Gone By Ishmael Beah

A Long Way From False Child soldiers often have a hard time returning to a normal life after war. Ishmael Beah, however, showed that he can do it and so can others. He lost his entire family in Sierra Leone’s civil war and the government recruited him as a soldier in his early teens and went on to write his memoir about it, A Long Way Gone. As hard as it was for him to go through and relive these memories to write his story, people still question the memoir’s validity. Despite what many articles say, Beah’s story is true. Most of the arguments against the truth of Beah’s story claim that the dates in the book are wrong and have proof to back it up. In an article from the Australian, the paper that originally tried to knock down the truth
One of the claims against him is that he was only in the war for months when he has said that he was in it for two years. In an interview with ABC News, he said this: “‘They are simply wrong...Why would I want to say I was in the war longer than I was?” (McFadden). Beah dismisses the idea that he exaggerated the amount of time he spent as a soldier since it would make no difference in the fact that he was a child soldier and experienced what he did. He implies that the papers are trying to denounce him in any way possible by examining every word of his story and pointing out the parts where he might have been mistaken. Although one can say that Beah was on a copious amount of drugs at the time and cannot recall what happened to him as a soldier very well, Beah does in fact have an “excellent photographic memory” as he mentions on page 51 of A Long Way Gone. Still, Beah lived his story and to say anyone else knows it better than he does is potentially offensive and blatantly
Several people and newspapers have tried to prove the story as false over time and have failed. Beah has many supporters and people he met along the way to back him up. The only real questions posed by journalists are ones based on supposedly wrong dates that have been proven right by Beah’s supporters. In the end, Beah is an honest man and author who spun his experience into a memoir to share it with the world. He shared it so others in similar situations would not have to be alone in their journey to rehabilitation and that more people could know that the child soldier recruitment is a real problem facing the world