March 23, 1991. That was the day the Sierra Leone Civil War begun, and the day that a whole lot of lives were ruined. Families were split apart. Men and boys were taken to become soldiers, and do the unthinkable. Ishmael Beah was one of those boys. At only thirteen, he was brought to the government army, and forced to fight the attacking rebels. After he managed to survive, Beah was taken by UNICEF and learned to live again. In A Long Way Gone, he manages to retell those days in a shocking and mesmerizing way.
Beah, the author of A Long Way Gone, wanted to write this book to give readers an inside perspective on this war. Peeking into what this is really like is very shocking, and makes you realize how bad battles like these really get. This is an account of a big part of his life, and he wants to share this with others so that they can realize how many people this Civil War affected. Conflicts that aren’t affecting us
…show more content…
In the chronology, there is several pieces of information about Sierra Leone, and about the war. Most, if not all of the dates somehow relate to the anecdotal evidence seen throughout the book. In the beginning of the book, Beah introduced how we was “first touched by the war”, and how news of the fighting didn’t seem real until it was right in front of him. After the story was completed, the timeline tied back to this. Beah recorded how the war started, in March of 1991. “A small band of men who call themselves the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), under the leadership of a former corporal, Foday Sankoh, begin to attack villages in eastern Sierra Leone, on the Liberian border” (Beah 222). This ties back to the anecdotal evidence because it gives a date (March 1991) and a name (the RUF and Foday Sankoh) to who is actually attacking them. When the author gives you this information, it connects certain dots together and solidifies the