Author shares his life as a very young soldier
Lynn Bonney
Saturday, March 10, 2007
“A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier,” By Ishmael Beah, Sarah Crichton Books: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2007, $22
In 1993, Ishmael Beah was 12 years old. After school, he and his friends practiced hip-hop lyrics and dreamt of putting together their own band. His family wasn’t perfect — divorce had separated the two older boys from a younger brother, who lived with their mother. But his grandparents were close by, to provide family stability and to tell wonderful stories colored with the imagination that fascinates young boys, even boys who are about to become men.
At 12, Ishmael’s knowledge of war came from “Rambo” movies. Until war came to his village in Sierra Leone, changing his life in ways that neither he, nor most of us, could possibly imagine.
Now 26, Beah is telling his story in “A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier.” It is a story of how a child went from a happy life to a hand-to-mouth refugee existence to the brutal world of a child soldier, one of an estimated 300,000 children around the world who are pressed into service for one side or the other in violent conflict. These are the wars that, too often, are relegated to the back pages of newspapers or to 45-second coverage on the network news. Americans don’t know the places where the fighting is going on, much less the names of the people whose lives are turned upside-down, Beah changes that, telling a personal story that is, sadly, universal, except for the unusual ending that lets us share his story. Anyone who read “A Long Way Gone” will be changed by this memoir.
Beah’s first childhood ended on the day that rebel forces attacked his village. Separated from their parents, a group of friends escaped into the bush, where they spent days living off the land, scrounging what food they could from deserted villages. When they finally returned to their village, they found that homes had been destroyed, that loved ones were missing, that they would have to steal in order to survive.
Sheltered by brave families who opened their doors to strangers, Ishmael and the other boys traveled a rambling route through Sierra Leone. With no maps and little knowledge of the country beyond their own area, they managed, remarkably, to survive — until they were captured by government forces.
Rather than rescuing them, the government pressed them into service, training them as guerrilla soldiers. They learned to wolf down food in less than a minute, to use guns and bayonets to attack the enemy. Their trainers kept them high on marijuana, enabling them to commit unspeakable acts of violence and to face the death of their former childhood friends, now fellow soldiers.
Eventually, surprisingly, the government needed money more than its soldiers and, in effect, sold the boys to UNICEF. Over a long, painful period, Ishmael suffered post-traumatic stress that manifested itself in anger and pain, until his pre-war memories returned, giving him his second childhood. Chosen to speak in New York as a representative of child soldiers, he eventually graduated from a U.N. high school and went on to earn a degree from Oberlin College.
“I never thought that I would be alive to this day,” Beah writes, “much less that I would write a book.” Readers who grieve and rejoice with Beah, will be grateful that he is — and that he did.
• Emporia Public Library staff and volunteers write “On the Shelf.”