In his memoir A Long Way Gone, Ishmael Beah recounts his time as a child soldier in the government army of Sierra Leone, when he was just thirteen years old. Now living in the United States, he looks back on his experiences at the age of twenty-six and recalls the intense suffering he endured during this war, including hunger and extreme privation, witnessing the torture and murder of many innocent civilians, and learning to kill and torture himself. In the end, he became as brutal and dehumanized as the people who had destroyed his family and home. His main themes that recur throughout the book is that his life as a teenage boy was simply a ‘long way gone’, along with his childhood and innocence, while most of his family died in the war, including his parents, grandparents and brother. Beah simply did what was necessary in order to survive this terrible time, and he finally was able to create a new life for himself in the United States. He had been a normal teenager in his home village Mattru Jong, mainly interested in rap music, dancing, and the poor relations he had with his stepmother. To him, wars only existed in the movies or on television until the rebels arrived in his area to take control of the diamond mines on behalf of their patron, the murderous Liberian dictator Charles Taylor. From that point onward, he was a refugee, running through the countryside in an effort to escape the rebel soldiers, who plundered, brutalized and killed the civilian population. Even after being returned to his village the first time, he had to flee again and eventually ended up being drafted into the government army. Beah recalled how ordinary children like himself were turned into ‘Little Rambo’s’, trained to kill and destroy until this simply became a normal, routine part of their lives. This war had dehumanized them, and even after he was sent to the UNICEF camp for rehabilitation, there was no escape from up, and he finally decided to leave the country after the rebels captured and sacked the capital city of Freetown.
Part of the true power of this memoir is the contrast between Beah’s life as an ordinary teenager growing up in Sierra Leone and what he became in the war, but one of his main themes was that this childhood life of innocence and with most of his family was about to be lost forever. Young people in that country did not seem extremely different from their counterparts in the United States, since they wore the same kind of clothes, listened to similar music and watched the same kinds of movies. He talked about his mother, father, stepmother and grandmother, who all became refugees and victims of the war as well, and how it finally separated him forever from his home and family. None of them would survive the war, and this recurring theme throughout the book is that, like a Holocaust survivor, he no longer has any home to which he can return. Beah’s innocence was such at the age of thirteen that he had never had any experience of war in real life before this time, and was more interested in the rap music of LL Cool J and Run-D.M.C. than any of the rumors about how the conflict was spreading to their area. He recalled how he and his friends wore American-style sneakers with “baggy jeans, and underneath them shorts and sweatpants for dancing” (Beah 9). Once the rebels moved into this area to take over the diamond mines, though, his life would never be the same, and the process of degradation and dehumanization began long before he was forced into the army.
His first hint that his childhood would soon come to an end was when he saw that all the people had fled from his grandmother’s village, leaving only footprints behind. Thus begins another major theme of the memoir that he was forced to do whatever was necessary to survive and had no choice in the matter. Then he began to see civilians, including many children and old people, who had been tortured and murdered by the rebels, which happened all the time during this war. One father was “covered with his son’s blood” and Beah remembered that “I felt nauseated, and my head was spinning” (Beah 13). He was too young to know much about politics, war or military affairs beyond what his father had told him, and he really had little understanding of what was happening or why. Sierra Leone had been a British colony from 1808 to 1961, and then a one-party state after a military coup in 1968. His father had called this the beginning of the period of “rotten politics”, and even though the rebels claimed to be liberators, he wondered “what kind of a liberation movement shoots innocent civilians, children, that little girl?” (Beah 14). At first, he and his friends and family told themselves that the war would be over in a few months, but of course that turned out not to be the case at all.
Even though he had been returned to his village once, the second time he was forced to flee he realized that it too was ‘long way gone’ and that even if he survived he would probably never see his home and family again. He was running through the forest again, being fired on by the rebels, and “the bullets continued to fly behind us, but now their redness could be seen as they passed through the brushes” (Beah 98). All the civilians captured by the rebels were held under appalling conditions and shot for the slightest infractions, even for going to the latrine without permission. After this second escape, he ended up in the hands of the government’s army, and with a group of other boy soldiers was given an indoctrination by a lieutenant who “went on for almost an hour, describing how the rebels had cut off the heads of some people’s family, making them watch” (Beah 108). Beah believed this because he had seen them commit many such atrocities, which made it easier for him to adjust to life as a soldier and to kill the enemy when ordered, even other child soldiers like himself.
Here again, Beah takes up the theme of dehumanization and survival of the fittest, for everyone in this story who survives at all has been thoroughly traumatized and brutalized by the war. This is a merciless world and often senseless world where the only rules are kill or be killed, eat or be eaten. To survive, Beah was forced to shut off all feelings, learning how to kill, and forgetting who he was in the fast, fpr that boy no longer existed. At first they were all given AK-47’s without any ammunition, and trained in the most basic infantry tactics, before being sent off to fight the rebels in real battles. As he looked back on the first time he marched off to war, he remembered how “I could hear the sounds of the guns far away in the distance and the cries of the people dying a long way gone” (Beah 117). Over time, he and the other soldiers became hardened to warfare and the cruelties they had to inflict on the enemy, such as shooting other child soldiers who had been taken prisoner. He and his comrades “talked only about the war and how surprised we were with the way the lieutenant, the corporal or one of us had killed someone” (Beah 126). There were many boys who came to enjoy this and identify completely with the war and the military, acting like ‘Little Rambo’s’ they had seen in the movies. Most of them were grateful that they at least had access to regular food in the army, as well as money and goods that they could steal from their dead enemies. Beah realized even then that “my childhood had gone by without my knowing, and it seemed as if my heart had frozen” (Beah 126).
Beah was finally released from the army and sent to a special UNICEF program designed to rehabilitate child soldiers and help them readjust to some kind of normal civilian life. He did have some contacts with his uncle, who tried to ask him what he had done during the war, but he really did not feel like discussing it. Beah knew that his former life and childhood home were gone and could not be replaced, any more than his lost childhood and innocence. When the rebels captured Freetown in 1997, and began looting the city and massacring the civilians there, he knew that he would simply have to escape the country completely because there was no future there. He ended up in New York, going toe school with kids who also liked to listen to rap music and watch the same kinds of movies he had in Sierra Leone, but a real war of the kind he had experienced at the age of thirteen was just beyond their imagination. They also wanted to know what had really happened and he promised to tell them someday, which he finally did in this memoir. Beah was able to build a new life for himself and recover from his horrible experiences to some degree, but as the title of the book indicates, everything he once was and everything he had known in Sierra Leone before the war was indeed a long way gone—forever.
WORKS CITED
Beah, Ishmael. A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. NY: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2007.
