Preview

Ishmael Beah : Child Soldier Reflection

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
498 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Ishmael Beah : Child Soldier Reflection
The Child Soldier Reflection
By : Gabriel Garlycia

Ishmael Beah was a child soldier who got out of the military base with the help on unicef. Afterwards he stayed in America and wrote a book about his life as a child soldier when he was younger. He tells about how the child soldiers were treated and how he became a child soldier in the first place.

Ishmael Beah grew up in a remarkable childhood until a war came to his part of his country and because of war the landscape he grew up in became really scary and he was seeing first hand what wars are and what they’re doing to families. When he was taken away from his family and all his family got killed, he went to a military base to look for safety in which he was pressed into a war and he was forcefully trained to shoot along with all the other young people who are recruited and forced to participate in extremely violent acts in this war. The life of a child soldier is that they shoot people and does whatever the commander tells them to or else they’ll kill them and those child soldiers are also fed drugs and there are ways the commander would kill people in front of them to desensitize them and they’re given more drugs afterwards. Those child soldiers have the commanders as father figures and the other soldiers as his family as he and the other child soldiers have lost everything that’s there to them because that’s how the commanders think and work, to control children they Destroy what they know like their families and town and everything the children know is how they brought children to war and manipulate and drug them off to do whatever you want them to.
Then a few years later Ishmael Beah and a few other child soldiers manage to get out of the military base as a few people from Unicef came and talk to the commanders to let them ago and whatever they said must’ve worked. At first, Ishmael and those few other child soldiers didn’t want to leave the military base as they have become attached to everyone

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    A child carrying a gun, and forced to kill was deemed as normal. A boy who became a soldier against his will, was normal. This visual is concrete evidence that this is very much real. That this was Ishmael Beah’s reality.…

    • 272 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    The book A Long Way Gone is about a boy named Ishmael Beah. Ishmael was born in Sierra Leone in 1980. He was 12 when the war first touched him. Basically the was was fought by children, on drugs. There were about 300,000 child soldiers. At age 13 he was picked up by the Government Army. At age 16 he was removed from the war by the UNICEF. With the help of rehab he learned to forgive himself, regain humanity to begin healing. This story was told with force and heartbreaking…

    • 92 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Who is Ishmael Beah? Ishmael Beah is an activist known by many and has contributed so much of his time and effort to try and help prevent children from experiencing what he has experienced. He has donated and been involved in many organizations-such as his own- and has learned over time that to make a change, we have to take a stand and have our own voices.…

    • 67 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    A long way gone by Ishmael Beah is a story about his experiences as a child soldier in a civil war in Sierra Leone. He vividly showcases his life during the war by writing about his memories and his emotions in those particular situations. By displaying such scenarios, Beah indirectly explains his audience and purpose of his writing.…

    • 362 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    At the beginning of his memoir, Beah illustrates how the civil war split many children, including himself, from their families causing affliction among them by showing how he and other children from his village were abandoned and forced to join the army—or even get captured by rebels. For example, Beah recalls the exact moments when the rebels attacked his village, “When the rebels finally came [into my village], I was cooking. The rice was done and the okra soup was almost ready when I heard a single gunshot that echoed through the town…My heart was beating faster than it ever had. Each gunshot seemed to cling to the beat of my heart…I thought about where my family was, whether I would be able to see them again, and wished that they were safe…

    • 239 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Ishmael Beah grew up in a town known as mattru jong, during the hard times of the civil war beahs village was under attack by a group known as the rebels. The group of friends that beah…

    • 344 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In the book Long Way Gone Ishmael Beah struggles between trust and survival in the midst of a gruesome war. He laments how, “the war had destroyed the enjoyment of the very experience of meeting people” throughout the book there are many examples of this upsetting truth. The consequences of this mistrust in people are clear as he travels through Sierra Leon while being incessantly threatened and assumed a member of the RUF. Most of this book is about the ongoing struggle within Ishmael between trying to stay alive and deciding who to trust. The phenomena of war and trust can coexist only if you have an ability to differentiate your friends from enemies. Ishmael struggles throughout the book to stay alive, and thus decides to trust no one, but this could be detrimental to his survival.…

    • 587 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Ishmael was mentally and physically challenged as a child solider. The RUF constrained the children to do medications, for example, cocaine, pot, and "chestnut cocoa," which give them the guts to fight and the ability to forget their emotions in times of war. Their everyday presence is a battle of survival, Beah wind up submitting acts he would never have done for example, taking nourishment from kids and killing innocent villagers. If Ishmael or any other child soldier didn’t comply with what the RUF soldiers told them to do, their families and anything they love would be threatened. The novel A Long Way Gone makes an incredible showing with regards to delineating the life of a child…

