Summary of the Book: Part 4

Ishmael's first battle takes place shortly thereafter. He watches Josiah, who at eleven can barely lift his gun, die from wounds inflicted by a rocket-propelled grenade. Anger takes over his body: "I raised my gun and pulled the trigger, and I killed a man. Suddenly, as if someone was shooting them inside my brain, all the massacres I had seen since the day I was touched by war began flashing in my head. Every time I stopped shooting to change magazines and saw my lifeless friends, I angrily pointed my gun into the swamp and killed more people." Over the next two years, Ishmael and the other boys who survive will spend their time watching Rambo movies, sniffing brown brown (cocaine mixed with gunpowder), and committing casual mass slaughter. As Ishmael writes, "My squad was my family, my gun was my provider and protector, and my rule was to kill or be killed." One day, four UNICEF workers pull up in a truck. After they meet with Lieutenant Jabati, the lieutenant orders Ishmael and a few other boys to climb into the truck with the UNICEF workers. Good soldiers, they do as they're ordered, but they're also confused and angered. The boys see themselves as soldiers; they want nothing to do with these civilians. The truck takes them to a rehabilitation center near Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, where they are ushered into a dining room. There they meet other teenage soldiers who have been rescued from the militia. The problem is this: the other boys are from the rebel camp. Naively, the UNICEF workers thought that if they separated the boys from the violence of the war, all would be well. The truth is harsher. The boys have been so steeped in a culture of violence that they are incapable of behaving in a peaceful manner. A battle erupts in the rehabilitation center, Ishmael tosses a grenade he has smuggled in, and within minutes, six boys lie dead.