Response to "A Long Way Gone"

Of all of the novels we have read for this class, A long Way Gone is the one that really kept me reading.  I knew the book was about child soldiers and was surprised that he did not become one until about halfway through the book.  The whole first half where he and he refugee companions were trying to survive as he made his way back to his parents really humanized him and I could feel him lose all hope once he found the 2nd camp where he believed his parents to be was destroyed.  After having spent all that time looking for them just to find out what he already knew deep down, but he was just a kid and how could anyone want to believe that.  The part that struck me as most interesting was how he says at one point that he was just a kid who liked rap music and now his only goal was to survive.  I don’t know why it struck me as so interesting, but it shows how this could be a story about any normal kid.  Beah was just a normal kid.

I figured that he would be indoctrinated into the RUF yet it was the government that picked him up to be a child soldier.  I found this interesting that it was not the rebels that used him, even though there is a fine line between rebels in this conflict.  From my research on Sierra Leone I noticed that the rebels outnumbered the opposition by 5 to 1, explaining why the government was taking child soldiers.  While the methods used to make these kids soldiers was horrible, I could not help but wonder if it was a last resort that the country was willing to take in order to win.  This takes winning at all costs to a new extreme and the government was willing to go through with it.  If I had to venture a guess, I would assume that many of the child soldiers if not all have serious PTSD problems and no real way to get treatment.  Even in America, PTSD is something that until only recently has been recognized as a problem and treating military members who have it and not leaving them to deal with it themselves.  Beah didn’t exhibit any signs after he got out, but I think that it was way too early to see any real damage or it hadn’t really set in for him.  Once he returned to a destroyed Freetown, you could feel the dread of being involved in another war.  Being adopted and being brought to America is the best thing that could have happened to him.  I really don’t think he could have emotionally survived living through the conflict again.  As for the drugs and War movies that were given to him, I see some good that they did.  The drug induced haze and war desensitization may have helped him keep his sanity in the end.  Because he was so desensitized to what he was doing, I feel that it may not have affected him as much after he came out of the situation.  Not that I condone what they did in any way, I just feel that in the long run it kept him from truly understanding what he really did.