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Furious Bursts. Ojukwu's antagonist is a dapper, 33-year-old son of a Methodist missionary. Yakubu Gowon, the commander of the federal forces, had no ambitions beyond serving as a competent staff officer of the Nigerian army until two years ago, when leaders of the Northern countercoup settled on him as head of state. Gowon was, at that point, the North's way of appeasing the South: besides practicing Christianity, he belonged to one of the smallest Northern tribes. Trained at Britain's Sandhurst military school, Gowon once shared barrack quarters with Ojukwu, but has neither his intellect nor his strong interest in politics—a fact that probably does not displease his Northern sponsors. He is an affable, unassuming leader who has shown considerable skill in keeping Nigeria united during a civil war that he himself once predicted would be nothing more than "a short, surgical police action."
It has proved to be neither short nor surgical. The federal army all too often advances only on roads, and by day, and sometimes takes its afternoons off from fighting. When the federal troops attack, their strategy is to saturate Biafran positions with wanton bursts of 76- and 90-mm. artillery fire, move forward quickly, then dig in and wait for the artillery to catch up. Such tactics, or at least the attitude behind them, are not confined to Nigeria's federal troops; they are commonplace with most African armies. Moreover, federal commanders have built up an army to match the scale of their weapons orders —almost a tenfold increase on their 8,000 regulars. Inevitably, the volunteers included unemployed youths and street-corner thugs who planned to serve most of their hitch looting towns and shaking down civilians. They also included a share of vengeful Northern tribalists eager to settle old scores with the Ibo tribe. The songs they chanted marching off to war dealt not with Nigerian unity but with finishing off the Ibos.
The Sweepers. As the war progressed, the chants turned into terrible reality. In captured village after village, frontline troops were followed by ragtag "sweepers" from Northern Nigeria. They nailed Ibo tribesmen to the walls of their wooden huts, then sprayed them with automatic-rifle fire or set torches to their clothes. "Mop-up" soldiers raped women, sometimes lined up whole villages to be shot. The Ibos concluded that the Hausa tribesmen fully intended to use the war to systematically exterminate them. This fear, more than anything else, has hardened the Biafran determination to fight on to the end. "We shall all return to our villages and homes, if necessary behind enemy lines, and torment and harass them at every turn," says Ojukwu.