There are about 250,000 child soldiers today. In A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah we read about his personal experience as a child soldier. In this book we see the start of the civil war in Sierra Leone before he was a soldier but as the war spreads he becomes a soldier as he didn't have another option. We see him go through loss of family and friends, brainwashing, violence, drug addiction, withdrawal and PTSD. He goes through recovery and gets better through hard work and the help of others. In this essay I will be discussing violence and how it affected him, drug addiction and storytelling. I personally believe revenge is okay to seek and its human nature but there are some limits. Taking revenge in a way that harms the other person in a …show more content…
A drug addiction occurs when someone uses substances to give themselves a feeling of pleasure even if it has negative consequences for them or others.When an addiction occurs the brain changes too making it extremely difficult to quit. This is because the brain wants more of the pleasurable substance because it’s giving dopamine. Once someone is addicted to something all they want is that thing and they will do anything to get it. This is a social issue because not only does it affect the individual it affects everyone. These addictions can lead to overdoses which is a huge cause of preventable deaths. It also affects many families and can lead to homelessness and food insecurity. There is also a lot of money used to arrest these people when instead they could have been sent to something like rehab. Since someone with an addiction will do that substance as much as possible this leads to unsafe conditions for them and others like driving under the influence. Drug addiction affects society as a …show more content…
These drugs were given to manipulate and brainwash the soldiers into fighting. Once he was addicted to the drugs he would do anything to get more and this also kept him from feeling pain while fighting. During rehabilitation the child soldiers would experience very intense withdrawals from these substances. He says “I cringed and rolled around on the floor by my bed or sometimes on the verandah. No one paid attention, as everyone was busy going through their own withdrawal stages in different ways”(Beah, 140). Many of the boys go through insufferable symptoms of withdrawal and because of this they would harm themselves or others. This made recovery very difficult for him for the start of
Ishmael Beah has experienced extreme hardships ever since he was a little boy. Growing up in Sierra Leone during war causes Ishmael’s life to revolve around such. In the nonfiction book, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldiers, Ishmael Beah shares personal accounts of what it was like growing up in a period of violence and separation. Ishmael and his family live in a small village called Mattru Jong. When Ishmael is twelve-years-old, his village is attacked by rebels.
In Ishmael Beah’s memoir ‘a long way gone’, Beah describes his experience as a child soldier. A deep message that Beah conveys is that “children have the resilience to outlive their sufferings if given the chance”. During Beah’s journey as a child soldier, he commits multiple graphic acts under the influence of drugs, such as demanding that prisoners dig their own graves, then burying them alive (151). This event shows how far gone mentally Beah
The book, A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beth is based on a true story of the author's life, who became an reluctant boy soldier during a civil war in Sierra Leone. Beah is now twenty-five years old, tells a compelling story. When he was twelve years old, Beah's village was attacked while he was away practicing raps with friends. Among the confusion, violence, and uncertainty of the war, Ishmael, his brother, and his friends wandered from village to village in search of food and somewhere to stay. Their day-to-day experiences was a struggle of survival, and the boys find themselves committing acts they would never have believed themselves capable of, such becoming a soldier.
"A Long Way Gone: Memoirs Of A Boy Soldier" by Ishmael Beah, has permanently altered my understanding of "Civil War". Due to the way Ishmael Beah talked about his own near death experiences, children who read his book can now have knowledge of war, from a child's perspective. The absurd savagery Ishmael was exposed to, taught him lessons a child like myself should never have to learn. Reading this book has brought light of the many intentional and unintentional consequences of war. Ishmael had been born in Mogwemo, a poor segregated village, like most of the regions in Sierra Leone.
A Long Way Gone is Ishmael Beah’s memoir. It retracts all of the tragic events Ishmeal endured while the Sierra Leone civil war occurred. Ishmael was a child who lived an ordinary life until rebels infiltrated his village which left him and others with no choice, but to flee. He was then forced to become a child soldier. This book shows the physical and mental torture Beah had to go through while has was a child soldier.
