When killing is like drinking water

"A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier" by Ishmael Beah, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 240 pages, $22

"I remember that boy, I was there when they caught him," my guest, a refugee from Sierra Leone, said excitedly when he saw the photo on the book's cover. It was taken during a short period when it seemed that the war was over, and the soldiers who wanted to relieve the boy of his weapon treated him gently, as they would a child. And then, my guest recounted, the boy raised his gun and killed the unit's commander. The boy in the photograph is not the author of the book, but his picture symbolizes the use to which children were put on both sides in the civil war in Sierra Leone. That boy fought for the rebel forces, in the Revolutionary United Front (RUF). The book's author, Ishmael Beah, fought for the other side: the army.

The events described in the book took place during the 1990s, from the time the author was 12 until he was 15. Beah's own exploits as a boy- soldier, during two years of his life, actually take up a relatively small part of the book. He gets to them only after describing, with heart-stopping detail, many months of escape and a constant struggle for survival, in which there were no good guys or bad guys and no rules of the game.

War caught up with the author when he, his brother and friends left their village for a nearby town to give a rap performance at a talent show. The tapes he carried in his pocket saved his life more than once. The children, who set out with no provisions (they were, after all, planning to return the next day), never made it to the show. They were stranded in the town after hearing that their village had been attacked. They saw the victims, mutilated survivors sent to sow terror throughout other villages, some who had been shot while fleeing and others who had lost their sanity.

Once the boys were caught by a rebel unit and almost forced to join their ranks. A chance occurrence saved them before the rebels could carve the organization's initials on their bodies, an act that would have made escape impossible. Indeed, chance dominated Ishmael Beah's life completely. Chance stole his brother from him and left him to live alone in the woods, lonely, hungry and afraid. And chance also gave him new friends. It was chance that caused him never to see his parents and brother again, and chance that saved his life.

In those years, any boy wandering around by himself was suspected of being a rebel. Hence the children were deprived of the compassion and protection they would otherwise have received in the villages they passed through. Perhaps under other circumstances they would also have been spared the discussions, held in their presence, about whether to let them live or to take no chances and kill them immediately instead. When Beah's group reached a village where army forces were based, they initially felt protected. Some 30 children orphaned by the war, aged 11 to 17, were put to work there, cleaning and fetching water in exchange for shelter, until one day they, too, were called upon to serve. The military's conscription method was not as cruel as that of the rebels, but it was made clear to the boys that if they wished to keep living in the village, they had to take up arms and fight. Beah and his friends agreed, after realizing that leaving the village was tantamount to suicide.

Terrible stories

The boys' training was brief and included, among other things, charging at the enemy with commando knives. Later Beah demonstrated on other living beings just how well he had learned his lessons. Of the first battle he writes: "I have never been so afraid to go anywhere in my life as I was that day." To help them overcome their fear, the boys were given amphetamines, to which they eventually became addicted. Plenty of other drugs were also available, which helped. "We boys led the way," he writes. "There were no maps and no questions asked. We were simply told to follow the path until we received instructions on what to do next. We walked for long hours and stopped only to eat sardines and corned beef with gari, sniff cocaine, brown brown [cocaine mixed with gunpowder], and take some white capsules. The combination of these drugs gave us a lot of energy and made us fierce. The idea of death didn't cross my mind at all and killing had become as easy as drinking water."

Beah's most terrible stories emerge while he is undergoing a process of rehabilitation with the help of Children Associated with the War (CAW), an organization supported by UNICEF. The words "It's not your fault, you were only a boy," which the people at the rehabilitation center repeat like a mantra, somewhat soften the account of the atrocities that Beah and his friends committed, as though he were pleading with the readers, too, to understand.

Amazingly, it works. Beah is not a professional writer. His descriptions are often simplistic, and his statements are clumsy, but he moves the reader on every single page - even when he describes how his unit accidentally ran into a rebel group on a soccer field. The exchange of gunfire left all of the rebels dead. "The group had also consisted of young boys like us, but we didn't care about them. We took their ammunition, sat on their bodies, and started eating the cooked food they had been carrying. All around us, fresh blood leaked from the bullet holes in their bodies."

Books of this kind are usually described as shocking. The truth is that "A Long Way Gone" is primarily beautiful. It has touching, even comic parts, such as that describing Beah's experiences in New York, where he traveled to speak to the United Nations about children in war zones. He was impressed by the big city and its lights, and kept looking for the utility poles carrying the power lines. When evening set in, he marveled that dark came so early and was told that this was because it was winter. "I knew the word 'winter' from Shakespeare's texts," he writes, "and I thought I should look up its meaning again."

Beah wishes neither to shock nor to justify. His book is not easy to read, and yet it is difficult to put down. The reality it describes is horrifying, and yet I would recommend it warmly to 15-year-old readers, because it is, above all, the most moving anti-war book I have read in recent years. The kind that makes you want to become a better person.

Nurit Wurgaft's book "Police! Open Up! - Migrant Workers in Israel" was published by Am Oved (in Hebrew).