86 pages • 2 hours read
Ishmael BeahA Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Solider
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2007A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 10-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary
Ishmael’s mood is understandably low. He is overwhelmed by the sense that he does not know “what I was going to do with my life” (69). His goal becomes to merely survive, and his default outlook is pessimism. Even the group’s de facto leader, Saidu, questions how many more times they will confront death, noting that a part of himself is killed each time this occurs. He posits that soon, he will become an “empty body” even while alive.
During a pleasant interlude visiting a friendly village, Ishmael recalls the love and affection given to him by his family and the fables told by his grandmother. In particular, he remembers her calling him “carseloi,” or “spider,” due to his love of playing pranks on his brother. When they arrive at a deserted village, the boys dance and recall legends from their childhood. When they awake to find the smoked meat given to them by the friendly villagers missing, the boys become angry and suspicious of one another. They eventually find that it was stolen by a stray dog.
The author switches to a flashback mode to detail how each of the boys came to wander in the forest. Musa separated from his family when his father tried to find his wife; Kanei escaped with his parents but became separated as they crossed a river with rebels firing at them. Jumah and Moriba lived in houses destroyed by rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) but could not find their families afterwards. As Saidu’s family—which included three teenage sisters—hid in their house, the rebels invaded the home and repeatedly raped the young girls prior to kidnapping them. His parents were forced to carry all their belongings and follow the rebels. Saidu, who was in the attic doing a chore at the time, never saw any of them again.
To avoid danger, the boys walk at night. On one occasion, they cook and eat a crow that ominously falls out of the sky. An uncharacteristically quiet Saidu faints and vomits; nevertheless, he insists they continue to walk. The following day, he dies in a friendly village. The event traumatizes the boys.
A woman in a crowded village recognizes Ishmael and advises him that his family are all in the next village. Thrilled at the prospect, Ishmael has a premonition of tragedy later that night. The local dogs cry out all night for no apparent reason.
Chapter 11 Summary
Most of the boys sob aloud and gather near Moriba, Saidu’s best friend, but Ishmael grieves away from the group. Their mood lifts as they anticipate the possibility of being reunited with their families in the next village. Ishmael recognizes a man from his village named Ngor Gasemu who advises him that his family is searching for him. As Ishmael joyfully descends the hill into the village, he hears gunshots, barking dogs, and people crying. The village is in flames; a house filled with people is afire. Bleeding bodies litter the ground. Gasemu points to a charred house as the one the Beah family occupied, but its contents are reduced to a pile of ashes.
Ishmael rages at the sense of lost possibility. He wishes he arrived at the village sooner so he might have died with them. In a burst of irrational anger, Ishmael assaults Gasemu, who merely responds that “I didn’t know that this was going to happen” (97). The other boys restrain Ishmael and fight among themselves, but Gasemu restores order. Observing from a distance, the group hears rebels laughingly discuss their exploits of the day as one holds the recently decapitated head of a man by the hair. That day alone, the RUF burned three villages.
When a member of Ishmael’s group makes a noise, the rebels are alerted to their presence. Gasemu leads the group into the forest to escape the gunfire. During the night, Ishmael is frightened to hear Gasemu “cry like a child” (98); during the retreat, he was shot in the leg and side. The boys try to treat him, but he continues to bleed copiously. Heroic to the end, Gasemu instructs them to carry him to a fork in the forest so he can direct them to the proper path to escape. He dies when they reach a “wahlee”—a building used to process crops—outside the next village; Ishmael is overcome with regret and grief. He tries to imagine how Gasemu felt when he took his last breath.
Chapter 12 Summary
After days of walking, the boys encounter two men who direct them at gunpoint to lines of Sierra Leonean military soldiers carrying automatic weapons. Ishmael observes a dying man whose smashed brain still pulsates, and the dead bodies of young boys on the side of a river. A soldier leads them to the relative safety of Yele, a military occupied village. The narrator notes the apparent normalcy of the conversation and routine of the residents, but the large number of orphans serve as reminders of the war. The boys assist in the military kitchen and enjoy the distraction of daily chores.
Although the “sergeant doctor” examines Ishmael and questions him about fevers and colds, the young boy never mentions the frequent migraines or terrifying nightmares he experiences. Ishmael sits apart from his friends at night and clenches his teeth in pain, but he never mentions his suffering to anyone. Even when Lieutenant Jabati, a fervent reader, engages Ishmael by asking him if he eats enough, these topics are never discussed.
The soldiers leave one morning to engage the RUF in battle; only some of them can return to the village. After several days of skirmishes, the lieutenant explains that the men and boys of the village must either join the cause of fighting the rebels, or they will be asked to leave the village. Ishmael and his friends are now soldiers. The officer rallies the troops during their training by asking them to envision the rebels as the individuals who committed heinous atrocities: decapitating family members in front of their loved ones; burning villages and their inhabitants; forcing sons to commit incest with their mothers; and removing partially gestated babies from the wombs of mothers to kill them. The narrator is given an AK-47 to use in battle; he smells marijuana wafting from the soldiers’ depot.
