Kawther Eljehmi’s novel The Colonel follows Libyan American Adam Al-Murabit, the son of assassinated Colonel Ali Al-Murabit, who has grown up in America without knowing his father. When his half-sister reaches out to him for the first time in 2015, Adam realizes he knows nothing about his father’s life in Libya or his relatives who still live there. He decides to remedy this by writing his father’s biography. In the course of writing the book, Adam speaks with family members and friends in Libya, Tunisia, and America. The following excerpt comes from Adam’s interview with Barka, Ali Al-Murabit’s closest friend in America and an affectionate father figure to Adam. Barka was Ali’s fellow prisoner of war in Chad, and joined him in strategically switching sides to become members of the Libyan armed opposition, and then dissidents-in-exile. Here, Barka tells Adam how he met Ali during the 1987 war in Chad.

I swallowed a whole lot of sand the afternoon we got lost in the desert. A few hours before we got caught, a passing sandstorm had blown into our faces. It had picked the worst time to hit because our scalps were already being burned by the midday sun, and if we’d been back at the base, we’d have grumbled about its timing. But we were busy running for our lives, so we couldn’t waste our breath on useless complaining.

Little did I know it then, but this wouldn’t be the last time we had grit shoved down our throats. And the next time, things would be much worse.

That morning, we’d hightailed it out of the Wadi Doum base. We lost the base in a battle at dawn, on March 23, 1987. The fighting had begun the day before at around five in the afternoon; it died down during the night and started up again at daybreak. Whoever managed to get away, did. But some of us fought back bravely, fools that we were, and many were killed on the spot. The ones who stayed to fight were either old soldiers, hung up on their military honor, or high-school students—the oldest were seventeen, like me—who thought they’d be safe if they just followed orders. We didn’t understand how the Chadians had found the main entry route, a twisting path that was kept clear of mines. Years later, we discovered that our footprints and the marks our cars left in the sand had given away the safe entrance. Our own tracks! Yes, it was as simple as that.

I’d spent two whole months at Wadi Doum, but I still had no clue where to find the other mine-free trails that led in and out of the base. On the day the Chadians clobbered us, they sprang an attack at dawn. At first, us green young recruits thought it was part of our training exercises, or just a skirmish like the ones from the night before. Shells shot over our heads like meteors, lighting up the sky while we waited for the sun to rise on a new day, a day that would be lost from our lives. I stuck close to the cannon, which—luckily for us, compared to other units—was mounted on top of a Toyota pickup truck. So, at least we could move our weapon around, and we pulled back and took cover behind it at a spot where we could fight off the attacks. I didn’t wake up to what was really happening until I saw Ali running, hunched over, toward my group’s commander. He was shouting, “Let them go, Abdulsalam! Get out now! It’s over.”

Our commander, Major Abdulsalam, stared hard at Colonel Ali. He knew the Colonel was a great patriot, but orders like these would never come from a man who believed, without a shred of a doubt, that he was at war to defend his country, and not invading someone else’s. “Is this you talking, Colonel Ali?” he asked. “Or orders from up top?”

We could hardly hear what they were saying, but we hoped he’d let us escape from this blazing hell.

“They’re just schoolboys, Abdulsalam. And there aren’t any orders except mine. Let them go!”

Our commander turned to look at us, and I saw his eyes were red. Must be the smoke, I thought, from all the burning bodies and equipment. But his voice shook when he spoke to us, and I realized he was fighting tears of defeat. “Whoever wants to leave can go. Go in God’s protection.”

But he stayed.

I left without a backward look, or even a word of goodbye. It was a knee-jerk, selfish reaction, especially since he’d treated us like he actually gave a damn. I’d counted myself lucky when they put me in his group. It wasn’t just because we belonged to the same race and tribe—he was a Tebu from Kufra like me—but he also taught me himself to use a 23-millimeter anti-aircraft machine gun. None of the other soldiers and officers showed us anything like the kind of fatherly care Major Abdulsalam gave us.

A friend of ours died during training. He was another one of the students dragged into this war. Killed by the recoil of a 106-millimeter cannon. All because the solider who trained him didn’t tell him he needed to stand clear. Because why bother pointing out the obvious? So he died. Just like that. Without his parents knowing how or why he was killed. They didn’t even know where he’d been taken. The poor boy had gone off to school on an ordinary morning, and no one knew it would be for the last time. It was the same for all of us. They took us in buses toward the as-Sarra air base. Told some of us we were on a school trip to the Aouzou base, and others that they would visit Benghazi! We didn’t care where we went, only that we were on a fun trip to somewhere new. It was a trip to somewhere new, all right, but fun? Ha! We’d just become victims of the largest kidnapping of school students in Libya’s history.

