My Life. And His Life.

When I was twelve years old, I was carefree. Of course I was aware that war existed—we were right on the verge of the Iraq War at the time—but I lived in a country that had not had to endure war on it’s own land for over a hundred years.

The closest I ever came to living in the midst of a war was the summer my family spent in Israel, when I was seven. For one thing, everywhere in Israel there are soldiers (and even ordinary citizens) with rifles. For another thing, the outdoor market Machane Yehuda in Jerusalem was bombed only a week after I had been there. Even so, Israel was relatively peaceful during the three months I resided there.

The second closest I’ve ever come to war was when I was eleven, when two planes were purposely flown into a city an hour away from my home and killed thousands of people—including at least one I’d met. In the weeks following September 11, 2001, every plane I saw that looked like it was flying too low scared me. But after awhile, my life returned to normal.

I’ve been lonely in my life, but I’ve never felt completely alone. I’ve been an outcast in my life, but people have never irrationally feared me to a point that they hated me and wanted to hurt me.

Perhaps the only thing that I share with Ishmael Beah is that we have both been students at Oberlin College.

Ishmael grew up in the African country of Sierra Leone. At the age of twelve he and his brother were separated from his parents and village when they went away for the day (to give a hip-hop dance performance) and the rebel army ransacked their village during the time that they were gone. Later, he was separated from his older brother as well (I must admit, I would have given anything to be able to get away from my older brother at that age).

Before Ishmael and his brother are separated, they wander around the countryside with a group of their friends, trying to stay alive and avoid being conscripted into the rebel army. At one point, they are found by rebel soldiers who separate out the boys who they want and tell them that they will be initiated into the army by killing all the boys who were not selected. Ishmael was selected and his brother was not. When he tries to catch his brother’s eye from the other group, he realizes that his brother is ignoring him and there is already a huge divide between him and his brother. Seeing how scared the boys are, the rebel soldiers decide to bring the groups back together and make selections a second time, not from the goodness of their hearts, but because they do not want weak, scared boys in their army. Luckily, Ishmael and his friends are able to escape. For a while it seemed like they found peace working on a farm, but the rebels eventually attack there, too, and while rushing into the woods to avoid them, Ishmael is separated from his brother forever.

After that, Ishmael wandered alone in the bush for a long time. Merely reading his descriptions made me shiver. At the time I was reading it, I was alone in my house. Reading about his complete and painful loneliness made me long for human contact and company.

Eventually Ishmael hooks up with another group of boys (some of whom he had gone to school with) and they continue to wander as a group the way he and his brother and their friends had before they got separated. They face some scary situations where death seems certain and one member of their party does die.

Afterwards, the boys make it to a village, which is run by the Sierra Leonean army and where Ishmael’s real troubles begin. He and his friends are conscripted into the army. They aren’t forced to join up, but the army makes it very clear that they will die soon enough trying to survive on their own and that the army is their only hope.

From there, Ishmael is made into a killing machine that feels nothing and for whom killing is no more difficult than breathing. To keep the boys under in a daze and aggressive, the army provides them with marijuana, cocaine, and brown-brown (a mixture of cocaine and gunpowder—I read somewhere that the gunpowder helped make the boys more aggressive, but it remained unclear to me why they needed both cocaine and brown-brown), and has them watch violent movies glorifying war and its heroes. Ishmael is never separated from his AK-47, which acts almost like a teddy bear or a security blanket for him.

Beah does not describe his years in the army in all that close detail, which was probably for the best, because I found it disturbing enough as it was.

After a few years in the army, Ishmael is rescued by UNICEF and goes through the process of rehabilitation so that he can be a normal human being, again. Over and over the boys are told that they are not at fault for what they have done. But it takes them a long time to believe that they have done something wrong in the first place, much less to believe that it is not their fault.

Ultimately, Ishmael moves in with his uncle in the capital city of Freetown. He goes to visit the UN in New York in order to give a report on child soldiers and how it is imperative to stop the horrible practice of using them. He makes friends in America who he keeps in touch with after returning to Sierra Leone. For a while he resumes a normal life, going to school and living with his family. After another coup in Sierra Leone and living in really horrible and dangerous conditions and he escapes, first to Guinea, the neighboring country, and then from Guinea he goes to New York to live with people that he met there.

Ishmael Beah was certainly comparatively a lucky young man. He was saved from the army and he was able to create a new life for himself without returning to soldiering as many rescued child soldiers did. He went to live in America and got a high school degree and then a college degree.

And if Ishmael Beah is lucky, then I don’t have words to describe the peaceful, and fearless life that I’ve lived. But as I mentioned before, what Beah and I have in common is that fact that we attended a school know for its social awareness and action. And reading Beah’s account of being a child soldier has given me a fuller view of a dismal world that I hope one day I can work to change.