    • 118 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    I believe Ishmael’s level of resilience throughout the story was immensely high considering the age he was during the war. One example, was when Ishmael first experiences the war and loses all of his family except his brother, Junior. Ishmael does not complain about walking miles and miles all day long in the scorching sun, when many kids his age would start complaining after fifteen minutes on a nice breezy day. As well as, when Ishmael was all alone in the forest he did not act crazy about the freedom he had, but instead was orderly and still did day to day necessary activities while remaining calm. He always shows that even in the toughest situations he acts just like an adult and is always in control, when kids his age lost their cool and acted crazy leading them to die. Last but not least, when Ishmael was at the rehabilitation center he did act agitated, but recovers from the worst thing a child could be during the war, a child soldier. He acts insane and puts his life at risk when he is a soldier because he did drugs everyday and killed hundreds of people for years, and all it takes for him to recover to be a normal child again is eight months.…

    • 1111 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    A Long Way Gone Analysis

    • 702 Words
    • 3 Pages

    By sharing his experiences in A Long Way Gone, Ishmael Beah helps increase awareness of the events that have occurred, and continue to occur today. Beah provides an intriguing perspective on the Sierra Leone Civil War. A Long Way Gone depicts the fascinating life story of a real person and is not simply summarizing a series of events. Ishmael Beah’s wrote A Long Way Gone to bring awareness to the many terrors of war, and to acknowledge the numerous people who aided him and he accomplished this by sharing an different perspective and a jarring story.…

    • 702 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Long Way Gone Reflection

    • 934 Words
    • 4 Pages

    On the article by Peter Wilson, “Beah’s credibility a long way gone”, Wilson says, “But in the interview with Oxford University student reporter Naomi Scherbel-Ball this week, Beah said: “I drew the map from memory and gave it to the publishing house – I didn’t do the measurement.” Beah himself admits that this was all from memory and he didn’t even make sure that what was being said in the book was actually factual. Beah on a different article, “Thanks for the memories”, says, “I wrote the book from my point of view, as my experiences as a child in the war. Which is why I didn’t write about girls because I wasn’t a girl in the war, so I wrote about my account and my account is accurate in my memories as far as I can remember it and that is what I stand by.” This can be controversial because in the book, Ishmael took many drugs such as Brown-Brown, which could have affected his…

    • 934 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    They have to change their mind and body, to go to reality of the real world, instead of life in war. In the article Should child soldiers be prosecuted for their crimes?, the report stated how children need to be held accountable for the crimes they commit by more sufficient and appropriate methods, other than incarceration, empowering them to acknowledge their past and the crimes the execute. (should, 14). Rather than putting children in jail for murder, they should be rehabilitated so they can recognize what they did in the past was wrong. Because just putting them in prison for something they wouldn’t recognize was wrong wouldn’t be helping anyone; it would just be putting a short term solution on a long term problem. In the article Child Soldiers, the author gives “Demobilization and Reconciliation program, often abbreviated TTR and DDR, are far better ways of helping children recover and reintegrate back into society and out of war. The problem with prosecution is that it poses far too many problems” (Child, 18). A child from war needs to be pointed in the right direction instead of them having to dwell on what they did. The adolescent can turn their life around and focus on good things, other than situations of…

    • 778 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Once more, the three main icons key to helping child soldiers is we firstly need to be considerate and not let them wander off freely. Secondly, research must be done to find out how they feel about killing and what's going on around them. Are the passionate about such events, or do they despise them. And finally we must clarify what kind of state they’re in. Meaning the kind of schools in which they have been taught in. Are they being yelled at by a general, or simply being taught in a school. Crucial evidence may lead to more investigations and might someday end child…

    • 939 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Theses child soldiers are being forced to fight against their will. Ishmael Beth was a child soldier in a news report on CBS News and he said that they were drugged. Also a gun was held up to there held every second this went on. The children were also drug or sold out of their homes and put in the army, plus boys with no home or food go wandering into military base seeking help, instead they get enlisted and drugged.…

    • 446 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    During the Sierra Leone Civil War that started on March 23, 1991, the eleven-year armed conflict caused the displacement of many citizens and the conscription of child soldiers. The novel A Long Way Gone, shows the memoir of Ishmael Beah’s childhood during the violent years of the war. Throughout the story the author Beah embodies the loss of innocence in many parts of his early life. Using the different events that Beah experiences, the author displays the transition of youthfulness to the end of Beah’s childhood. When Beah is inducted into the military and endures hardships, he truly loses innocence and stops calling flashbacks to his childhood causing him to disconnect from reality.…

    • 360 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays