Incorrigible

Last night, I stayed up way past my bedtime to finish reading A Long Way Gone, Ishmael Beah’s account of his years as a child soldier in Sierra Leone. Mr. Beah, who recently completed his undergraduate degree at Oberlin, has lived in the United States since 1997.

Some of you may have read the startling excerpt from his book in "http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/14/magazine/14soldier.t.html?ex=1326430800&en=18db63da3854259e&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss"> The New York Times Magazine a few weeks back. It was that article that prompted me to buy the book, which I actually picked up at my local grocery store (!).

As you might expect, a book about a boy who had an AK-47 shoved into his hands after suffering the trials of Job during his country’s civil war, is not happy reading.

I have never been so afraid to go anywhere in my life as I was that first day. As we walked into the arms of the forest, tears began to form in my eyes, but I struggled to hide them and gripped my gun for comfort. We exhaled quietly, afraid that our own breathing could cause our deaths. The lieutenant led the line that I was in. He raised his fist in the air, and we stopped moving. Then he slowly brought it down, and we sat on one heel, our eyes surveying the forest. We began to move swiftly among the bushes until we came to the edge of a swamp, where we formed an ambush, aiming our guns into the bog. We lay flat on our stomachs and waited. I was lying next to my friend Josiah. At 11, he was even younger than I was. Musa, a friend my age, 13, was also nearby. I looked around to see if I could catch their eyes, but they were concentrating on the invisible target in the swamp. The tops of my eyes began to ache, and the pain slowly rose up to my head. My ears became warm, and tears were running down my cheeks, even though I wasn’t crying. The veins on my arms stood out, and I could feel them pulsating as if they had begun to breathe of their own accord. We waited in the quiet, as hunters do.
The silence tormented me.

The short trees in the swamp began to shake as the rebels made their way through them. They weren’t yet visible, but the lieutenant had passed the word down through a whisper that was relayed like a row of falling dominos: “Fire on my command.” As we watched, a group of men dressed in civilian clothes emerged from under the tiny bushes. They waved their hands, and more fighters came out. Some were boys, as young as we were. They sat together in line, waving their hands, discussing a strategy. My lieutenant ordered a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) to be fired, but the commander of the rebels heard it as it whooshed its way out of the forest. “Retreat!” he called out to his men, and the grenade’s blast got only a few rebels, whose split bodies flew in the air. The explosion was followed by an exchange of gunfire from both sides.

I lay there with my gun pointed in front of me, unable to shoot. My index finger became numb. I felt as if the forest had turned upside down and I was going to fall off, so I clutched the base of a tree with one hand. I couldn’t think, but I could hear the sounds of the guns far away in the distance and the cries of people dying in pain. A splash of blood hit my face. In my reverie I had opened my mouth a bit, so I tasted some of the blood. As I spat it out and wiped it off my face, I saw the soldier it had come from. Blood poured out of the bullet holes in him like water rushing through newly opened tributaries. His eyes were wide open; he still held his gun. My eyes were fixed on him when I heard Josiah screaming for his mother in the most painfully piercing voice I had ever heard. It vibrated inside my head to the point that I felt my brain had shaken loose from its anchor.

This quotation is from the article. In the book, Beah provides detailed accounts of how he came to find himself a soldier in the first place. His family was slaughtered. He and his male friends, all of whom were 12 to 16 years of age, spent months hiding from the RUF and the army in order to avoid being conscripted. In the end, the army forced him to carry a gun, and thus he began his career as a killer.

And make no mistake, at age 13, Ishmael killed. He killed with his gun. He killed with his bayonet. He tortured captives and then killed them. There is no way to sweeten what he did. But, he was a child. And when, at the age of 15, he was turned over to the United Nations, he was sent to a home for a group of former child soldiers in order to be given refuge and rehabilitation.

This is what happened on the first day in the home:

We were on the road for hours. I had gotten used to always moving and hadn’t sat in one place idly for a long time. It was night when the truck stopped at a center, where there were other boys whose appearances, red eyes and somber faces resembled ours. Alhaji and I looked at this group, and he asked the boys who they were. A boy who was sitting on the stoop angrily said: “We fought for the R.U.F.; the army is the enemy. We fought for freedom, and the army killed my family and destroyed my village. I will kill any of those army bastards every time I get a chance to do so.” The boy took off his shirt to fight, and on his arm was the R.U.F. brand. Mambu, one of the boys on our side, shouted, “They are rebels,” and reached for his bayonet, which he had hidden in his army shorts; most of us had hidden either a knife or a grenade before our guns were taken from us. Before Mambu could grab his weapon, the R.U.F. boy punched him in the face. He fell, and when he got up, his nose was bleeding. The rebel boys drew out the few bayonets they had in their shorts and rushed toward us. It was war all over again. Perhaps the naïve men who had taken us to the center thought that removing us from the war would lessen our hatred for the R.U.F. It hadn’t crossed their minds that a change of environment wouldn’t immediately make us normal boys; we were dangerous, brainwashed to kill.