At as-Sarra we were given kit bags, and we were struck by how bizarre this all was. But the truth behind what they’d decided for us was stranger than our wildest suspicions. We never imagined we’d be thrown into the chaos of Chad’s war! And without a single word to our parents!

I was my father’s only child. My mother had died when I was a baby, and my father’s second wife didn’t give him any children, so he stopped hankering for a big family and made do with me. He kept his wife on to take care of me. After I left Chad and moved to America, I tried to get in touch with them. That’s when I got the shocking news: My father had died, his heart broken over losing me. And his wife—she was my mother in everything but birth—had left our city. I lost hope of getting in touch with her, and I didn’t try again after that. It was better for her to think I was dead. After all, I was an armed dissident who’d escaped from the war in Chad. If word got out that she was in touch with me, she might end up being spied on and held responsible, maybe even accused of being a traitor. The government was burning up with panic during those miserable years, so anything was possible. Chad­, with its prisoners of war and the people who’d gone missing there, was a bone in the regime’s throat. A bone that it couldn’t swallow, so it spat it back out—claiming stubbornly that Libya had won the war.

I ditched my unit, turned my back on my commander, and followed Colonel Ali. I thought he was on his way to one of the safe exits that I didn’t know how to find, but turns out he was doing what he’d done with us: racing between groups containing students and ordering them to run away. Some of them ran, but got nowhere fast, scurrying in circles like rats in a ring of fire. They were looking for another rat to follow, one who knew where the gaps in the mines were. That day, we weren’t as scared of being bombed to death or taken prisoner as we were of stepping on a landmine and being blown to smithereens.

I kept tailing Colonel Ali and saw him return to the center of the base. But I dithered a bit before I followed him: How could I go back to a spot that was more dangerous than where I was now? The Chadians were aiming at the weapons being fired at them, so I decided to hide behind an abandoned cannon that was protected by a curved wall of sandbags. I kept my eyes on Ali. He was running around warning people and threatening everyone who refused to leave. At the time, I wondered why he was so convinced that we would lose. Why did he doubt our strength, when our troops were armed to the teeth and stationed at the largest military base in Chad—in short, President Habré’s biggest nightmare? How could he be sure it was useless to fight back, when he knew better than I did that the Chadian army didn’t have our tanks or our rockets, never mind our airplanes? Could the French forces have decided to step in? I figured they had, because French fighter planes had destroyed the only radar at the base. Later, I learned that the French never got into open war with our army. But that day, Ali may have shared my suspicions.

Ali’s last stop before leaving the base was one of the barracks. When he ran out, I saw he was carrying a kit bag. He was moving fast, so I could tell the bag wasn’t heavy. It wasn’t full­ either, as he hadn’t bothered to tie it closed at the top. The clashes had begun to die down, and as soon as Ali left the base’s center, I decided to come out of my hiding place and follow him. The instant I made this decision, something exploded into the cannon I’d used as a shield. It felt like it was my head that had exploded. My eyes went dark, my ears went deaf, and I thought I was dead. My vision cleared slowly, and I found myself surrounded by a cloud of dust. I went blank for a while. I forgot why I was there and wondered where my friends were. Then I came back to my senses and remembered Colonel Ali. Bit by bit, the sounds of cannons and machine guns began to return. Funnily enough, the booming and blasting cheered me up because I’d been afraid my hearing was gone forever. I lifted my head and stuck out my neck to look for Ali. It put me at risk but I didn’t care. I was hoping the dust would clear, and expecting my brains to be blown out any second. In the end, either my move would show me where Ali was so I could join him, or it would finish me off and I could rest in peace.

I finally spied him holed up behind one of the Toyotas that were scattered all around me. He was looking at me, his head bowed, and when he spotted me moving, he signaled that I should follow him. How did he know I was there? How did he find me in this nightmare of a place? He looked like an angel to me then, Adam. An angel with wings, a hero, a savior, a loving father—you can fill in as many worn-out labels as you want. I suddenly wanted to run to him like a child, the way I used to run to my father as a schoolboy, when I was chased by stray dogs in the street.

Colonel Ali took off and I took off after him. That day, I learned what it meant to run. And it was a race with no certain finish line.