A Long Way Gone- Entry #1

For this quarter, I am reading the memoir A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah. I became interested in this book after watching the film Invisible Children, which shows the horrors endured by Ugandan children who have escaped from abduction or live in constant fear of it. The photograph on the cover of the book seems consistent with the title, as it features a young boy carrying a rifle and a machete on his back. To have those two horribly contrasting ideas--violence and childhood-- blended into one image gives the reader a quick glimpse how truly far gone these children are from any sense of normalcy. Despite this, after reading the first few chapters of the book, I was surprised by how genuinely normal the boys truly seem. Of course there are obvious cultural differences such the names of their towns (Mattru Jong and Mogbwemo), yet the children do not seem any different from those that I see every day here in Deerfield. Beah speaks of listening to cassettes and watching movies, giving his story an eerily familiar feeling, despite the tremendously unfamiliar and violent direction in which it will soon head. Beah writes, "The only wars I knew of were those that I had read about in books or seen in movies such as Rambo: First Blood, and the one in neighboring Liberia that I had heard about on the BBC news" (1). The fact that this sense of calm normalcy is soon replaced a mere twelve pages later with images of rampant violence speaks to the pace of the war and this issue in general. Beah says, "In the back of the van were three more dead bodies, two girls and a boy, and their blood was all over the seats and the ceiling of the van" (13). The acceleration of violence in these first several pages is astounding, and I can only assume what implications it has for the rest of the memoir. While some of the scenes Beah describes are difficult to swallow, I am curious to continue reading and witness exactly how quickly a war such as this one can unravel an innocent young boy's life.