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[bibliogramma]

A Long Way Gone, Ishmael Beah

In A Long Way Gone, Ishmael Beah gives us a courageously honest account of his personal nightmares. As a young boy in war-torn Sierra Leone, Beah is separated from his family following attacks by rebels. Banding together with other young boys from his home region, he struggles to survive in a world where violence is becoming more and more common, and where few people are willing to take the risk of helping homeless and vagrant young men who have no way of proving that they are the victims, not the perpetrators, of violent attacks. Searching for word of their families, Beah and his comrades find only tragedy after tragedy. Eventually, Beah – still a child – is conscripted into the government military forces and sent into battle against rebel soldiers, many of whom are no older than he is.*

Beah’s story, as horrific as it is, is the story of one of the few, fortunate ones. He is rescued from the life of a child soldier, receives rehabilitatory care, and makes connections that enable him to escape to the US and safety when the rebel forces overthrow the government of Sierra Leone and tear apart his life once more.

This is a painful book to read – and even after you’re finished, you still won’t fully understand the special horrors that war holds for children forced to be soldiers.

As it happens, I once knew and worked with someone who had been a child soldier during the Iran-Iraq war. He didn’t talk about it much, but I know some of the things he experienced, and I also know that that unlike Beah, he never had the opportunity for rehabilitation treatment. A charming man on the surface, he was in some ways morally adrift. Even the slightest hint of a challenge to his security could overwhelm his conscience. An intelligent and well-educated person, his language was full of unthinkingly violent imagery. He controlled his anger well – but was angry more often than almost anyone I’ve ever met, and the few people I’ve known who were as angry were, based on their own personal histories, dealing with some degree of PTSD as well. Most people who didn’t know or understand his background were uneasy around him, and I lost track of him after he was let go from the company where we both worked, for being “not the right fit.” I know some of my colleagues were afraid he’d “snap” one day and do something violent. I don’t know if they realised that he was afraid of that too.

The human cost of war, and especially of making children go to war, is too much to pay. Maybe someday, we won’t have to pay it anymore.

*There has been some question over the accuracy and timing of some portions of Beah’s account of his experiences, written 10 years after his rescue. Most of those raising questions have made it clear that they do not doubt Beah’s sincerity or the general outlines of his account, but believe that his memories may have been affected by the trauma he experienced, the rampant drug use engaged in by Beah and his fellow child soldiers (which he discusses in his memoir) and the passage of time between the events he recounts and the writing of the book. Beah has denied these criticisms, and since so many records have been lost and so many people have died in Sierra Leone during the period of civil war, it appears to be difficult if not impossible to make any final determination. In the final event the reader, as always, must judge for herself. My own assessment is that the account has an emotional truth to it that cannot be disputed, even while acknowledging that human memory is inconsistent at the best of times, and notoriously unreliable when subjected to great stress.