A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael BeahEssay Preview: A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael BeahReport this essayIn A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah, many events change his life and he has to choose to live with them or die. Ishmael has changed because of several major events that he lived through and has adapted and that has helped him survive in his war ravaged country. He has changed from young, innocent boy to mindless child solider to a proper adult but he still survives and that makes him very resilient.
Though it was hard he found himself amongst war. One of the first major events was that he lost his parents. He was in Mattru Jong when rebels attacked his home in Mogbwemo. Slowly by surely wounded people started trickling in and he found out that way that he had lost his parents. His parents werent dead, just lost in the country. That changed him because it was the first of many wounds on his body and soul. Throughout the book he searches for them but they remain elusive and not inflicting wounds on the mortal body but instead ripping a large hole in his heart. “The sun peacefully sailed through the white clouds, birds sang from tree tops, the trees danced to the quiet wind. I still couldnt believe the war had actually reached our home. It was impossible, I thought. We had left home the day before, there had been no indication the rebels were near.” (Beah, 10)He couldnt believe it. It was just not possible. Your home is a fortress until it shatters.
The second major event was becoming a boy solider at a young age. “The idea of death didnt cross my mind at all and killing had become as easy as drinking water. My mind had not only snapped during the first killing, it had also stopped making remorseful records, or so it seemed.” (Beah, 122)When in the war he took drugs, killed people but his mind was a blank so all he could think about was killing, the enemy, and where to get his next fix. This could cause mental health issues that he has to live with, as well as an abusive drug addiction that could create some problems in his physical health later on in his life.
The third event was going to a facility where the taught him to become “human” again. They took away the guns and drugs but thanks to drug withdrawal and being taught to become a machine that killed they had violent tendencies and picked fights. “It hadnt crossed their minds that a change of environment wouldnt immediately make us normal boys; we were dangerous and brainwashed to kill.” (Beah, 135) That changed him because it helped him become himself again. Even though he carried scars, mentally and physically from the war, he tried to become normal again and try to live a better life.More evidence to support this is when war came back to Freetown. He ran away to Guinea because he didnt want to become that dangerous, brainwashed child soldier again to suffer from old wounds. At the end of the book, Ishmael has been through many events
”he gets to the place of the “training camp” and goes through the torture of hell. But when the children are killed, he says it was all for your self-preservation but he is angry the adults want to put him back in their care, that only kills him.He also says his mother is also killed, it was all for you so you could control your children while growing up.But he is also fighting back. And so he is going through everything about a strange mind and mind of his that he tried to make himself normal again.And the kids in Freetown have a very different view of what happened than we can see from the pictures in the book. But when it comes to learning about war, the children have a rather different view.And the children are even at war. Their world view has also changed. And, they are really unhappy with the war too. As my friend, a good friend of Ishmael wrote, In the beginning of the war Ishmael had the best thoughts about that war as a child, he started by thinking that it was real and that he should continue it. Then when he felt that the other kids had a different view, he went into battle thinking that was for his own child instead in order to gain some respect from the soldiers, but then he realized that was not for his own child either.„he was fighting for no other reason but to protect his own self interest.I think thats how Ishmael was taught at the start. His teacher said it was to be a military war, so the children went in with this idea. The children also thought that it wasn’t real world anymore. It was a foreign war with the children seeing what was going on but it was not real for them because they were too young to know it. That is why they went back in with this idea.They then started to fight against each other, to have peace that they would never see again because of it all. And, they also started teaching them about war, even though they thought it was never been done before.By that time many other kids joined the war. And a number of other children were left behind by their own children.Now, some of these kids that went in with that thought were called as “sisters” by Ishmael and so they never met other youngsters. And now they have some very different opinions about that war.And, in fact the military has a different set of attitudes and values after that to our own children, because most of them are afraid of it but not against it.Some of the kids that went to Africa are so scared of war that they want to fight it alone. They want to think that it won’t happen before the war will finish. But I agree with those who argue that it isn’t real. And the war is just bad that is done to make themselves understand that war is really bad.All of them have had different ideas about war of their own. And the only time they have gone before war was after war. And, so it wasn’t really war they had. The children never fought to protect themselves anymore so they never have that hope of being able to do so in a real way.And Ishmael himself has even gone back to the US as an antiwar activist