Actions and/or Feelings Between Me

¶ … actions and/or feelings between me and Beah. Beah was only 13-years-old when he began to fight with the Sierra Leone Army, and his memoir shows that war can have a strong psychological effect on the soldiers who fight it.

Like the author, I would not hesitate to join an army to protect my country. However, the army Beah joined was corrupt and violent, and while they were fighting rebels who spoke out against the country, they also looted civilian towns, killed their enemies very violently, and they kept the children fighting through coercion and even gave them volatile mixtures of drugs to ensure they would stay and fight. He says they had no choice in fighting. He writes, "We had no choice. Leaving the village was as good as being dead" (Beah 107). This is the difference between the civil war in Sierra Leone and fighting for my country. Beah had no choice; he could fight or die, while in our country, it is our choice to fight to uphold our country and our freedom.

I would fight to protect my country, but I would not be so violent and gruesome about the way I killed people, either. Beah talks about how cruelly the army eliminated the enemy, and how they even ran "contests" to see who could kill someone the fastest. He even became so used to violence that when his friend was killed, he shrugged it off. He writes, "My squad had lost the base where I had trained, and during that gunfight Moriba was killed. We left him sitting against the wall, blood coming out of his mouth, and didn't think much about him after that" (Beah 122). He became essentially a killing machine, and that is not something I would want to become, no matter who I was fighting. I think that he did that to survive in a terrible situation, while I would fight for my country to keep our situation from becoming something like that.

Rehabilitation for many people is long and difficult, and Beah's story indicates how difficult it can be. Not only did he have to get away from the army, he had to work to forget what he had seen and done, and it took a long time for him to get over his experience. He notes that many of the young men who were in rehabilitation with him returned to fighting, but he managed to escape and finally come to America, where he went to school and finally wrote about his experience. During his rehabilitation, the people working with him would tell him what happened was not his fault. One social worker said, "None of what happened was your fault. You were just a little boy, and anytime you want to tell me anything, I am here to listen" (Beah 160). Her encouragement helped him overcome his fears and his self-recrimination, and helped him move along the road to true rehabilitation.

Rehabilitation takes time and patience, and this woman, "Nurse Esther," had both. She is largely responsible that Beah was able to assimilate back into society and live a normal life.

She helped him realize that he could not feel guilty about what had happened, that he had to move on with his life and live the best life he could. He has become an advocate for children's rights, and has spoken widely about his experiences and the exploitation of children in civil wars such as the one he lived through in Sierra Leone.