"We had been in the village for only a few minutes when the rebels attacked again. They didn't want to give up the village easily. We looked at each other sitting around the fire and angrily changed our magazines and went out to get rid of attackers for good. We fought them throughout the night and the following day. None of us wanted to give up the village to other, but in the end we killed most of the rebels and captured a few more. The others ran away into the cold and rainy forest. We were so angry with the prisoners that we didn't shoot them but, rather, decided to punish them severely. "It will be a waste of bullets to shoot them," the lieutenant said.
So we gave them shovels and demanded, at gunpoint, that they dig their own graves. We sat under the huts smoking marijuana and watched them dig in the rain. Each time they slowed down, we would shoot around them and they would resume digging faster. When they were done digging, we tied them and stabbed their legs with bayonets. Some of them screamed, and we laughed an kicked them to shut them up.
We then rolled each man into his hole and covered him with the wet mud. All of them were frightened , and they tried to get up and out of the hole as we pushed the dirt back to them, but when they saw the tips of our guns pointed into the hole, they lay back and watched us with their pale sad eyes. They fought under the soil with all their might. I heard them groan underneath as they fought for air. Gradually, they gave up, and we walked away. "At least they are buried," one of the soldiers said, and we laughed. I smiled a bit again as we walked back to the fire to warm ourselves. "
This is a true story of a soldier Ishmael Beah who was just 13 years old when he committed the merciless act. Unrest in Sierra Leone was forced Ishmael to join Army to survive and get food. He had already lost his entire family in inter conflicts and wanted to save himself from rebels.
'A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of A Boy Soilder', This is assumed to be the first memoirs of the boy soldier out of three lakh child soldiers the world has today. Hopped-up on drugs, wielding AK-47s and killing people on the orders by senior soldiers is what these children do in more than thirty conflicts prone countries.
Before knowing the world around him, Ishmael sees lot of violence and gets pool into it for survival. I remember seeing movie 'Blood Diamond' has similar story that how children were exploited to get diamonds.
Such stories are not only terrible but they leave a permanent impact on the child's mind. Like in the book, when Ishmael gets into better company, he could not accept it initially. He has to hide his past life from others and gets frequent migraines.
Children are very vulnerable in the society and therefore they are the easy target. They have been used, abused, beaten up and killed for political gain. How to stop this is the big question.
