RUN! From Civil War to the NFL; The Jehuu Caulcrick Story

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, blank faces, teeth yellowed by jungle-juice and heroin, AK47's hanging off gaunt bodies. It was 1990, the middle of country's second civil war in ten years. He walked for nearly seven-hundred miles, until he was nine-years-old. When he was twenty-seven years old Jehuu carried a football for the Buffalo Bills in the NFL 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 and his family threading an impossible needle of luck, coincidence, fate, fortune and perseverance to escape the devil's playground and make it to the promised land. The Caulcrick family fled war torn Liberia for the United States to make a life. But war torn doesn't capture the horrific, barbaric inhumane things that happened from 1989 to...actually the country is still a hot mess; murder in every way you can conceive, rape, torture, mutilations so creative you wonder how the perpetrators dreamed them up, the human capacity for creative destruction on full display. This historical biography takes the reader through Jehuu's childhood in Liberia to his life in the United States where he was an all-state high school football player, running back at Michigan State University, eventually signing NFL contracts. His early years at his grandma's house in the middle-class suburb of Buchanan were care-free and middle class -Jehuu in the Liberian Bassa dialect means fussy-baby, and spoiled child - but the narrative changes when war breaks out in his front yard, and the Caulcrick family flees their rich neighborhood for a life on the road with hundreds of thousands of other refugees. It culminates in his escape from Liberia, and he starts a life in a place called Clymer, New York. At the same time in his native country a rebel offensive called Operation Octopus was happening, a battle that would see thousands of child soldiers killed in and around the swamps of the Liberian capital city. Through it all child soldiers anchor the story. A boy named Hope, and his story of recruitment into the rebel army, coming up through the ranks of rebel forces to survive an unimaginable world.