without breaking stride, turned back, picked him up, and continued running — with a child in his arms — and was still ahead of me. I was running free. He was carrying a child. He was still winning.He was a gunner. Infantry. Mounted machine guns — the kind fixed to trucks and helicopters, the kind whose sound you feel in your chest. He has talked about running with a rifle in each hand, about the weight becoming ordinary, about the body learning to carry what the mind decides is necessary.There is a word I keep reaching for. Forged. Not trained — forged. Through heat and pressure and repeated impact until something new exists that did not exist before. The depot system he went through was not survivable by everyone. People broke. Some were sent home. The ones who came through were not the same people who went in, and that was entirely the point.This is what civilians miss when they complain online that Nigerian soldiers are too aggressive, too harsh. The aggression is not random. It is not arrogance. It is manufacture. The training does not ask you to modulate your energy for social situations. It conditions you for survival and combat. The man who comes out of that will not soften because someone thinks he is too intense. The aggression is the product. The aggression is what was asked for.In the Nigerian military, you do not answer to civilian courts. Only a military tribunal rules on a soldier's offence. Soldiers exist in a parallel system with its own laws and its own definition of acceptable conduct. They were never meant to be judged by civilian standards, because they were never built by civilian standards.I once sat in a room with officers at the Army War College. They were reminiscing in that flat soldierly way — humour sitting on top of things that are not funny. One told a story about a colleague who woke from sleep, heard shower water hitting tiles, thought it was gunfire, and in throwing himself to the ground slipped and hit his head on the wall. The room laughed. I did not laugh. I was cold — from the understanding that this man's body had been so thoroughly conditioned for combat that water could betray him in his own bathroom.Another talked about waking his household in the night, just returned from deployment, coming up from sleep already reacting. His wife had to call his ADC to come and talk him back into the present.In that room, these were jokes. I sat still and listened to men laugh about their own fractures, and I thought about my father, and about all the years of phone calls instead of presence. Some of what soldiers carry is not safe to bring inside a house with children in it. Some of it needs distance to be managed.Half of them sacrifice their families so that other families can remain whole.Now let me tell you what "bloody civilians" actually means.Most people hear it and think contempt. Soldiers looking down on ordinary people. But I have thought about this differently, and I think the meaning runs deeper than most people who use the phrase have stopped to consider.A soldier's blood has been tested in ways civilian blood has not. The training pushes the body past every limit it thought it had. Blood has flowed in that process — in the depot, in the field, in the bush, in war zones whose names most civilians cannot spell. And the soldier has been conditioned, completely, to spill blood — including their own — in service of something beyond themselves.Here is what sits underneath all of it: when a soldier bleeds, it is for the people at home. The civilians. The ones going to weddings, jogging in the mornings, living ordinary lives undisturbed. The soldier's blood is the price of that ordinariness. When they are broken, when they do not come back — that cost was paid so civilians would not have to pay it.So when a soldier says "bloody civilian" — yes, there is contempt. There is the distance of someone forged looking at someone who has not been. But underneath it is also something that sounds almost like: your safety is written in my blood. I have bled for you. I am ready to bleed again. And you will never fully know what that means.The blood is on civilian hands. Not as guilt — but as debt. A debt most civilians carry without knowing it exists.I watched the groom finally seated beside his bride, his face holding that stillness I know from years of watching my father. He had made it. But I knew — the way a soldier's son knows — that part of him was still somewhere on that road from Maiduguri. Still paying the cost of getting to a room that was already his.You practically become a guest in your own personal occasion.Civilians saw a soldier in a sharp uniform, arriving a little late.I saw everything it takes to become one. Everything it costs to remain one. Everything that is given and taken and never returned.They call us bloody civilians.After everything — after watching what this life does to the men who chose it and the families who didn't — I understand why.They are not wrong.<img alt="" src="/media/inline_insight_image/479144.png" style="background-color: transparent;"/>

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