A long way gone final reading response

A Long Way Gone, by Ishmael Beah, is a powerful story that clearly depicts the level of corruption, violence and drug use among the Army soldiers. The main character, Ishmael is turned into a child soldier, fighting for the Sierra Leonean Army, to kill rebels who have slaughtered families and are trying to overthrow the government. I found it difficult to support their efforts in the face of all the corruptions that was going on.

         Despite the good cause that the soldiers are fighting for, the corruption of the army, mainly their tactics, makes the reader question how decent the soldiers truly are. For example one of the main tactics used by the rebels is to raid and attack villages to steal supplies, get more children to fight for them, or sometimes, just slaughtering them for fun. One of the reasons the army fights the rebels is to stop them from killing innocent civilians and drafting more soldiers, but the army’s tactics aren’t much better.  One line in the text shows what the do when they run out of food, ammo, gasoline or drugs:  “We raided rebel camps… we attacked civilian villages to capture recruits and whatever else we can find.”  (Ishmael, 122)

This shows the similarities between the army and the rebels and their immoral tactics.

         In this book the violence is incredibly graphic, grotesque images show how terrible the life of a child soldier or any soldier in that environment is.  I think that there is enough graphic content that if it were to be put on TV, or in a movie, it would be much too violent for many viewers to watch. When the main character is going on his first mission as a soldier, and they run into a rebel group, he says,  “the grenade’s blast got only a few men, whose bodies flew in the air… a splash of blood hit my face… I saw the soldier it had come from, blood poured out of the bullet holes in him like water rushing through newly opened tributaries.”  Graphic imagery like this was what made me resist believing in Ishmael, because of his part in all this violence.

         Finally, the drug use in the book was very disappointing.  Ishmael describes his use of the many drugs he had access to as a soldier: “smoking marijuana and sniffing Brown Brown, cocaine mixed with gunpowder… and taking more of the white capsules, as I had become addicted to them.”

         The use of those drugs by the main character frightened me. Such a young boy doing all these drugs given to him by adults. It was very depressing. Ishmael also goes through withdrawal and intense rehab, which also was sad, even though the process was beneficial to him.

         Despite the parts of the book that were sad and difficult to accept, I was amazed by the intensity of the book at every page. It gave me a first hand account of the hardships that other countries face. I was relieved that the characters made it out alive and were able to be brought back into society and saved.