Love Story

When you hear people talk about childhood it is usually a happy conversation filled with lots of laughter and good memories, happiness, and remembering the simpler times. In A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah, when Ishmael talks about his childhood it is not so innocent or happy. In the beginning it starts off with Ishmael as an innocent child who loves rap music, but it all gets destroyed in the blink of an eye. War and children are two things that should never be mentioned in the same sentence, in A Long Way Gone they mix to make a tragic story. So many children from Sierra Leone got involuntarily caught up in the war, and were made to do things that no human being should ever have to do. They were forced to kill people in inhumane ways and do hard drugs so they could be brainwashed by the older soldiers. Childhood is something that should be off limits from war and destruction no matter what the cost is; Beah’s true innocence is lost through forced actions in which he had to commit to keep his life.

The war changed everyone’s life in Sierra Leone.it took the few things people had in that area in the world; It turned every the villages and the people into nothing but bystanders to this horrific tragedy. The rebels stole families, killed them, took all their possessions, took the children and made them drug addicted killers. Unfortunately, Ishmael Beah was part of it all. While reading A Long Way Gone, Beah clearly shows the dwindling of his childhood. He looks back on a memory of himself realizing how different he was from before the war started when he says, “One evening we actually chased a little boy who was eating two boiled ears of corn himself” (30). The loss of innocence started when the boys got really hungry. The war had sent them into the woods to survive on their own, and they had no choice but to start doing what they had to do for food. Like chasing that boy and stealing his corn. They slowly became animals, but really had no choice but to help...