The civil war in Sierra Leone, which went on from 1991 until 2002 and in which British soldiers took part, is now just one of history's many forgotten wars. Why it was fought (for diamonds?), and what the result was, remain arcane. This book, an autobiographical account by one of its thousands of child combatants, gives the war a painfully human dimension and reminds us of its pointlessness.

Beah tells of his flight from his native village as the rebels advanced and of his hungry wanderings through a ravaged land. Then he, too, was conscripted to a cause that had destroyed almost everything he knew. His brutalisation was abrupt. “We proceeded to practise killing the prisoners the way the lieutenant had done it . The person whose prisoner died quickest would win the contest.” From Bosnia to Rwanda, we are all too familiar with the actions Beah describes and the things that he admits to doing. For three years he lived to kill or be killed “as if my heart had frozen”.

A mission from Unicef began his eventual defrosting. As it has to many broken people, the United States gave him succour and refuge. He now lives in New York and writes well in his adopted language. If the pathos of this book helps to persuade the puppeteers of the estimated 300,000 child soldiers fighting today to put down their guns, then Beah will have done more than all those AK47s ever have.

A Long Way Gone, The True Story of a Child Soldier, by Ishmael Beah
Harper Perennial, £7.99

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