Kenya: In London, a friend was moving fast to get a wedding gown made and shipped to a friend in Kenya waiting to marry a Kenya Defence Forces platoon commander.
In the trenches of Somalia, the would-be groom, military officer Lieutenant Kevin Webi, was fighting the Al-Shabaab militia with part of his life dominated by his upcoming wedding to a young lawyer, Rachael Masika.
In Western Kenya, Webi’s parents were immersed in wedding plans for their son, not in the least bothered by the soldier’s earlier counsel to them that being a KDF officer, they should be prepared for anything, including getting killed in war.
But the wedding was never to be and the gown from London landed on Rachael’s hands wedding was never to be and the gown from London landed in Rachael’s hands when it had turned into just a piece of cloth, clawing at her heart and opening up layers of painful memories in her mind.
Back at Webi’s home, what the soldier had said as a joke or perhaps in premonition of his death had come to pass. The wedding plans had long turned into funeral arrangements and the body of the brave soldier once garlanded by then President Mwai Kibaki for outstanding performance in training had been interred amid tears.
In a cruel turn of events, Webi’s colleagues, who had been preparing for the military formation at his wedding, where the groom and his bride would walk between ceremonial bayonets gleaming against the sun’s rays, instead turned up to send him off with a 21-gun salute. As they pulled the triggers to fire, the recoil from the gun probably shook their hearts and opened floodgates of memories of the gunfire that chillingly marked their days in the battlefront.
Read more at: Standard
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