My new friends have begun to suspect I haven’t told them the full story of my life. “Why did you leave Sierra Leone?” “Because there is a war.” “You mean, you saw people running around with guns and shooting each other?” “Yes, all the time.” “Cool.” I smile a little. “You should tell us about it sometime.” “Yes, sometime.”
This is how wars are fought now: by children, hopped-up on drugs and wielding AK-47s. Children have become soldiers of choice. In the more than fifty conflicts going on worldwide, it is estimated that there are some 300,000 child soldiers. Ishmael Beah used to be one of them.
What is war like through the eyes of a child soldier? How does one become a killer? How does one stop? Child soldiers have been profiled by journalists, and novelists have struggled to imagine their lives. But until now, there has not been a first-person account from someone who came through this hell and survived.
In A Long Way Gone, Beah, now twenty-five years old, tells a riveting story: how at the age of twelve, he fled attacking rebels and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence. By thirteen, he’d been picked up by the government army, and Beah, at heart a gentle boy, found that he was capable of truly terrible acts. This is a rare and mesmerizing account, told with real literary force and heartbreaking honesty.
I just finished reading this heartbreaking book. It paints a story of a child who's life is rocked by the war that changes it forever. It left me thinking about it even when I put it down. I can not imagine the things he saw, but his story paints a pretty painful picture of what this war did to this country. An amazing eye opening tale.
I’ve wondered for a long time if I have what it takes to kill a man. Part of me has always believed that it is innate in our nature to kill for our own survival, but I’ve always been fascinated by stories of Quakers who were so anti-violence that they would let themselves be murdered rather than strike back. This does not seem natural; in fact it seems downright ludicrous. A Long Way Gone tells Ishmael Beah’s own story of his life in a war torn country, and he seems to answer this question for me. It would seem that depending on what horrors you have seen, what lies you have been told and what hope for escape you have, just about anyone can become apathetically ruthless. Except Quakers, of course.
This book hit home for me in many ways. It enforced my belief that the scariest thing in the world is a teenage boy with a gun in his hands and a belief that he is entitled to something. What that something is differs among countries and cultures, but that sense of entitlement allows them to justify the means for the ends. As this terrifying mentality seems to be popping up in more and more countries through out the world, including our own, I think this book is crucial to read. It illustrates the struggle to maintain one’s humanity in the worst of circumstances and how easy it is to let it slip away. However, it also demonstrates that one man can make a difference and that aid organizations can help to solve the problem one child at a time. We risk our humanity if we do not at least consider our own reaction in these situations and how we can work to ease the problem now. As a result, I think the book is a must read.
That said the book was not the easiest thing for me to read. I often felt that while the country was war torn that the story lagged. Of course, at points it had to in order to tell the more introspective side of things. The author seemed hesitant to delve into the acts which he had committed as a boy soldier. While this is understandable, I felt it made the book somewhat less effective without more of a first-person look at the psychology of how you bring yourself to committing those deeds. Do you steel yourself every time? Does it ever register that something might be wrong now that you are so comfortable taking lives? It reads as though the author felt that his body was on auto-pilot, committing acts that his brain would not allow him to think about, and that definitely shows in the writing. The entire section of the book where Beah is actively involved in the war feels as though it is told on auto-pilot, which was difficult for me to reconcile with what I imagine had occurred. I wished thoroughly through out the book that I felt like things were moving more. Things were always happening, and yet they did not seem real or like a development. I can see how some could make an argument for the book being written in this manner, but it was extremely difficult for me to continue listening to such atrocities in such a passive voice.
Additionally, there are characters who are with us for a large portion of the book, yet we are constantly being reminded of who they are: the oldest, the quiet one, etc. This began to grate on my nerves. Being introduced to them once or twice would have been fine since we meet several at once. Being reminded nearly every time they are brought up again becomes tedious.
Ultimately, I do think this book is a necessary read and sheds some light on issues that many of us have not previously considered. However, one should be very aware of what they’re renting when they take this book out. It is not action-packed; it is merely heart-breaking.
