A Long Way Gone--book review

I haven't seen anywhere where it says England and France are going along with sanctions against Iran. Even if they are, it won't make any difference. I am not too worried about what they are "about to do," they've already done more than enough to suit me.

Yesterday I finished reading A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah. This is an incredible story of a teen-aged boy of Sierra Leone who is separated from his family, is forced to run and hide in the jungle for weeks, is hungry and totally miserable the entire time, eventually has to join the army to fight against the rebels, witnesses and engages himself in the most violent acts of murder and arson imaginable, learns his family survived the initial raids that killed most everyone else, tries to reconnect with them only to see them destroyed by rebels just before he can actually meet with them, goes on killing until by some strange act of fate is selected to be rehabilitated. As among other things he has been taking drugs, mostly cocaine and marijuana for months, in order to keep participating in the virtually endless pattern of slaughter, his rehabilitation is extremely difficult and takes months. He recovers with the help of a sympathetic and understanding nurse and some others, he eventually goes to live with an uncle in Freetown. In a short time he is one of two veteran child soldiers selected to represent Sierra Leone at a meeting at the U.N., discussing the issue of child soldiers. While there he meets a very wealthy American woman who stays in touch with him when he returns to Freetown. When rebels attack Freetown and the slaughter begins there as he had seen it before, and continues for months, his uncle dies and he escapes to Conakry, the capital of Guinea. From there he manages to fly to New York where he lives with his newly adopted mother. He goes to college for a time and writes this book about his experiences.

It is a fine and readable book, Beah is not without a talent for writing. Like all personal accounts I suspect there are many things he understandably does not want to tell us. But he does tell us accounts of cutting throats, killing indiscriminately, the hatred that motivated him, and the huge quantities of drugs he took that helped enable him to perform these terrible acts of violence and keep going day after day. A strange feature of the book, which I doubt was intended, is while reading it you have no idea what it is all about. There is a government army, of which he is a member, and there are rebels. They are engaged in constant raids upon each other's camps. But the ultimate purpose of all this raiding and killing is not clear. It is just a matter of one group seeking out and killing members of another group and vice-versa. There is no apparent relationship to a broader revolution or what it is supposed to be about. This is not a criticism of the book as I suspect this is all that it was about for him, just killing and more killing, and survival. From his description it is clear that it was traumatic almost beyond belief and that he learned to kill his countrymen skillfully and with no more remorse than killing flies. The boys engaged in this were constantly high-fiving and congratulating each other on how well they killed and how many they killed. The fact that he could actually be rehabilitated I regard as virtually miraculous in its own right. It is truly an awesome tale of a boy's survival in a country gone mad with blood lust, murder, arson, and pillage. You have to admire him for his honesty and success and wish him good luck for the future.

The dark side of reading his book, which is not his fault or the fault of the book itself, is that while reading it you don't think enough about the thousands of other child soldiers who were not so fortunate. His experience was one in a million. How many others were cut down in their teens never to experience normal life at all. The misery of all these thousands of innocent people is incalculable, there is no scale for such measurement. And Sierra Leone is just one case in point. The same horrible acts are occurring elsewhere in the world as you read this - in Iraq, Darfur, Somalia, Indonesia, and other places as well. The human species is a disgrace, as someone once said, "put here to humiliate the animals."

LKBIQ:
"Is it the only lesson of history that man is unteachable?"
Sir Winston Churchill