After walking for days on end, the boys were picked up by a
group of soldiers. Later on they started losing the battles to the rebels and
inevitably had to join the rebels or be killed by them. In January of 1996, when Ishmael is 15 years old,
UNICEF men arrive to take the boy soldiers from the war zone. Ishmael and his
friends are lined up, and the lieutenant chooses the youngest ones to be
released from their duty. He tells them that the UNICEF men will put them in
schools and find them new lives.
Everything going on in this
part seems to be about revenge. They use revenge as a tool, or as an excuse for
doing something they shouldn’t. The boys’ motivation to join the army is
survival, but the theme of revenge is present as well. The boys are brainwashed
into believing that, by soldiering, they can take revenge on the men who killed
their families. When
Josiah and Musa are killed in front of him, he finds a rage inside that forces
him to fight and to kill. The brainwashing from the military is effective in
motivating violence in Ishmael, but he also must have the drugs to remain numb
enough to do his job and survive. Ishmael's innocence is completely
gone. He writes that the combination of the drugs made him fierce and that
killing had become "as easy as drinking water." His attitude toward
violence now is one of numb acceptance. He seems almost to enjoy the task, in
vast contrast to his earlier descriptions of his reaction to killing. Violence
as entertainment is also a theme coming up in this part of the story, as
Ishmael and the soldiers make little distinction between the Rambo movies they
watch and the wars in which they fight.