One of the most famous male child soldiers was Ishmael Beah who fought in the civil war in Sierra Leone. Ishmael Beah later wrote a novel titled A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier in 2007. In this novel, Beah describes his personal experiences in a nonconventional military unit and its affects it had physically and mentally. The grave detail of the novel enables the readers to fully understand the seriousness of this phenomenon. Beah experienced many life changing events in his life beginning at the age of twelve.
In the novel, “A Long Way Gone,” Ishmael Beah suffers from PTSD due to the exposure to war at such a young age and the rehabilitation process. Ishmael was exposed to guns, drugs and other types of violent acts due to the war at the age of 12. As time went by, Ishmael lost his family and slowly his friends too. Ishmael was traumatized from all the violence he experienced due to the war approaching his village. He had been forced by the Sierra Leone Armed Forces to serve as a child soldier during a civil war and “It was not easy being a soldier, but we just had to do it.
In the memoir A Long Way Gone, by Ishmael Beah, Beah writes about his childhood to teen years being an unwilling child soldier in Sierra Leone and living through times of great tragedy and war. Ishmael was born in Sierra Leone in 1980 and he moved to the United States in 1998 where he finished high school at the United Nations International School in New York. Ishmael went to Oberlin College. He is also a member of the Human Rights Watch Children’s Watch Rights Division Advisory Committee. He has spoken in front of the United Nations, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Center for Emerging Threats and Opportunities (CETO), and many other NGO panels on how children are affected by war.
Carson Edwards English I Ms. Thaden 10 February 2023 Family Provides Strength Twelve-year-old soldiers, blinded by cocaine, violence, and war, can only find strength through the love of family. Ishmael Beah, in his book, A Long Way Gone, is struggling through the war but keeps going toward the ultimate goal of seeing his family again, proving how the unfailing love of family will give one the strength to persevere through the hardest times. This book shows the instinctual longing for the family during times of need. Beah remembers a quote from his father during the beginning half of his war journey.
Baseline Essay: Influence of Beliefs in A Long Way Gone “It was not easy being a soldier, but we just had to do it. I have been rehabilitated now, so don’t be afraid of me. I am not a soldier anymore; I am a child” (239). The memoir A Long Way Gone follows Ishmael in war-torn Sierra Leone.
Not experiencing war is a luxury many people unfortunately do not get; however, Ishmael Beah, the author of A Long Way Gone, lives and survives the war, though not without heartache. With war there is always fear, death, and hell. Ishmael Beah proves war is hell through the killing of civilians, the distrust, and the after effects of the war. Ishmael proves war is hell through the killing of civilians. Many innocent bystanders of the war are forced out of their homes, made to run for their lives.
The soldiers were all given drugs daily to make them feel fearless and unstoppable; to make them shut their emotions off and not think about being killed, but to kill. Ishmael says he shot anything that moves because if he didn’t, then
Addiction is a disorder of the brain where a person feels he has to take the drug despite its destructive effects (Volkow, Koob and McLellan). Dependence is a state normally associated when an
They may be victimized through false promises or abduction, and then forced to commit acts of violence such as murder or to fight under the influence of drugs and alcohol. These children are not willing participants in these activities, but rather are coerced or manipulated into them by armed groups or other parties. Ishmael Beah, a former child soldier in Sierra Leone's civil war, supplies an example of this in his memoir "A Long Way Gone" which raises awareness about the issue of child soldiers and their impact. Beah describes how he and other child soldiers were given drugs to make them more willing to fight and kill, and how the trauma of the war and the acts he was forced to commit affected him long after the conflict ended.
Addiction is the reliance on a routine. There are many addictive stages. Addiction, as it comes along, becomes a way of life. The persistent use of the substance causes to the user serious physical or psychological problems and dysfunctions in major areas of his or her life. The drug user continues to use substances and the compulsive behavior despite the harmful consequences, and tries to systematically avoid responsibility and reality, while he or she tends to isolate himself/herself from others because of guilt and pain (Angres, & Bettinardi-Angres, 2008).