A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Solider (Chapters 11 & 12)

Lily Tikijian
October 17, 2008
Literature Period 6
Mrs. Pfanschmidt

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Solider
Chapter 11 & 12

Unbelievable. That’s about the only words that I can use to describe these two chapters. Its true that I was warned that these two chapters would be the worst ones of the book, but I wasn’t expecting anything as bad as that! The beginning over chapter eleven starts off with a lot of grieving and sorrow because Saidu just died. “We all knew we grieve only for a short while in order to continue staying alive.” That’s what Ishmael says. No matter how much grieve the boys have, they cant dwell on it because they have to keep moving in order to stay alive. In class, we were talking about how the weather in the book is kind of like a foreshadow to the bad things that are to come. In the beginning of the reading it says that one part of the sky was completely blue and the other part was filled with stagnant clouds. The weather is a foreshadow to these two chapters I think. That sky kind of describes these two chapters. I was so excited because Ishmael and his friends are about to get to the villages were there families are. Ishmaels says he couldn’t stop smiling; he was excited to see them. The boys see one of Ishmael’s old neighbors, Gasemu. He talks about Ishmael’s family and how excited they will be to see him. Once they got close to the villages there was, of course, bad news. The villages was pretty much all burned down. Ishmael says, “When I got to the village, it was completely on fire and bullet shells covered the ground like mango leaves in the morning.” This would have killed me. I honestly probably would have died right there. They walk into the village and there are bodies everywhere and houses are burned and there is blood. Ishmael runs to the house where is family was and there are piles of ashes on the floor, no solid body is there. He becomes so filled with anger and disgust that he almost kills Gasemu, right then I could tell that the war was starting to take a huge affect on Ishmael. He was going to kill one of his friends just because he didn’t know how to control himself, that’s scary. The boys have to escape the soldiers again, and Gasemu is shot and dies a few days later. I don’t really understand the rest of the chapters. The boys were taken to a village/camp where there are other civilians and they are treated well. I am assuming that these are the native soldiers that are fighting against the rebel army. Ishmael and his friends are soon put into training to becoming a solider. They have to carry guns, which just scares Ishmael more than anything. When they are in training one of the officers tells the boys to, “Visualize the enemy, the rebels who killed your parents, you family, and those who are responsible for everything that has happened to you.” He is telling them this as they are being forced to practice stabbing a banana. They have to pretend like the its one of the rebels. Ishmael can’t sleep anymore but especially after that. I would be the same way, my head would be full of terrible thoughts and I would be afraid to go to sleep because I would probably have nightmares about them just like Ishmael. I missed a lot of things in these chapters because I couldn’t read them; I had to skip over them. They were just so terrible I couldn’t do it. I really wasn’t expecting it to be as brutally as it is.