When he was seven years old Jehuu Caulcrick (Jay-you Call-crick) walked the Liberian coast with his family, passing through checkpoints armed with child soldiers not much older than him. These soldiers, these children, had blank faces, teeth yellowed by jungle-juice and heroin, with AK47's hanging off their gaunt bodies. It was 1990, the middle of country's second civil war in ten years.
Jehuu walked for two years, covering nearly seven-hundred miles.
When he was twenty-seven Jehuu carried a football for the Buffalo Bills in the National Football League for one yard and a first down, his only carry in a five-year nomadic career as a professional football player.
In between, a lot happened.
This is the story of a boy from Liberia, Africa and his family as they threaded an impossible needle of luck, fate, and perseverance to escape the most dangerous place on earth. The Caulcrick family fled war torn Liberia for the United States to make a life. But "war torn" doesn't capture the barbaric inhumane things that happened in Liberia from 1989 to...actually the country is still a hot mess to this day. Coups, assassinations, atrocities, murder in every way you can conceive, rape, torture, mutilations were a daily occurrence. Violence so creative you wonder how the carnage was dreamed up.
Jehuu was right in the middle of it all.
The book encompasses Jehuu's childhood in Liberia and his life in the United States, where he was an all-state high school football player, a running back at Michigan State University, and eventually a player in the National Football League. His youth in Liberia started as a care-free life at grandma's house in the middle-class suburb of Buchanan, Liberia. When war breaks out in Jehuu's front yard, the Caulcrick family flees their affluent neighborhood for a life on the road with thousands of other refugees. That life climaxes with his escape from Liberia, a harrowing race to the border of Ivory Coast and a plane ride to JFK airport. The Caulcrick family starts a new chapter in a place called Clymer, tucked into the southwest corner of New York state.
At the same time as his escape, his native country is mired in a rebel offensive called Operation Octopus, the siege of Monrovia, a battle that would see thousands of child soldiers killed in and around the swamps of the Liberian capital city.