A Long Way Gone Review

The Pathfinder: A Journal of Peace and Conflict Studies Volume 1 Issue 1 January 2009

Beah, Ishmael, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. Farrar, Straus & Giroux: New York, New York, 2007.  Marianne Taflinger

 What is it to be a child caught up in the confusion and chaos of war? Ishmael Beah tells the harrowing tale of his experiences of the civil war in Sierra Leone as hapless victim and then victimizer as a child soldier for the government. The book powerfully evokes his confusion and the shifting alliance of townspeople who fear the roaming band of boys. The work is important because it demonstrates both how children become the tools of war and how armed conflict devours their spirit and fuels their resolve as a group. Finally, it exposes the moral decay of both sides of this conflict The book deftly conveys the growing sense of unease, paranoia and terror of the boys. One kindly neighbor says: "This country has lost its good heart. People don’t trust each other anymore. Years ago, you would have been heartily welcomed into this village." But the total breakdown of the social order is depicted in ways great and small. Marauding bands of boys unite for protection, but peril exists everywhere. The book is particularly effective in depicting Beah’s reaction when he discovers that his family has been burned alive in their house. He writes, "My head was burning, as if on fire." This triggers further violent reaction in him. He and his friends are inured to seeing people left with just thumbs because their fingers had been cut off with machetes. Beah’s account of how the government troops exhort them to commit violent acts portrays textbook examples of brainwashing and the propaganda that creates killing machines. For example, they explain: "That is why we must kill every single one of them. Think of it as destroying a great evil. It is the highest service that you can perform for your country." The boys are taught how to use AK-47s, how to stab banana trees with bayonets while "visualizing the enemy, the rebels who killed your parents." To further feed this murderous rage, they receive a steady diet of war movies, marijuana and a type of cocaine called "brown brown." But the opposing side is just as brutal, once the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) captured Beah and his friends, promising to annihilate an entire village in front of both the children and government forces that arm them, exhorting them to commit greater violent acts. ‘A Long Way Gone’ tells a riveting, gut-wrenching tale of how children caught up in a confusing, morally ambiguous struggle for survival become killing machines. For me, reading this book is to live inside the nightmare of war and grasp the difficulty of rehabilitating children for whom violence becomes normal and expected. P.W. Singer’s ‘Children at War’ documents the facts of child soldiers in armed conflicts around the world. Singer details the many advantages child soldiers have, but Beah’s book shows you what these children see, how their hearts and minds are twisted, what they feel, and the terrible toll that the loss of their humanity takes on them. Beah tells an unapologetic and unsentimental story of his participation in gruesome acts, as well as his rehabilitation and escape to the United States. More of the book is devoted to events before becoming a child soldier and the account of his rehabilitation and escape to New York passes rather quickly. To this reviewer, the emphasis seems warranted. Gandhi once said that men could be persuaded to eradicate evil so long as you were able to get them to pay attention to it. ‘A Long Way Gone’ shows how child soldiers can be created, captured and reprogrammed to be children once more, when the world intervenes to stop this evil.