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'A Long Way Gone' documents Sierra Leone nightmare  By Nahal Toosi March 04, 2007 NEW YORK -- The nightmares won't stop. In one, fighters chase him with a gun. In another, he watches a person get mutilated. In a third, someone is hacking his neck with a machete. Yet, years after he left the life of a child soldier in Sierra Leone, Ishmael Beah has found a reason for hope in his vivid nocturnal visions: He never dies. "It almost makes me feel like, you know, that this whole thing will never really get me," Beah says, "that I think I have some sort of inner strength that's able to outlive everything." Beah is a wiry 26-year-old with a smile as bright as the sun. He loves Shakespeare and hip-hop and lives in a Brooklyn apartment filled with classic novels and African art. It's hard to believe he was once a drugged-up, rifle- toting boy soldier who sliced men's throats. In his new memoir, it's clear Beah is still coming to grips with that past life. "A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier" (Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus Giroux, $22) tells the tale of the brutal civil war that debilitated Sierra Leone during the 1990s through the eyes of a child not old enough to understand the politics, yet old enough to kill. Beah's book, now being promoted by Starbucks, traces what he went through when the civil war first touched his life at age 12, and how he struggled to regain his humanity after years of killing. Beah found himself separated from his parents and forced to travel with other young boys, seeking refuge in jungles and villages while trying to outpace rebel fighters. Eventually, Beah and his friends were cornered into taking up arms. Government soldiers handed him an AK-47 and trained him to kill. By that time, Beah had learned that his parents and siblings were dead. "Visualize the enemy, the rebels who killed your parents, your family and those who are responsible for everything that has happened to you," soldiers would tell their young trainees. "I could not put this book down – it was just an incredible story," said Ken Lombard, president of Starbucks Entertainment, which picked Beah's book to promote, with $2 of the $22 cover price going to a UNICEF fund. But the book's somber subject matter might be a tough sell. After three years of fighting for government-backed forces, Beah entered a rehabilitation facility for child soldiers. It was hard to get the drugs out of his system. It was even harder to rid himself of the anger. After leaving the rehab center, Beah lived for a while with his uncle's family and was chosen to visit the United Nations for a conference for about children in war. Later, when the situation in Sierra Leone deteriorated again, friends helped him get out and back to New York. He was 17 at the time. He started writing the memoir while studying political science at Oberlin College. "When I was writing the book it was very difficult," Beah says. "I was sad all the time. I felt physically exhausted by the sadness. I got to face all the things that I was capable of doing." At the same time, "the whole process was ... therapeutic because I got to face all of these things. I got a chance to reconcile with certain things." Today, he declines to put a number on how many people he killed, saying it might serve to glorify horrendous actions. He says he feels compassion for the rebels he battled in the jungle. "I realized they were just like us," he says. "Most of the people who were in there, especially the young ones, had been brainwashed." It's not just nightmares that have lingered in Beah's life. It's the little survival instincts, like checking for possible exits in every room, or trying to judge people's character in an instant. "Whenever I travel, like whenever I leave, I still have this fear that I will not come back, or that as soon as I leave a place, the people that I love or the people that I care about there, I will not see them again," Beah says. He still feels guilty, but tries to control his emotions. "I think if I take on the idea, fully, of being guilty and guilty and guilty, that will itself handicap me," he says. As for the guilt that remains, he says: "I think it's a small price to pay to stay alive. A lot of people did not." Sierra Leone emerged from the 11-year war in 2002. Beah visited last year, and was dispirited to see how little had changed. There's still a great deal to rebuild and tremendous poverty. Beah says the political corruption worries him most, because it's often a prelude to more conflict. Through various organizations, Beah promotes the message that child soldiers need help, and that they can regain their humanity, though it won't be easy. "The process of recovering from a war, recovering from having lived through a war ... it's not a one-twothree step," he says. "It's a process that you have to do for life." URL: story url
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