Summary Of A Long Way Gone By Ishmael Beah

The story told by Ishmael Beah in A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier is an amazing recollection of the effects that the extreme violence of war can have on a person, including physical, psychological, and social trauma, in which a boy tries to survive and escape his past as a child soldier. Civil war brings along not only violence, sadness, poverty, death etc. but also horrible conditions in which the victims that suffer the consequences are the children. Kids in third world countries, like in Sierra Leone, that are going through civil wars are forced to join the fight in order to survive; it’s the only option they have. War impacts their lives long-term in unimaginable ways that leaves them bruised for life. Ishmael had to endure seeing people gunned down in front of him and murdered in the most gruesome ways as illustrated by the author, “I had seen heads cut off by machetes, smashed by cement bricks, and rivers filled with so much blood that the water ceased flowing” (Beah 49). After many months of cheating death and
Many of the boys would awake to nightmares and sometimes run out to the soccer field in terror. They suffered from flashbacks of the killings and blood. Ishmael describes this well in this scene; “Whenever I turned on the tap water, all I could see was blood gushing out. I would stare at it until it looked like water before drinking or taking a shower…Other times, the younger boys sat by rocks weeping and telling us that the rocks were their dead families” (Beah 145). Anytime something would remind Ishmael of his experiences he would wander off in thought, reliving the terrible scenes of the past in his head. The violence of the war also left many without trust. People had to rely on themselves and live in constant fear. They never discussed what they thought or felt. It took Ishmael a while to learn to open up to others