A child’s war and the lust for blood diamonds

In my mind, I pictured little boys scurrying through African jungles, chased by men with big guns. I saw the boys shot and killed, their blood running down the tall trees surrounding them. I saw them lying in oozing mud.

Then I tried to envision the same scenario in my own little South Shore community. I imagined men I had never met firing rocket-propelled grenades at homes and schools for no apparent reason. I imagined my friends, my family, scattering like ants, trudging through the muck of the nearby saltwater marshes.

But my vision ended there. I couldn’t bear the thought of people I know and love mercilessly killed.

Yet that is precisely what happened to Ismael Beah in 1993. Now 29 and living in Brooklyn, Beah is a United Nations spokesman and the author of “A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier” (Sarah Crichton Books: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007). I put the book on my summer reading list this year. It is a difficult read that chronicles Beah’s teenage years, when he was conscripted into the Sierra Leonean army to fight the Revolutionary United Front, a band of former students who were expelled from the country in 1985. Reportedly, they received military training in Libya and then returned to Sierra Leone to wrest control of the country’s considerable diamond trade.

By all accounts, the RUF was ruthless, executing impoverished villagers in the West African nation’s diamond mining region to show the appointed government’s inability to protect its people. The RUF began its attacks in 1991, inciting a civil war that killed tens of thousands, razed whole sections of the country, including nearly 1,300 schools, and lasted for more than a decade.