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A Child Soldier’s Story2008 HALL FELLOW: ISHMAEL BEAHPhotos by Tim MorseIshmael Beah was eleven when fightingseized Sierra Leone. By thirteen, he hadlost his immediate family—his mother,father, and two brothers—and had been draftedby army forces into a vicious civil war.Beah shared the story of his violent pastand his return to normalcy during an all-day visitApril 3, part of the Hall Fellowship program,which honors former Headmistress Elizabeth B.Hall by bringing distinguished speakers tocampus.During an assembly, the former childsoldier described a countryside where the birdsno longer sang. A river where he could no longerswim because bodies would float by. Childrenwho had never raised their voice to adults butwho were recruited to kill them. And boys, likeBeah, who were savvy enough to run only atnight, when bullets were more visible.Beah’s bestselling book, A Long Way Gone:Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, recounts his transformationfrom a kid living in a tightknit community,focused on soccer and hip-hop, into a young soldierwho routinely killed to survive. To SierraLeone’s army leaders, children were especiallydesirable recruits—cheap and malleable.“Children can be manipulated,” Beah explained.His own commanders pushed rhetoricabout punishing his parents’ murderers and preventingother children from losing their families.“They fed you lots of drugs, and they fed youlots of hate and propaganda,” Beah said. Hefeared for his life daily; nevertheless, those commandersbecame father figures and the otherchildren like brothers. “Violence became a wayto show your loyalty,” he explained.The daily nightmare ended when Beahwas taken to a UNICEF rehabilitation camp,where violent and mistrustful boys would beatup workers who were trying to help them. Evenwhen seriously injured, the workers told theboys it wasn’t their fault. It had been a long timesince anyone had believed in Beah like that, andthe UNICEF staff’s faith and calm eventuallyreached him.In 1998, Beah moved to the U.S., courtesyof a woman he had met at a UN conferencewhom he now considers his mother. In his NewYork high school, he was a loner, a successfulstudent who had no trouble ignoring tauntingbut found one moment particularly difficult—when he was asked for a baby picture for theyearbook. “I felt incredibly sad around thattime,” he recalled.Beah went on to graduate from OberlinCollege, where his commencement brought himto tears. “It was the first time I cried in a longtime,” he said. “I had something that no onewould be able to take from me.” Beah warnedCA students not to look at college as a statussymbol, a means to a good career, or even just aneducation. “It’s a journey of self-discovery,” hesaid. “Education made me discover that there’smore to my life than what I experienced as achild.”At Oberlin, Beah’s first assignment in arhetoric and composition class planted the seedfor A Long Way Gone. Asked to describe how heplayed as a child, Beah wrote not about hisdeadly “play” as a soldier, but about his wholesomeprewar play. Curious classmates wanted toknow more, and Beah realized that people mightwant to read about his country.Since arriving in the U.S., he had beenfrustrated at how little Americans know aboutSierra Leone. “Where is that?” friends wouldask. That worried Beah: “If people don’t knowthis country at all, if they don’t know that itexists, how can they understand what is happeningthere?”If they knew anything, it was a SierraLeone characterized by civil war and madness,not his childhood Sierra Leone, where communitieswere caring and education was valued.Beah wrote A Long Way Gone to shed light onhis country as well as on the war. “It was importantto put a human face to it,” he said. “It wasimportant to write what war is and what it doesto the human spirit.”It was no accident that Beah discovereda strong narrative voice. He’d grown up withelders telling stories to their families every night,then, days later, asking a child to retell a story.Kids became active listeners. “My early sense ofnarrative really comes from that,” Beah said.Beah’s life as a child soldier ultimately createda passionately nonviolent and unflappableyoung man. “I’m always smiling because therearen’t that many things that worry me,” he said.Still, he sleeps only about three hours of interruptedsleep nightly. But he casts his insomnia asa blessing, one that provides extra time to writeand study. That upbeat outlook has helped himlive with memories that sometimes jar him unexpectedly.A person walking by quickly or a loudnoise sometimes sparks wartime images.The memories are too ingrained to leavehim. “I can’t forget,” he explained. “I’ve justlearned to live with them and to transform thempositively.”—Gail Friedman7WWW.CONCORDACADEMY.ORG SPRING 2008