One of the most pernicious discoveries of our age is that children can be as good at killing people as adults. It requires little physical strength to fire an AK47. All over the world, insurgents and even some national armies recruit boy soldiers, some no older than 12. In Africa especially, unspeakable deeds are carried out by teenagers who in Britain would legally be too young to buy cigarettes.

The young possess the advantage that they are infinitely malleable, as readily turned into mass murderers as into football fans or computer-game freaks. In societies where anarchy prevails, family and community life have collapsed, and food is available only to those with guns, the rise of feral children is a phenomenon that shocks the world, but that it seems powerless to arrest.

Ishmael Beah was 12 in 1993 when war swept his country, Sierra Leone. His passions were rap music and reciting monologues from Shakespeare. During the years that followed, he became first a witness of destruction and massacre, then a participant in them. His account of his experiences makes appalling reading.

The rebels of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) advanced across the land, killing with impunity. When they seized recruits, it was their custom to carve the letters RUF with a hot bayonet upon their chests. From that moment, such conscripts were doomed, because if they fell into the hands of government soldiers, they were branded with their guilt. They must fight and kill until they themselves were killed.

Ishmael himself was away from home with a brother and some little friends when the war overtook his village. Thereafter, for months he wandered starving and desperate from place to place. He witnessed RUF massacres of the old and sick, the young and helpless. He saw people shot, blown up, bayoneted, buried alive, their throats slit, and narrowly escaped such a fate himself.

One day, Ishmael met a man from his own village, who told him that his family had escaped to safety, and were living only a few miles distant. The boy hastened to the reunion he craved so desperately. Instead, he found the village in flames, his parents dead alongside every other inhabitant, killed by the RUF.

Soon afterwards, Ishmael was conscripted into the government army. At first, he was a most unwilling soldier. Two little friends who joined with him were too weak to carry their guns, and had to drag them through the dust as they marched. But they learnt to fight, or else died. In a cocaine-and marijuana-induced haze, they trudged from firefight to firefight.

When each child had so much personal misery to avenge, it was not hard to motivate them. Month after month, for two years, Ishmael fought and killed, with increasing pride in his proficiency.

The first section of Ishmael’s memoir tells a terrible story, yet we know that such monstrous things happen. The second half is much more surprising and moving, because he describes his escape from this experience. One day, he and two others were abruptly ordered to lay down their weapons, board a truck for Freetown and go back to school. They were to join a pioneer rehabilitation programme for child soldiers.

They resisted bitterly their removal from the company, the only world and family that they now knew. Ishmael was 15, but had become a wild beast. He rejected kindness and sympathy, despised lessons, smashed windows, furniture and every other artefact of civilisation, craved the drugs that his system expected, demanded to be allowed to return to the killing fields where he believed that he belonged. “It was infuriating, to be told what to do by civilians.”

Yet infinite kindness and patience, as shown by a nurse named Esther, slowly had their effect. At first, he rejected physical affection as well as moral absolution. He was enraged when Esther and other nurses told him again and again: “None of what happened was your fault. You were just a little boy, and any time you want to tell me anything, I am here to listen.”

When, by some miracle, an uncle of his was traced, a Freetown carpenter, it required weeks of visits by the kind old man before Ishmael accepted him, and eventually went to stay with him. More miracles followed. The teenager was chosen to fly to New York and describe his experiences at a UN conference.

Having overcome his initial culture shock in America, he sobbed when it was time to fly home – and he had reason to. A few weeks after his return to Sierra Leone in 1997, RUF rebels broke through to Freetown. During the months that followed, amid relentless civil war, Ishmael found himself starving again. His uncle died: “I was always losing everything that meant something to me,” he wrote. He dreaded conscription into one of the rival armies. He fled across the border into neighbouring Guinea, from where he was able to gain a passage back to America. Laura Simms, an NGO worker whom he had met on his earlier visit, became his adoptive mother. He has stayed in America ever since. Now 26, he has embarked upon a career as a writer.

This is an absurdly attenuated precis of an odyssey of horrors. The simplicity with which Ishmael tells his story carries conviction. If this is not a literary masterpiece, it is indeed an important book. The author bears witness on behalf of hundreds of thousands of child soldiers, almost none of whose stories attain such a tolerable ending as his own.

A LONG WAY GONE Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah

Fourth Estate £14.99 pp240

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