A Long Way Gone

--------a bleeding true-life account of the war
A LONG WAY is the first first-hand account of a children soldier’s life. The narrator Ishmael Beah, along with a nation of children, was inevitably involved in Sierra Leone’s civil war of the 1990s, experiencing unspeakable inhumanity.

At the beginning of this novel, it introduces to the reader a 12-year old happy Beah who has a passion for hip-hop and loves life from the bottom of his heart. The narrator uses about a dozen of pages to look into this part of his life. Everything seems to get on well with him, however, the madness begins when Beah watches a mother rocking her dead baby killed by a bullet. At first I suppose it is no less disturbing to think about the inhuman act toward a baby. Nevertheless the real terror just begins when his family and village had no choice but to defend themselves against the invading enemies. Young men were compelled to fight for their cause, which begins the fear-wrought and unending run for Beah’s life.

Finally, Beah finds the protection of the national army. But he could not avoid taking arms and fighting because of the decrease on the lives of the national army. As a consequence, all his life becomes under the domination of fear and regret for he killed lots of people in the war.

After reading Beah’s memoir, I have to acknowledge that humanize brutality exits in everyone’s heart and however good person can sometimes do terrible things though they did not mean to. It is mirrored in Beah’s simple but compelling account that people can do nothing but kill enemies to offend their own lives. Besides, society can hardly be healed when the war is over partly because people lost their relatives and friends for ever.

In contrast with Beah, we are tucked in a clean campus and receiving first-class education with all of life’s luxuries. Thus many of us cannot imagine the nightmare of war. So this book provides us a chance to explore a broad range of the world and what it means to be a human.