Ishmael Beah Reading at the Brattle

Ishmael Beah will read at the Brattle Theatre at 6:00 pm tomorrow, Tuesday, March 13. Tickets are $3.

It's rare when you see Jon Stewart flummoxed. But author Ishmael Beah's life story almost left Stewart at a loss for words. He said the book "made his heart hurt."

Just hearing about the book would "make your heart hurt." Ishmael Beah writes of his experiences fighting in Sierra Leone in A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. At age 13, the government recruited him to fight in the nation's civil war. Brainwashing and "brown-brown" (a mix of cocaine and gunpowder) transformed Beah and kids like him into killing machines.

Beah was lucky. He was rescued by UNICEF and eventually made his way to the United States. But he had to get off the drugs and return to a state of humanity. He told Stewart, "I had to learn how to sleep. I had to learn how to sit in one place for a long time."

Beah also pointed out that we can't assume people are fighting for a big idea or a powerful leader: "At some point, the war was not about anything. It was about survival."

Given the lack of coverage of the fighting in Africa, it might be all too easy to think of Beah as an exceptional case. However, Amnesty International states that "more than half a million children under 18 have been recruited into government armed forces, paramilitaries, civil militia and a wide variety of non-state armed groups in more than 85 countries." Think about that.

You can see all of Beah's interview with Stewart on Comedy Central, and then you can see Beah speak live.

Image of Beah's book cover from Amazon.