A Long Way Gone: Memoirs Of A Boy Soldier By Ishmael Beah

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah is a narrative of survival of a 12-year-old boy separated from his family and caught in the mess of the Sierra Leone civil war in the early 1990s. His story reveals his traumatizing and shocking experiences as a soldier driven by anger and revenge for the loss of his village and his culture, only later able to overcome everything that had happened and the things he’d done. Ishmael’s cultural connection to storytelling was ultimately what drove his recovery from the horrid events of the war that stole his childhood and innocence out from under him. He uses the stories of his past to understand what he has gone through, how to move on, and to connect with his lost culture.
Ishmael was first affected by the war in 1993. He was in another …show more content…
Running from village to village, escaping near death experiences with rebel groups always on their tail, had become their life. Witnessing people being burned, tortured, beaten, decapitated, shot, and stabbed became a common occurrence. They faced starvation, exhaustion, fatigue, and distrust from almost anyone they encountered. Ishmael took refuge at a village/base for the Sierra Leone army, but was given the choice to become a soldier or leaving the village where it was guaranteed he’d be killed by the rebels. Ishmael overloaded himself on drugs like marijuana and “brown brown” which was cocaine mixed with gunpowder (Beah 120). He became a killer, doing all the things he had witnessed while trying to run from the rebels. However, he is able to make his story into an inspiring tale of recovery and hope. After the mental shock and drug haze had began to ware off he faced more pain than ever before. He struggled with who he was, who he had become, everything he had