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The journey of the Lost Boys is poignant and engrossing, but it's not unfamiliar. Beah, however, is a new breed; he's not just a victim but a perpetrator. For almost the first time, we are seeing life from behind the dead eyes of a killer child. And life is not good. How many people did he kill? "I really have no idea," Beah says during an interview in Paris, where he is taking some time off before his publicity tour. "I never thought to keep count. We attacked civilians, villagers--anyone the commander deemed was an enemy; we killed them. If you thought they maybe aided the rebels, you shot them. If they withheld food, you shot them. And if you came across a group of refugees who appeared too quickly, or gave you some reason to suspect--you shot them too."
Beah was in a nearby town performing with a little dance-and-rap troupe in 1993 when his village was torched by rebel soldiers. After many months of privation and searching for his parents, he fell into the hands of the Sierra Leonean army. It offered protection for a while--and then conscription. Fueled by anti-rebel lectures, constant war movies, speed pills and "brown-brown" (cocaine mixed with gunpowder, which the soldiers sniffed), Beah became a killing machine. "That was your life," he says of his two years of endless fighting. "That's what you did unless you wanted to stop and die." His lieutenant liked him--they discussed Shakespeare--and when the order came to disarm the children, he was one of the first chosen to be rehabilitated.
From the rehabilitation camp where he was weaned off drugs and violence (not an easy task; Beah calls the workers there "truly heroic"), the former soldier went to live with an uncle. But the civil war was not over, and his uncle died, so Beah, who had visited New York City in 1996 as a guest of the U.N., eventually was adopted by a woman he met then. He went to school and college. And now, in one of those American-dreamlike turns, he's going on a 10-city book tour sponsored by Starbucks.
Starbucks? Yep. The company that brought the word venti into daily use has become a purveyor of solidly middlebrow culture to go with its joe. Beah's is the second book it has chosen to feature in its 6,000 stores. Its first was by best-selling male weepmeister Mitch Albom (he of those Tuesdays with Morrie), which suggests how far the child-soldier has moved as a phenomenon for mass consumption.
U.N. figures put the number of child soldiers at about 250,000, mostly in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Even for those who are no longer fighting, the future is bleak. "That is the stage we usually fail them," says Olara Otunnu, a friend of Beah's and a former undersecretary general to the U.N. "Child soldiers may be, for want of a better word, the most sexy category of children affected by war; but they are not the only ones." Sometimes families cannot be found or refuse to take the ex-soldiers in; sometimes they can't kick the drugs; frequently they return to soldiering.