Entertainment

Ishmael Beah is sitting in a hotel room in Ann Arbor, Mich., surrounded by comfort. He can lie on a queen-size bed, watch TV or send e-mails to his girlfriend. But he can never escape the horror that has indirectly put him there.

Mr. Beah, 26, is touring the country to promote his first book, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. He will arrive in Dallas on Tuesday to read from the book at a Starbucks on Greenville Avenue.

He will look out at a crowd of listeners, many sipping lattes, many who know every detail of the life and death of Anna Nicole Smith or the name of the front-runner on American Idol, but who know nothing of his homeland, Sierra Leone.

And to their shock and amazement, he will tell them how his childhood was brutally stolen.

He will tell them how every member of his family was burned alive by rebel soldiers and how he, as a 12-year-old, became an unwilling fighter in a bloody civil war.

He will tell them how he and the other boys were given AK-47s, amphetamines and dizzying doses of "brown brown," a mixture of cocaine and gunpowder, and ordered to keep fighting for days at a time.

He will tell them how he became one of an estimated 300,000 child soldiers still taking part in more than 50 conflicts around the world.

And he will tell them why his story is important.

"Because you can read it and think, 'This could be my 11-year-old kid, my 12-year-old kid' ... and you don't want what happened to me to happen to any other child, much less your own."

He will also tell them of the people that he has killed.

"By killing another person," he says by phone from the quiet of that hotel room, "you lose your own humanity. But this was my daily life."

Some of the passages from A Long Way Gone leave his listeners gasping.

"We walked around the village and killed everyone who came out of the houses and huts," reads one.

"After every gunfight, we would enter the rebel camp, killing those we had wounded," reads another.

He confesses to slitting the throat of a prisoner and how he "angrily pointed my gun into the swamp and killed more people. I shot everything that moved." At one point, he writes, "Killing had become as easy as drinking water."

After storming the rebel camp, they routinely rounded up civilians – "men, women, boys and young girls. ... We shot them if they tried to run away."

Writing about such moments is, says Mr. Beah, his way of coping. He's encouraged by the reception the book is getting. The second book chosen for promotion by Starbucks, it has sold more than 47,000 copies in 6,500 stores. The quiet, unassuming Mr. Beah has even been a guest on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart.

Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz says of A Long Way Gone, "We were all inspired by this tale of determination and hope and knew it was an important book to share with our customers."

Mr. Beah says he's happy that the message is getting through.

"What I'm thrilled about is, when people come to the readings, they're bringing their kids – 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, kids of all ages," he says. "Some people have never even heard of Sierra Leone, but with Starbucks, we're reaching a demographic of people who are going to become very aware of this issue.

"For me, I know what it's like to lose your family, to suffer, to try to regain yourself and how difficult it is to regain yourself. And so I want to make sure that people know that and can help those who are in need. I wrote this book for them."

He's especially pleased that Starbucks is donating $2 from the sale of each book (priced at $22) to support UNICEF programs – such as the one he credits with saving his own life.

Before the war reached Sierra Leone in 1993, when he was 12, Mr. Beah lived what he calls a simple, idyllic life.

His father worked as a lab technician who tested soil samples. He moonlighted as a trader, selling cigarettes and chewing gum, "just basic things, to make money," says his son. His mother sold cooking commodities, "palm oil, fish, rice, things like that."

He loved playing soccer, swimming in the river "and going to the forest to look for birds." Some of his most cherished memories are visiting his grandmother in the village six miles away.

He also loved school and thrilled his parents with his mastery of English and even Shakespeare.

But all of that ended with the onset of war.

In the 1990s, civil strife in neighboring Liberia prompted the rise of the Revolutionary United Front, a liberation army headed by Foday Sankoh, who took over the diamond mines in eastern Sierra Leone and whose militia became known around the world for amputating the hands of its captives.

Mr. Beah's family sent him away in hopes of having him evade the rebel army. He and a ragtag posse of fellow boys fled to the countryside, wandering aimlessly through the jungle, starving and desperate and often harassed by those they encountered.

He and his friends would return to the village, only to find that their entire families had been burned alive in their homes. Soon, the boys fell into the hands of government troops, who taught them to kill and ordered them to seek revenge on the rebels.

War skills came about in on-the-job training, with no day in his life worse than the first day of killing. At the end of the day, the boys were force-fed drugs and made to watch violent movies, especially Sylvester Stallone's Rambo series.

"We were in a constant violent war, fighting, doing drugs and watching war films. This was our life," he says.

He often surprises those who come to his readings by saying he came to embrace this life. "Because if you don't embrace it and don't accept it, you will never be able to rise above it," he says. "You see things happening, but in your mind, you're not keeping any remorseful record of it."

He sighs, once again laughing his hollow laugh.

"When you're removed from it and the drugs begin to wear down and all the memories start kicking in, ... then," he says, "you realize what really happened."

From ages 13 to 15, he was immersed in daily killing. Then, in 1996, he was released to UNICEF and taken to a rehabilitation camp, where he was weaned off drugs with the help of a saintly nurse named Esther, who told him repeatedly it was not his fault. Eventually, he was moved to the capital of Freetown, where he lived with an uncle he had never met. But when that, too, proved dangerous, he was relocated to New York City in 1998.

There, he was legally adopted by the woman he now calls his mother, a professional storyteller, author and activist named Laura Simms.

He graduated from high school and enrolled at Oberlin College, where his initial attempts to tell his story in a fictional format were roundly dismissed.

He says that fellow students and a caring mentor, novelist Dan Chaon, told him that either the things he was saying were true or he was a very sick person. A memoir was born.

He is asked often, of course, about his biological family, to whom A Long Way Gone is dedicated. It's the subject he finds most difficult to talk about.

"It is a loss I will never get over," he says. "My life before, during and after the war, these are the things that make me who I am – now. It makes me appreciate what I have. They dictate to me my responsibility and what I hold dearly.

"I have found the best way to cope with my grief is to transform my pain into something positive, rather than dwell on the negativity of it. Because, believe me, that would kill me. Seriously."

Ishmael Beah will speak at 2 p.m. Tuesday at Starbucks, 3715 Greenville Ave. in Dallas.