“Why I Write” By Ishmael Beah

I write because when I hear people glorifying war, I know that they don’t know the truth. When I first came to America in 1998, I lived in New York City. At high school, my friends asked me about Sierra Leone and the war. They asked me if I actually, “saw people running around with guns and shooting each other?” “Yes, all the time,” I answered. But what really makes me feel that I need to write is their response, “Cool”. By writing, I hope that I can change those particular and naive perceptions.

I grew up in a village called Mogbwemo in Sierra Leone, Africa. Before the war, I had a very simple and remarkable childhood. I was very close to my family and had the opportunity then to just be a child. My friends and I enjoyed hip hop because the artists often times looked like us, and we were in total awe of how they could speak English so well and so quickly, while staying in beat with the music. I was very happy and innocent during these young years, but that quickly changed.
The war came to my home and destroyed villages and devastated the trust people had for one another, especially of young children. At twelve years old, my entire family was killed. Mothers ran with their shot babies on their backs without even knowing it because they were running from the rebels. Fathers held their dead sons in their arms. Men, women, and children were mercilessly murdered by the RUF and army alike. The RUF stands for Revolutionary United Front. They are a group in uprising against the government who claim they are obtaining freedom for the people, but really they just want power and are willing to go to whatever extremes are necessary to obtain that power. While the army is fighting against the RUF at this time, they too recruited child soldiers. At twelve years old, with no family or home, I was recruited as a child soldier.

I knew that I needed a home, a family, and a means to stop having to run. The army gave me a false sense of all of these things. After annihilating everything I had ever known to love including the very landscape of all my childhood memories, the army was able to easily manipulate me, along with all the other children they had recruited. They used our hate to fuel us. They brutally murdered people in front of us to desensitize us. They caused us to lose our humanity and innocence as children. Over and over again, we would watch Rambo movies; take drugs like marijuana, brown brown, and heroine in order to remove us from the very things that make us human. In a weird way, they became my surrogate family. The commanders were seen as our elders and the friends I made there were like my brothers. We were trained to ruthlessly pillage villages, burn homes, and kill as many people as we could without a second thought. This became my reality until I was taken for rehabilitation.

With utter selflessness and perseverance, the staff at the rehabilitation center was able to bring back the lost humanity in me. At first, I was so angry that I was there. The other boys and I would fight and stab the staff at the center, but they never gave up on us. Instead, they’d continue to use the phrase, “It’s not your fault.” It is thanks to them that I am alive and living the life I have now.

I write because I need to tell the world that the recruitment of child soldiers is absolutely wrong, no matter what side. Awareness is the message I need to send. There are currently twenty countries where children are being recruited as soldiers. I hope that my story can show the severity of this situation and all the devastation, disaster, and loss these children are victims of. I write because I need to tell the truth to what war really is. The common misconception of how war is romantic, glorious, and admirable for its violence needs to be shattered. Many people believe that a part of healing is to forget. I write because I will never be able to forget everything that has happened to me. Instead, I have come to learn how to live with these memories and how to transform them to help me appreciate my life. I hope that through my writing, others can too, learn to forgive because that is the only way to move forward.