artemis227285 's review for:

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah

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? stars

Everything felt like a tragedy, and it was beyond scary to see all of the bad endings that Ishmael barely missed himself, which he didn't miss at all, in a sense, because they still happened... And, there was also how Mambu went back to the front lines after coming to the rehabilitation camp, which was piercing because it was its own little and insignificant tragedy. That was Ishmael's sadder ending--all of the dead friends and family and strangers.
And that line in the beginning/middle-ish part of the book, when Ishmael says how that was the last time he ever saw Junior, I felt this kind of numbing, bone-deep exhaustion. And my English teacher made this comment, which I wish I remembered better, while we were all reading our different books, about like how the people who become the movers, the shakers of the world, the ones that bring it forward, or prod it awake, are the ones that have, essentially, come from the worst places and have had to struggle- they're who have actually gone and and actively fought for their life, because when you have everything, you don't have the drive--which I just found a really scary idea to have confirmed.

And, it seemed like the people in either side’s army--RUF and government soldier alike--didn't realize that their only difference was that they were part of two different armies and sides of an argument and that these armies did the exact same thing as the other did, which is their main motivation for fighting and killing the other side, right? Both armies tortured and killed people brutally and mercilessly, burned the villages of civilians, manipulated and used children as young as six or seven as soldiers, took drugs and gave them to the children, killed the innocent, and more. So, essentially, weren't the soldiers themselves fighting the enemies because of their hatred of the enemies for doing exactly what they did? As Ishmael saw it, it was mainly revenge which resulted in another attempt from the other side to get revenge--rather than fighting for the larger cause of either side, which was lost in the soldiers.
Also, (I could be completely wrong and there's definitely a large hole in my understanding of it somewhere), wasn't it the larger cause of the rebels that led to them forming and taking action in order to push back against the government they believed to be corrupt, which they did with force because it would not give up its power? But then, the government, similarly, fought against the rebels because they believed the rebels were corrupt, and were as a result obviously threatened by this powerful group that wanted to take the power for themselves. So, basically, they were fighting for the same cause, which was for a fair, effective, and stable government for Sierra Leon, right? And on the whole, if not out of personal revenge, did they get caught so easily in the idea of the greater good that they were willing to do anything, like manipulate innocent children or burn down the villages of civilians and slaughter people--which they realize is immoral, right?--for their own cause, which would then essentially just contradict it?