A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

The summary

A Long Way Gone treats a child soldier as something assembled, and gives most of its length to the assembly. Ishmael Beah’s memoir, published in February 2007 by Sarah Crichton Books at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, carries one boy from twelve, running from an attack on his town in southern Sierra Leone, through the national army to a rehabilitation centre in Freetown at fifteen. The machinery is the subject: what, in Beah’s account, an army does to a grieving child to make him usable, and what reversing it costs. He writes both halves at the same flat pitch, and the evenness is the argument — on his telling neither process was mysterious, and only one was fast.

The army assembles a soldier out of grief

Beah never describes choosing to fight. He runs for months down roads littered with bodies, learns his parents and two brothers are dead, and reaches an army base in the southeast. Everything after is incremental: a lieutenant’s speeches about defending the country, a gun held for comfort, white capsules issued before battle whose contents he says he never learned, marijuana and “brown brown” — cocaine mixed with gunpowder — on a table by the ammunition hut. At night they run Rambo off a generator or a car battery and want to be him.

In the excerpt he published in The New York Times Magazine in January 2007, he compresses that stretch into one sentence: “My squad was my family, my gun was my provider and protector and my rule was to kill or be killed.” “The idea of death didn’t cross my mind,” he writes, “and killing had become as easy as drinking water.” You’re never invited to read this as possession by evil. It reads as a list of inputs — bereavement, hunger, stimulants, a peer group, an enemy with a name — that came together inside a week: after that first week of raids, he writes, “our initiation was complete.” And these boys wear government uniform: UNICEF’s own record of the conflict notes that in 1994 Sierra Leone’s head of state, Valentine Strasser, raised army recruitment to 12,000, some recruits street children as young as twelve.

The flatness is the technique

Beah rarely stops to explain and almost never to absolve. His friend Josiah, eleven, is thrown onto a tree stump by a grenade in Beah’s first firefight; Beah covers the boy’s eyes, lifts him off, finds his backbone shattered, lays him down and picks up his gun. No comment follows. Beah wrote most of the book as an Oberlin undergraduate, working through some four hundred pages with the novelist Dan Chaon. What survived is a narrator who reports and declines to interpret.

Withdrawal is the second war

Beah lands at Benin Home in Freetown’s Kissy neighbourhood, run by a local NGO, Children Associated With the War. The boys wreck the furniture, throw food at the staff, and hold a bucket over the cook’s head until he puts more milk in the tea. Coming off the drugs, Beah rolls a plain sheet of paper and smokes it. Boys bolt from the hall screaming that the rebels are coming; younger ones weep at rocks they say are their families.

The staff repeat one line and he hates it. “This isn’t your fault, you know,” a staff member says, wrapping a blanket around him after a nightmare. “It really isn’t.” A nurse called Esther gives him a Walkman and a Run-DMC tape, draws out the story of his bullet wounds, and says the same thing. He throws the Walkman at her and leaves with his fingers in his ears. Months later — a Bob Marley tape, a lyrics notebook, a dream of dinner with his dead family — he writes that he began to believe it, without becoming immune to the guilt. Nobody is repaired here; someone is made able to think.

The dates are contested, and this page can’t settle them

Early in the book Beah writes: “The first time that I was touched by war I was twelve. It was in January of 1993.” On 19 January 2008 The Australian ran an investigation by Peter Wilson, David Nason and Shelley Gare, followed by about a dozen further articles, arguing that the attacks Beah describes on his home town and region came in January 1995, not January 1993. If so, he was in the army for months, not the roughly two years the book covers before UNICEF removed him in January 1996. The paper also reported that aid workers and journalists in Freetown then could recall no trace of the fight Beah describes between army and rebel boys at the centre they were taken to — six dead, in his account — and that no official record of it turned up.

Beah conceded nothing. In a written statement three days later, quoted in Slate, he wrote: “I am right about my story. This is not something one gets wrong.” He told the Associated Press his memory gave him 1993, and that was what he stood by. His editor Sarah Crichton and FSG backed the book, and she ruled out a disclaimer for the paperback. Slate reported that March that FSG had produced witnesses who met Beah at the centre, but that no former child soldier who served with him had come forward to back the story. The Australian said former teachers produced documents placing him in school in March 1993; the Associated Press reported that most such records were destroyed in the war.

The surrounding history is not contested. Foday Sankoh’s Revolutionary United Front invaded from Liberia in March 1991, backed by fighters loyal to Charles Taylor, and children ended up armed on both sides. When formal demobilisation closed in January 2002, UNICEF counted 6,845 children among 72,500 demobilised combatants — and noted that many recruited as children were adults by then.

The bottom line

The book’s strongest claim is that turning a child into a killer took ordinary ingredients and about a week, while turning him back took months, a stranger’s patience and a sentence he couldn’t at first stand to hear. Read it for those mechanics, not a verdict, and read the 2008 dispute alongside it. Hand it to anyone who has only met the child-soldier question as a statistic.