"No Taller than My Gun": How a white guy in Virginia channeled a genius Congolese child soldier

The novel--chilling but ideally inspiring as well
(Image by David H. Rothman—just owner. Cover design: Marko Marković.)   Details   DMCA

The teaser on the cover sums up No Taller than My Gun: "From child soldier to drone whiz to pirate to tycoon-philanthropist." My hero is very very lucky and very very smart. In 2050 he is writing his war memoir on the horrors of a quarter of a century before.

So how did a pale-skinned white guy in Alexandria, Virginia, end up inside the brain of a genius child soldier in the Democratic Republic of the Congo? I'd be wondering, too. The American Dirt controversy was on my mind last year, and then as now, I believed that different races and ethnicities could write about others, albeit only after lots of homework or at least meaningful experiences from Life. More on that later, but first, a word on Gun's origins in 2016.

Ray Arco, a Golden Globe judge and a Holocaust survivor from Roumania, thought George Clooney might want to produce a movie about child soldiers. Clooney's wife, Amal, is a leading human rights lawyer. My deal with Ray was that I'd be the main writer and he'd earn his keep pushing the project to Hollywood. We could both fantasize over the possibility of Ray having to recuse himself if our baby were up for a Globe.

The inspiration for my title came from the words of a child soldier quoted in a human rights report: "My gun was as tall as me." My hero is actually tall for a 15-year-old. I made the title metaphorical. Guns first, in the minds of the bad guys! After some months, an early draft of the script was ready. Ray said Netflix among others wanted a look at it. But then we argued for weeks over bizarre issues such as the width of the script margins. Ray wanted us to ignore industry standards, and he even tried to talk me out of using script-writing programs that respected them. Never mind that most everyone in Hollywood was compliant and automated and happily bowing down three times a day to the creators of Final Draft and other marvels. By the time we finally compromised on such matters, the claimed Netflix interest had vanished. George Clooney? No idea what happened there.

More positively, Ray pestered me into turning the script into a novel to help whet Hollywood's appetite. I'd done well over 90 percent of the work on the movie project, and unassisted, he could not write the best American English despite his talents in other areas -- hence, my solo byline on the book.

Sadly Ray fell, suffered a concussion, went into a coma, and died of Covid at age 91 on Christmas day 2020 before he could read the first draft of the novel and argue with me over the margins there. I'll mourn him as a friend despite our myriad of creative differences. Online photos tipped me off about his fondness for berets, crazy flamboyant clothes in general, and poses with VIPs ranging from Oprah Winfrey and Julia Roberts to George Clooney and Leonardo DiCaprio. We never met face to face. But from afar we knew each other a decade or so, going back to the time some nut bafflingly posted Ray's phone number in the comments area of my ebook site and Mr. Golden Globe Judge phoned me out of the blue with gruff orders to take it down; I did, happy to keep the comments section on topic. Ray and his wife, Ileana, called me "the American in the family."

Constructing Gun's book incarnation as a short thriller, not an epic, I hoped to reach a mass audience otherwise oblivious to the suffering in Africa. Here's the plot of the book and movie:

Lemba Adula is a fifteen-year-old electronics genius. Josiane is his twin sister and a talented dancer and singer eager to be an international rumba star. Gun worshippers kidnap Lemba for his technical brilliance and abilities as a marksman. Can he escape in time to rescue Josiane from sex traffickers eager to sell her off? To save his mother and father from terrorists, he's forced to fight for the wrong side both on land and sea. The wrong side is the Congolese Purification Army, led by a seven-foot-tall whack job all too handy with AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, and oversized machetes.

Ray wanted Lemba to be just 12 years old. I myself favored a 15-year-old protagonist who could be more credible as a tech whiz and more deeply ponder the consequences of his actions as a child soldier and military drone pilot and trainer. When I wrote the book in Lemba's voice, I had to do research even beyond the work for the script.

Online and offline from more than 9,000 miles away, I delved into everything from Congolese wildlife to the old colonial outrages documented in Adam Hochschild's book King Leopold's Ghost. I read newspapers out of the Democratic Republic of the Congo; I watched YouTubes; I visited virtual forums.

But that still wasn't enough, especially in the wake of the American Dirt episode. Two wonderful Congolese freelancers fact-checked and critiqued my book manuscript. One of them, Jean Felix Mwema Ngandu, is a civic leader, a former Mandela Fellow and a cofounder of the popular Community Service Day. The other, Junior Boweya, is a translator, software localization expert and businessman in Kinshasa. I found Junior via the Upwork freelance service and Jean Felix through a Congolese journalist working for a well-known media organization.

Junior and Jean Felix were godsends just like the goodies online. I wanted to find out, for example, what kind of dog my hero would own, and what life was like for child soldiers, and what was the history of University of Kinshasa. I could never be a true expert on the Congo, also comprising the Republic of the Congo, a different country without "Democratic" in its name. The same for Africanness or Blackness. But I could imagine characters and situations for a thriller-adventure story and see what was plausible and what wasn't, and what I should write about which was not already in the manuscript.

I was lucky. Most of the corrections were simply on such matters as geographical details. And of course, I relied on Junior and Jean Felix for the authentic names of people and places, real or imaginary. The two were strangers to each other. And yet they agreed on just about everything.

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