A Long Way Gone: Chapter 15 Summary & Analysis

The book covers two years in which Beah was a child soldier in just two chapters 13 and 14. The quick treatment of this time reflects the fact that this life is brutally repetitive: just more and more killing, and drugged up movies in between. But it also captures the way that during these two years Beah is so drugged up and emotionally repressed that he is, in a sense, in a constant present. It also captures that now, as the author, these are memories that he is repressing, that he wishes he didn’t have. Now, after these two years, the boys are fully used to war, having no choice after all, as it is adapt or die. But despite the desperation and the danger, the boys become almost depraved, and they are not pretending in the slightest when they talk about their joy of war. It is no longer horrible to them. This is their life. They are no different from the rebels who attacked Mattru Jong. There is also a suggestion here that Beah has, perhaps, a special connection to Jabati, through their Shakespeare connection.

Beah does not recognize this, but it may be that the special connection he shared with Jabati may have caused Jabati to decide to send Beah to school from the war. That Jabati, in some part of him, wants to protect Beah and realizes that war is no place for children (though of course he only sends a few boys away from the front. Meanwhile, the boys, despite what they have seen and done, are still treated as if they should have no choice in what happens next to them. Beah, distrustful and violent as he is, decides even though it is his lieutenant’s order that he go with the men, that he’d better keep some weapons to be safe.

Beah is once again being stripped of that which he cares about, even if now it is with his best interests in mind. Beah consider the soldiers who are watching him to be equivalent to civilians for all the war they’ve seen, and his contempt for them is clear. Still no one has explained to the boys exactly what is happening, which infuriates Beah, as it is evidence that no one takes seriously how grown up the boys feel that they are.

The city inspires in the boy’s a child-like fascination, but only briefly. The UNICEF man seems to think the boys will be excited to be away from war, demonstrating his own innocence and inability to understand the psychological reality of what it means to be a child soldier.

As far as the boys are concerned, they are still at war, and seem to even be itching for a fight, only averting bloodshed because one of them has the good sense to actually find out where the others are from. UNICEF seems to think it can just “save” the boys from the war, and that they will then revert to being normal kids. Of course the effects of being a child soldier are much deeper and more profound.

. That the UNICEF workers would bring the rebels and army boys into the same compound shows just how completely they don’t understand the nature of the boy’s conversion into soldiers. That both the army and rebel boys scream the same charge at each other shows how both sides brainwashed child soldiers in the same way. Meanwhile, UNICEFs inability to understand what has really happened to the boy soldiers here turns deadly.

The boys do not seem to be worried about having killed the other boys, as they are still at war, as far as they are concerned. In war, they have been taught, there are no rules. And this is the world they’ve been brought up in, the only family they’ve had. The issue is not just that these boys were forced into becoming soldiers against their will, it is that they have been transformed into young people who only know soldiering, have been cut off by fact and shame from who they were, who can think for themselves of being nothing other than soldiers.