Advantages Of A Long Way Gone By Ishmael Beah

The Damages of War

“Mourning the dead wasn’t part of the business of killing and trying to stay alive.” (149) The mind of a child is a scary place, full of dangerous thoughts. There is no hope, and, in their minds, no need to hope. They get used to the environment, to the killing. They see nothing wrong with what they do. In 2007, Ishmael Beah published a memoir called “A Long Way Gone” about his time as a child soldier in Sierra Leone. When he was twelve, the RUF (rebels) attacked his home village of Mogbwemo while he was in Mattru Jong with his older brother and their friends. The RUF then began to attack neighboring villages, sending Ishmael and his brother running. They are eventually separated, and Ishmael finds a group of boys his age.

For example, people were too scared to go to work. They didn’t want the rebels or the army to shoot them. That means that there were no doctors there to help take care of those who became ill. So when Ishmaels uncle got sick, there was no one willing to help him, resulting in death. “My cousins cried, asking, Who is going to take care of us now? Why did this happen to us in these difficult times?” (208) Even though he wasn’t their biological father, he still treated them as though they were a part of him. He loved them as their own, and his death took a huge toll on them. I can only imagine how many other families were torn apart simply because the doctors weren’t willing to leave home and help as it meant risking their own

Many of the child soldiers who were able to leave the war had a tremendous amount of problems. “But at night some of us would wake up from nightmares, sweating, screaming, and punching our own heads to drive out the images that continued to torment us even when we were no longer asleep.” (148) The child soldiers who were rescued and sent to one of the rehabilitation centers still had the same mentality. They were still addicted to drugs, and to killing. They would sometimes even choke one another. But when that need to kill faded and the last of their high wore off, they finally came to terms with the fact that they had killed many people. They had burned villages to the ground. They would have nightmares, the kind of nightmares a normal kid would run to their parents about. But they had nobody. The personnel at the centers tried to connect with them, but the boys still had the mentality that they shouldn’t trust