¶ … Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah. Specifically it will discuss what, if anything should be done to prevent the participation of youth in international wars? The author was a boy soldier from the age of 12 in Sierra Leone. He talks about his experiences, and makes an excellent case for preventing youth's participation in such violence.
Beah's experiences are horrific, especially for such a young child. He writes, "The bullets could be seen sticking out just a little bit in the baby's body, and she was swelling" (Beah 26). No one should have to experience things like that, especially a 12-year-old. What is driving the fighting in Sierra Leone is the diamond mining, which the rebels want to control. This is at least partly the problem of the government of Sierra Leone, who allowed rival rebel gangs to take over the country and terrorize it for years. The government was weak and corrupt, and it let down the children who were conscripted, like Beah, to fight with the rebels. They had little choice. They had no homes, no families, and were threatened with death. A reviewer notes, "In Beah's wartime view, the rebels either destroyed your village or they're about to. It's not hard to understand Beah's decision to fight, though, as it wasn't much of a decision" (Dicker 7). Killing became their only choice, and Beah's experiences should never happen to a child of his age, or anyone, for that matter. The government could have done much more to help protect the people and repel the rebels, so they are at fault here, and they should take responsibility.
Another thing that could be done to prevent this is to regulate the diamond industry in some of the poorest countries in Africa, where corruption...
" (4) This disbelief would fade with relative quickness though as in a matter of less than a day from this intrusion into his life, Baeh would see more bloodshed and death than any child should ever know. The horrific sequence in which the war first becomes visible to the author tells with unflinching honesty the degree to which violence had come to rule his former home. This would be part
He notes that many of the young men who were in rehabilitation with him returned to fighting, but he managed to escape and finally come to America, where he went to school and finally wrote about his experience. During his rehabilitation, the people working with him would tell him what happened was not his fault. One social worker said, "None of what happened was your fault. You were just
" You figure, Williams explained to the author, you don't like what's happening at home in Chicago, and now in the U.S. Marines "...you finally get a chance to get away." Those were Williams' reasons for joining the military and participating in the Vietnam War as an African-American youth. Indeed Williams saw the military as not just an escape, but as "a form of incarceration" - but the war might
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder was first recorded in soldiers after the Civil War, but was not recognized as a common occurrence until after the Vietnam War, when symptoms developed in over 30% of combat veterans (Harvard Men's Health Watch). After they are removed from combat, former soldiers often experience nightmares, flashbacks, outbursts of anger, and the inability to sleep (Cohen 1). Beah experienced all of these symptoms when he and some
" There is a more calm feeling to his description. This is not to say that the author was portraying war as being a patriotic act, but the author was not as graphical in his describing what the soldiers were seeing and going through. The reader is more connected to the actions of the poem and not the fact that someone is dying. He ends his poem by referencing "hell"
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,/as under a green sea, I saw him drowning./in all my dreams before my helpless sight / He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning./if in some smothering dreams, you too could pace/Behind the wagon that we flung him in,/and watch the white eyes writhing in his face,/His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,/if you could hear, at every jolt, the
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