LONG WAY GONE BY ISHMAEL BEAH

Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah

Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah

Americans tend to regard African conflicts as somewhat vague events signified by horrendous concepts — massacres, genocide, mutilation — that are best kept safely at a distance. Such a disconnect might prove impossible after reading A Long Way Gone, Ishmael Beah's account of his life as a teenage soldier during Sierra Leone's civil war of the 1990s.

We get only a brief glimpse of the joyous, hip-hop-loving Beah before the madness starts. A dozen pages in, he is watching a woman cradle her bullet-riddled baby. Things only get worse. Walking hundreds of miles to flee rebels, Beah is eventually snagged by army forces who use child soldiers eager for revenge against those who have slaughtered their families. Hopped up on marijuana and brown-brown (cocaine mixed with gunpowder), fed a steady diet of American killfest movies like Rambo, Beah proves a particularly effective soldier — in one case winning a throat-slicing contest.

Gone is a clear-eyed, undeniably compelling look at wartime violence — whose viciousness becomes profoundly disturbing when one realizes it's been committed by boys barely in their teens. Beah and his mates are eventually rescued and sent to a UNICEF-affiliated rehab center (he leaves Africa at 17 and later graduates from Oberlin College), resulting in a happy ending of sorts. Yet Gone finds its power in the revelation that under the right circumstances, people of any age can find themselves doing the most unthinkable things.

Ishmael Beah was 13 years old the first time he touched an AK-47. He was frightened, but the gun had been thrust at him by a soldier, and in Sierra Leone during the west African country's brutal civil war you obeyed the authority standing before you if you wanted to survive.

“I held it in my trembling hand,” Beah writes in his harrowing, spellbinding memoir of those terrible days, which robbed him of family, home and childhood. “He then added the magazine, and I shook even more.”

But just like the more than 300,000 other child soldiers who perform their grisly duties worldwide, Beah quickly grew accustomed to carrying a weapon and, through a haze of drugs, brainwashing and numbingly repetitive violence, he became immune to killing and guilt. A year of horror had primed him for transformation. He had lost his family, wandered alone in the jungle, starved, wept and witnessed sights no one should have to see—a woman on fire, a baby shot, villagers burned alive in their houses, severed heads, pulsating brains leaking into the ground. From a carefree, mischievous boy who loved hip-hop, he turned into a conscience-bereft murderer who cared only about staying alive.

Beah's story is a wrenching survivor's tale, but there's no self-pity or political digression to be found. Raw and honest, A Long Way Gone is an important account of the ravages of war, and it's most disturbing as a reminder of how easy it would be for any of us to break, to become unrecognizable in such ...