The Experiences of a Boy Soldier

A few months ago, the cover story of the Sunday New York Times Magazine caught my eye: The Making, and Unmaking, of a Child Soldier. The cover photo pictured a young man photographed against a bright yellow background, a distant gaze in his eyes.

Ishmael Beah was born in Sierra Leone in 1980. When he was 11, a brutal civil war broke out in his home country. At the age of 13, after both his parents and two brothers were killed, Ishmael was recruited as a child soldier and fought for almost three years before he was placed in a rehabilitation home by UNICEF. He eventually came to live with a family in the US.

Ishmael has now written a book about his experience entitled A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. Tonight he is the featured speaker at a Refugees International event in New York City. Our president Ken Bacon and senior advocate Andrea Lari will also be speaking at the event. In addition, author and filmmaker Roya Hakakian, who is also an RI Board Member, will speak about the refugee experience and present her short documentary on child soldiers, Armed and Innocent, which features Ishmael.

Here are some excerpts from Ishmael's powerful memoir:

...In early 1993, when I was 12, I was separated from my family as the Sierra Leone civil war, which began two years earlier, came into my life. The rebel army, known as the Revolutionary United Front (R.U.F.), attacked my town in the southern part of the country. I ran away, along paths and roads that were littered with dead bodies, some mutilated in ways so horrible that looking at them left a permanent scar on my memory. I ran for days, weeks and months, and I couldn’t believe that the simple and precious world I had known, where nights were celebrated with storytelling and dancing and mornings greeted with the singing of birds and cock crows, was now a place where only guns spoke and sometimes it seemed even the sun hesitated to shine. After I discovered that my parents and two brothers had been killed, I felt even more lost and worthless in a world that had become pregnant with fear and suspicion as neighbor turned against neighbor and child against parent. Surviving each passing minute was nothing short of a miracle...

...I lay there with my gun pointed in front of me, unable to shoot. My index finger became numb. I felt as if the forest had turned upside down and I was going to fall off, so I clutched the base of a tree with one hand. I couldn’t think, but I could hear the sounds of the guns far away in the distance and the cries of people dying in pain. A splash of blood hit my face. In my reverie I had opened my mouth a bit, so I tasted some of the blood. As I spat it out and wiped it off my face, I saw the soldier it had come from. Blood poured out of the bullet holes in him like water rushing through newly opened tributaries. His eyes were wide open; he still held his gun. My eyes were fixed on him when I heard Josiah screaming for his mother in the most painfully piercing voice I had ever heard. It vibrated inside my head to the point that I felt my brain had shaken loose from its anchor...

...The villages that we captured and turned into our bases as we went along and the forests that we slept in became my home. My squad was my family, my gun was my provider and protector and my rule was to kill or be killed. The extent of my thoughts didn’t go much beyond that. We had been fighting for more than two years, and killing had become a daily activity. I felt no pity for anyone. My childhood had gone by without my knowing, and it seemed as if my heart had frozen. I knew that day and night came and went because of the presence of the moon and the sun, but I had no idea whether it was a Sunday or a Friday...

You can read more about RI's work on children affected by conflict and displacement here.