The two youngest recruits, Sheku and Josiah, are seven-year-old boys assigned to Ishmael’s tent; they regard him as their protector. Along with Ishmael’s friends, the group undergoes rigorous training as they learn to crawl through bushes, eat meager rations within 60 seconds, and use bayonets. When firing practice begins, the little boys are not strong enough to raise their weapons, Ishmael recalls, “so the corporal gave them each a high stool to keep the weapons from falling” (112). Ishmael fantasizes about killing rebels by locking them in a house and setting it afire.
Chapter 13 Summary
On a Sunday morning, the corporal advises that the recruits may wish to attend church, as “you might not have another chance” (114). The boys play soccer and swim in the river until the corporal calls them back to the village. It is clear to the boys that a battle is imminent. Young Sheku and Josiah are frightened; Ishmael rubs their heads to comfort them. Another soldier distributes white tablets to the recruits, explaining they are used to “boost energy” while smiling furtively.
The group crouches near a swamp and prepares to attack the rebels. Ishmael notices that some of the enemy are boys, “as young as we were” (117). The lieutenant orders a grenade launched, and gunfire erupts from both sides. The author experiences panic: his surroundings are spinning, and he feels that he will fall off the ground while listening to the anguished dying shrieks of wounded recruits. He witnesses the death of seven-year-old Josiah, who is hit by an RPG and cries for his mother as he passes. Ishmael sees Musa’s head covered with blood and notices that his hands are “too relaxed,” prior to realizing that his friend is dead. Propelled to action by witnessing this carnage, Ishmael starts to shoot, attempting to kill “everything that moved.” Afterwards, he and the corporal remove the guns and ammunition from the dead bodies of their fellow soldiers and those of the enemy. This trauma leaves Ishmael physically and emotionally numbed. His officers provide him with more “white capsules,” and he is unable to sleep for the next week.
Chapters 10-13 Analysis
Ishmael’s sense of self starts to change in this section. Previously, he was occupied with day-to-day survival, particularly when he travels alone in the forest. Now, he is a member of a group of boys his age, but he loses this sense of purpose. He defends his psyche against constant disappointment by always expecting the worst; any brief sense of happiness he experiences is fleeting. Although his childhood was marred by his parents’ separation, Ishmael’s disposition was cheerful and ebullient prior to the catastrophic civil war. He loved to perform rap music and dance with his brother and friends. Just as his rap cassettes are destroyed in the pocket of his old shorts when a soldier hastily burns the garment, so too have the narrator’s dreams of a joyful existence burned away—all at the age of 12 years old. Similarly, Ishmael remains silent regarding his emotional distress. Migraines and terrifying nightmares become a part of his daily existence, yet he never mentions his suffering to his close friends or to the military physician who examines him.
Ishmael also develops a familiarity with the details of the physical signs preceding death that most adults do not experience until entering old age themselves. For example, he has an innate sense that Saidu faces not only physical, but spiritual mortality. He describes the older boy’s labored nighttime breathing and is concerned when Saidu comments that “each time I accept death, a part of me dies” (70). Ishmael experiences both emotional numbness and boiling anger when he is overloaded with the concept of death. Ishmael describes being within close range of the village where rebels murdered his family and realizes that he would’ve been happy to die with them.
When Ishmael’s former neighbor, Gasemu, leads the boys away from the triumphant rebels and into the forest, the older man does not reveal that he suffered two mortal bullet wounds. Ishmael and Alhaji attempt to administer a guerilla form of first aid in the wild. The author describes the smooth adeptness with which he attempts to stop the bleeding from Gasemu’s side with his hands and remove the victim’s shirt to use as a tourniquet. Musa faints from the sight of the hemorrhaging, but Ishmael, despite his emotional anguish, removes himself from his intense grief, guilt, and anger and functions mechanically. This scene, as well as Ishmael’s manic shooting of the rebels in the swamp after witnessing the deaths of his friends, represents a sea change in Ishmael’s worldview. He leaves any hope of happiness behind in the village holding the charred remnants of his murdered family, and he enters adulthood as a furious trained killer. Ishmael’s fury is initially displaced toward Gasemu, who tries desperately to ensure the boys’ survival. Eventually, this anger grows due to his survivor’s guilt and the amphetamine pills distributed freely by his military superiors.
The sense of spirituality fostered in Ishmael by his family during his childhood is replaced by an eerie sense of prescience. A disabled crow falls out of the sky while the starving boys seek food; they eat the animal, but speculate that it may be a “sign of a curse or bad luck” (81). The following night, all the dogs in the village start to cry piteously without apparent reason, and Saidu dies before sunrise. A confused cock crows throughout the entire night in the village prior to the boys’ participation in the first battle with the rebels. Signs of the natural world that should be familiar and comforting to the author are now unnatural portents of disaster.
In a speech designed to rouse his young troops prior to their first skirmish with the rebels, the lieutenant enumerates a litany of horrifyingly unnatural offenses committed by the opposing forces, including forced incest and murdered fetuses. These atrocities also reflect the extent to which all that Ishmael knows to be instinctive and natural is now inverted.
