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Summary: Chapter 12
After some more days of walking, the six boys are captured by government soldiers. The soldiers take the boys by boat to Yele, the government forces’ local base of operations, where an army lieutenant is in command. There are many orphaned boys in the village. For a while, life is pleasant. Mornings are for chores; afternoons are for games. In the evenings, the soldiers watch movies and smoke marijuana. Soccer games bring back happy memories for Ishmael. However, he has started having migraines, in addition to his nightmares.
One morning, the mood in the village changes as the soldiers prepare to defend against an attack. When the fighting begins, it is grim. Some soldiers die during surgery and prisoners are summarily executed. The lieutenant, a quiet but forceful man who enjoys his soldiers’ respect and reads Shakespeare in his free time, makes a speech to the villagers about the rebels’ many atrocities. Everyone must join the fight, he says. Strangely, Ishmael’s migraines have stopped. The boys’ clothes are burned, including Ishmael pants, which contained his cassette tapes. The boys are given shorts, T-shirts, and new sneakers. A corporal teaches Ishmael and two younger boys, Sheku and Josiah, how to move silently, how to stab with a bayonet, and how to fire an AK-47 automatic rifle.
Summary: Chapter 13
While swimming during a day off from training, the boys are called back to the village. The soldiers, both men and boys, load up with ammunition and are given white tablets for an energy boost. They head into the jungle and set up to ambush an approaching rebel patrol in what will be the boys’ first participation in warfare. When the ambush begins, most of the rebels—some of whom are boys, like Ishmael and his friends—are able to take cover. In the firefight that follows, Josiah is killed by a rocket-propelled grenade, which stuns Ishmael. The corporal orders Ishmael, who has stood up, to get down and start shooting. Then Musa receives a fatal head wound. Filled with rage, Ishmael begins firing at the enemy, killing several of them. When the shooting stops, Ishmael and the other soldiers recover ammunition from the bodies of their dead comrades and set up a new ambush not far away. The second ambush ends more quickly, with all the rebels dead. Back at the village, waking from a nightmare in the middle of night, Ishmael fires his weapon and must be calmed down by the lieutenant and the corporal. During the next two patrols, he has no trouble firing his weapon.
Summary: Chapter 14
The soldiers’ lives become a routine that revolves around drugs, war movies, and raids. The raids serve to obtain more supplies and to collect more recruits. After a raid, any wounded rebels are executed, and civilians are made to carry loot back to Yele. Ishmael and Alhaji, the tall boy, take turns at guard duty. The lieutenant tells Yele’s civilians to respect the soldiers who are fighting for them. The corporal tells the boys that their guns are their source of power. After the lieutenant slits one rebel prisoner’s throat, the corporal organizes a throat-slitting contest, with five prisoners as the victims. Because Ishmael’s prisoner dies the quickest, Ishmael is promoted to the rank of junior lieutenant. Kanei, the oldest boy, finishes second and is made junior sergeant.
Analysis: Chapters 12–14
Transformation is an important theme in this section, and Beah details how the government soldiers exploit the boys’ vulnerability to mold them into child soldiers. Their families killed, and in the hands of an organized and well-supplied force, the boys are extremely susceptible to the influence of the army’s leaders. These leaders are the perpetrators of their terrible transformation by mixing kindness with abuse. Ishmael is drawn to the lieutenant by his recitals of Shakespeare, remembering that his own recitals once made his father very proud. But this connection blinds Ishmael to the influence the lieutenant and the other soldiers have on him. When Ishmael finally enters a gun battle, all the pent-up rage and hurt over the deaths of his family and friends is unleashed, and Ishmael becomes a killer.
In Chapter 12, Ishmael’s rap cassettes, the last representation of his ruined childhood, are thrown into the fire. The boys are losing their childhood as they watch the clothes burn. The stark differences between childhood and war are expanded by the inclusion of Ishmael’s tent-mates, the two youngest boys, Sheku and Josiah. They are so young they cannot manage their weapons. The day of Ishmael’s first battle is marked by the contrast of playing soccer and swimming in the morning and killing and taking drugs in the afternoon. The army leaders seek to destroy the identities of the children and turn them into soldiers and use the missing elements of their childhoods as a lever to complete this transformation.
Ishmael’s first bloody battle makes him the perpetrator of war-time atrocities, a motif that haunts the narrative. After witnessing two of his friends die, Ishmael finally gives in to his rage and kills his enemies in bloodthirsty revenge. Little by little, every shred of humanity is ripped from the boys as they are fed more drugs and emotional manipulations. The death of Musa is significant because the stories he told to the other boys helped connect them all to their missing childhoods. For the rest of Ishmael’s time as a soldier, he no longer mentions memories of his family. The heinous atrocities of war that Beah describes in this section seem like they could belong to a different child than Ishmael altogether.