One boy grabbed my neck from behind. He was squeezing for the kill, and I couldn’t use my bayonet effectively, so I elbowed him with all my might until he let go. He was holding his stomach when I turned around and stabbed him in his foot. The bayonet stuck, so I pulled it out with force. He fell, and I began kicking him in the face. As I went to deliver the final blow with my bayonet, someone came from behind me and sliced my hand with his knife. It was a rebel boy, and he was about to kick me down when he fell on his face. Alhaji had stabbed him in the back. He pulled the knife out, and we started kicking the boy until he stopped moving. I wasn’t sure whether he was unconscious or dead. I didn’t care. No one screamed or cried during the fight. After all, we had been doing such things for years and were all still on drugs.

We continued to stab and slice one another until a bunch of MPs came running through the gate toward the fight. The MPs fired a few rounds into the air to get us to stop, but we were still fighting, so they had to part us by force. They placed some of us at gunpoint and kicked others apart. Six people were killed: two on our side and four on the rebel side.

It is horrific stuff. Not only what Ishmael suffered as he and his friends wandered the country as hunted boys—mistrusted by the villagers with whom they came in contact, but also hiding from those who sought to make them into soldiers—but, of course, the stuff that occurred after.

As Ishmael makes clear: he wanted to kill. He wanted to kill those who had murdered his family, burned his village, taken away his childhood. And, in addition, the army kept him so hopped up on drugs—"brown brown," a mixture of cocaine and gunpowder, and other drugs that were highly addictive and which fed the part of his brain that sought vengeance but also sought the sweet oblivion of not extending any kind of empathy to those he was killing.

Any number of things knocked the wind out of me as I was reading. And at 13, Ishmael was not even the youngest soldier. His accounts of watching a seven-year old who was not even strong enough to lift the gun he was being asked to shoot is, to use a term that has lost all meaning, heart-breaking.

This is not another diary, however, about all the awful things happening in Africa. It is, instead, what struck me yesterday as I was working. You see, yesterday, Yahoo News published the following story:

AUSTIN, Texas - Police were sent to all 22 Texas Youth Commission facilities and the agency headquarters Tuesday to investigate claims that young inmates were sexually abused and that agency officials covered it up.

Jay Kimbrough, appointed by the governor to look into the allegations at a West Texas youth prison, said the officers would conduct interviews at the prisons and halfway houses, secure equipment and collect documents if necessary.

He also issued a warning to agency employees.

"If you are part of this gig, you need to move on or we're going to find you and prosecute you," Kimbrough said.

The Texas Youth Commission houses offenders ages 10 to 21 who are considered the most dangerous, incorrigible or chronic. Its new board of directors chairman pledged Tuesday that the agency would cooperate with the investigations.

The emphasis in the story is mine. I want you to look at those words: "dangerous, incorrigible or chronic." And the ages attached to those words. 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21. In our nation, you cannot even buy alcohol until you're 21 because you are not considered an adult. You cannot drive until you are 16. You cannot vote until you are 18. And yet. In Texas, there are children who have been labeled as "incorrigible." Uncorrectable.

We have thrown away these children. And now, it turns out that in this particular case, those children may have been sexually abused by those who were in charge of their "care."

What is that we do, as a nation, for juvenile offenders who are considered incorrigible? What kind of help do we offer them?

Do you think that any of those children killed as many people as someone like Ishmael Beah did? Does that question make you uncomfortable? Do you think I'm advocating that Beah should not have been rehabilitated?

No. Of course not. The fact that he was able to be brought back into civilization, that people spent a long time bringing him back into the "light," of tapping into the things he had loved prior to the horror he suffered—rap music and Shakespeare—and used those as a means of reminding him of what he was is phenomenal.

So, if even the most brutal of child soldiers can become a scholar at Oberlin, why do we not put that kind of effort into saving our own children? Is a child who has suffered sexual abuse, or been beaten, or grown up in the kind of grinding poverty that leads to malnutrition, or who was prostituted before s/he even knew what sex was—are those children simply our garbage to be thrown out, locked up, declared unfit to live? Does a child who becomes a gang member because it's the only family or community that has ever taken him or her in deserve to spend the rest of his or her life in jail?

What does incorrigible mean, really? Incorrigible is our failure. Our culture's failure. Our unwillingness to not quit on these kids.

Ishmael Beah is a testament to what love and patience and work can do.

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