One of the more disturbing books I've read so far this year is A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, by Ishmael Beah. A victim of the civil war in Sierra Leone, Beah was orphaned at 12 and left to fend for himself in a rural part of his west African homeland. Eventually, he found refuge in a village protected from rebels by a squad of the Sierra Leonean army. When the village was in danger of being overwhelmed by rebels, Beah was conscripted (along with several other boys in the village), given an AK-47, drugged with amphetamines and pot, brainwashed with Rambo movies and initiated into life as a soldier.
By the time Beah was removed from the war several years later by UNICEF, he had become a heartless killing machine who had lost count of the number of men, women and children he had tortured and murdered. After being "rehabilitated" and "repatriated" into civilian society, Beah was adopted by a woman in New York, where he went to high school and now lives and works as a human rights advocate.
Throughout the narrative, those rehabilitating Beah would assure him, "It's not your fault," in an effort to get him to forget his past. However, these platitudes seem simplistic and did not ring true to me, only reinforcing the difficulty of addressing such human depravity apart from a biblical worldview that confronts both the sins committed against us and the sins that we commit in response. Are child soldiers guilty? When should they be held accountable for war crimes? When they're seven or seventeen? I'm sure their dismembered victims' families would have a different answer than I would.
Ultimately responsible are the depraved individuals who place guns and bayonets in the hands of children. However, apart from an encounter with the cross, self-redemption will be fleeting for the victims and the perpetrators of these atrocities--particularly when the line between the two is so fuzzy.
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