The Child Soldier Reflection Essay Example for Free

The Child Soldier Reflection Essay Ishmael Beah was a child soldier who got out of the military base with the help on unicef. Afterwards he stayed in America and wrote a book about his life as a child soldier when he was younger. He tells about how the child soldiers were treated and how he became a child soldier in the first place. Ishmael Beah grew up in a remarkable childhood until a war came to his part of his country and because of war the landscape he grew up in became really scary and he was seeing first hand what wars are and what they’re doing to families. When he was taken away from his family and all his family got killed, he went to a military base to look for safety in which he was pressed into a war and he was forcefully trained to shoot along with all the other young people who are recruited and forced to participate in extremely violent acts in this war. The life of a child soldier is that they shoot people and does whatever the commander tells them to or else they’ll kill them and those child soldiers are also fed drugs and there are ways the commander would kill people in front of them to desensitize them and they’re given more drugs afterwards. Those child soldiers have the commanders as father figures and the other soldiers as his family as he and the other child soldiers have lost everything that’s there to them because that’s how the commanders think and work, to control children they Destroy what they know like their families and town and everything the children know is how they brought children to war and manipulate and drug them off to do whatever you want them to. Then a few years later Ishmael Beah and a few other child soldiers manage to get out of the military base as a few people from Unicef came and talk to the commanders to let them ago and whatever they said must’ve worked. At first, Ishmael and those few other child soldiers didn’t want to leave the military base as they have become attached to everyone there but they were brought in by the organizations and was treated as they have also been mentally injured. Some child soldiers even stabbed those people from the organization but those people that are there to help still came back and try to help those child soldiers and this act of kindness really shocked those child soldiers. War has really made a major change in the society by even bringing innocent children to war and using them and taking away they’re childhood. Most kids and people have a romantic notion of war and violence as they have never experience the actual war and when people finally do learn and know about war they would then know that war doesn’t bring anything but suffering and everyone deserves living a peaceful life.