“I raised my gun and pulled the trigger, and I killed a man. Suddenly, as if someone was shooting them inside my brain, all the massacres I had seen since the day I was touched by war began flashing in my head. Every time I stopped shooting to change magazines and saw my two young lifeless friends, I angrily pointed my gun into the swamp and killed more people.” That’s how Ishmael Beah describes his first engagement as a child solder in his autobiography A Long Way Gone: The True Story of a Child Soldier.
The book tells the story of a 12-year-old boy separated from his family when the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels invaded his home town in Sierra Leone without warning. Most people were murdered, some were raped or brutalised and pressed into the service of the RUF. A few managed to escape, and the author was one of them. For several months he wandered from town to town with other displaced boys, frequently surviving close scrapes with the rebels or other people who distrusted anyone, until he was recruited into the “army”, before eventually being rescued and rehabilitated.
It’s not a pleasant story, but it is very engaging and well-written. It shows how a sensitive intelligent child can be drafted against his will into committing brutal acts of violence. It helps to explain what wars are like, particularly in Africa, and how violence begets violence. It helps us to understand people who have been victims of war, and most of all it encourages us to do everything possible to prevent war.