When he was thirteen, his parents and two brothers having been killed, Ishmael was conscripted to fight as a child soldier in the horrific civil war that started in Sierra Leone in 1991. Beah would go through rehabilitation and end up in New York City where he finished high school at the United Nations International School, and afterward progressed to Oberlin College in Ohio. In 2007, the book A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, in which fluently recounts his experiences was published.
