A Long Way Gone

by Ishmael Beah

It was the first time I had seen a grown man cry like a child, and I felt a sting in my heart.

“We must strive to be like the moon.”

We took their ammunition, sat on their bodies, and started eating the cooked food they had been carrying.

We didn’t say a word or even look at each other. Rather, we rushed on the boy at the same time, and before he knew what was happening, we had taken the corn from him.

As soon as I left the hiding area and was on the path, I felt as if I was being wrapped in a blanket of sorrow.

was glad to see other faces and at the same time disappointed that the war had destroyed the enjoyment of the very experience of meeting people.

Our innocence had been replaced by fear and we had become monsters.

I looked into the sky and saw how the thick clouds kept trying to cover the moon,

“How many more times do we have to come to terms with death before we find safety?” he asked.

We sat in the cemetery for hours, as if expecting something. But we were young—all of us were now thirteen, except for Kanei, who was three years older—and our emotions were in disarray.

bullet shells covered the ground like mango leaves in the morning.

The moon disappeared and took the stars with it, making the sky weep. Its tears saved us from the red bullets.

I couldn’t cry as much as I wanted to.

stepped up to a rack of AK-47s and handed one to each of us.

I took off my old pants, which contained the rap cassettes. As I was putting on my new army shorts, a soldier took my old pants and threw them into a blazing fire that had been set to burn our old belongings.

I imagined capturing several rebels at once, locking them inside a house, sprinkling gasoline on it, and tossing a match. We watch it burn and I laugh.

“Sometime I am going to take on a whole village by myself, just like Rambo,”

Sometimes we were asked to leave for war in the middle of a movie. We would come back hours later after killing many people and continue the movie as if we had just returned from intermission.

I had a tent to myself, which I never slept in because sleep never came to me.

“Where can we get ourselves some good drugs in this place?”

I would try desperately to think about my childhood, but I couldn’t. The war memories had formed a barrier that I had to break in order to think about any moment in my life before the war.

So we gave them shovels and demanded, at gunpoint, that they dig their own graves.

I smiled a bit again as we walked back to the fire to warm ourselves.

Before I shot each man, I looked at him and saw how his eyes gave up hope and steadied before I pulled the trigger. I found their somber eyes irritating.

It was the first time I had dreamt of my family since I started running away from the war.

When I was a child, my grandmother told me that the sky speaks to those who look and listen to it. She said, “In the sky there are always answers and explanations for everything: every pain, every suffering, joy, and confusion.” That night I wanted the sky to talk to me.

She listened carefully and said, “You never know. He might find him.”

Why does she do it? Why do they all do it? I thought as we went our separate ways. It was the last time I saw her. I loved her but never told her.

I was sad to leave, but I was also pleased to have met people outside of Sierra Leone. Because if I was to get killed upon my return, I knew that a memory of my existence was alive somewhere in the world.

We had not only lost our childhood in the war but our lives had been tainted by the same experiences that still caused us great pain and sadness.

I concluded to myself that if I were the hunter, I would shoot the monkey so that it would no longer have the chance to put other hunters in the same predicament.