The Jordan Harbinger Show - 622: Ishmael Beah | Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

Episode Date: February 8, 2022

Ishmael Beah (@IshmaelBeah) is a former child soldier, UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, and the New York Times bestselling author of A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier and Radiance of Tomorrow: A Novel. His latest book is Little Family: A Novel. What We Discuss with Ishmael Beah: What the volatility of life in a warzone is really like from the perspective of a child. How desperation drives human beings to rationalize committing any number of atrocities to survive. Why trusting old neighbors, friends, and even family in the midst of a civil war can arouse suspicion and cost you your life. The choice for all too many children in an area embroiled in armed conflict: accept recruitment into one of the factions as a soldier, or be killed before someone else can recruit you. How rap music saved Ishmael's life. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/622 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Miss our two-parter with professional pickpocket Bob Arno? Start catching up with episode 530: Bob Arno | Schooled by the Professor of Pickpocketry Part One here! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is sponsored in part by Conspiruality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy med yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspiruality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

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Find Conspirality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you do. get your podcasts. Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. I think the fear of human beings who have not experienced the depravity of life and violence, how it really gets into a community and changes everything around, the fear is that they don't want to believe that they too can be capable of those things. So we come up with this explanation and say that where we have layers of things, no, no, no, no.

People can lose it very quickly when their life is threatened, their family's life is threatened. They don't have any, they can lose, they can do things they don't imagine they can do. It's very real. It's very possible. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories. Secrets and skills are the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with people at the top of their game, astronauts, entrepreneurs, spies and psychologists, even the occasional Russian chess grandmaster, war correspondent or music mogul.

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Today, Ishmael Beah, I am just proud to call this guy a friend. He is absolutely an incredible human being. He grew up in Sierra Leone and ended up forcibly becoming a child soldier who grew up inside an absolutely bloody, brutal civil war and faced just unimaginable cruelty. Obviously for something like this, by the way, not good if he got kids in the car. There's plenty of other shows you can listen to. This is probably not the one. Welcome to the show if you're new.

This might also be a little bit heavy for you. But this story, it is harrowing, to say the least. Today we'll follow Ishmael as he searches for his parents and grows up unwillingly almost overnight from a child into a killing machine that he himself can barely even recognize. Not much more of an introduction needed here. This is an important story.

I'm honored to be able to bring it to you today. and if you're wondering how I managed to get people like this to do the show, it's all because of my connections and my network, and I'm teaching you how to do the same thing for free. Not necessarily for your podcast if you have one, but for your professional and personal life, jordanharbinger.com slash course is where you can find it. The course, six-minute networking.

It's about improving your networking and connection skills and inspiring others to develop a personal and professional relationship with you. It'll make you a better networker, a better connector, and a better thinker. That's Jordan Harbinger.com slash course, and most of the guests you hear on the show subscribe and contribute to the course. So come join us. You'll be in some amazing company where you belong. Now, here's Ishmael Beah. Tell me about what you saw early in the war in Sierra Leone. When did you first see violence? Well, I mean, Sierra Leone, when I was growing up, was a pretty peaceful country.

In my, at least, in the part of the war, the country that I grew up in, there was no semblance of the type of violence that came out through the war. The only thing that I had really heard about was when the war was in the neighboring country called Liberia. And we started seeing refugees coming and they would recount what had happened to them. And that's how we began to really understand what was going on or what war really was. Prior to that, our version of war, what we saw in Commando, in Ramble, in films like that. So it was something far-fetched, something in the movies, Hollywood, nothing real. tactile in that way. The first time I really saw it was when the war came to my part of the country

in the south, and I had gone about seven miles away from my town, and I tried to go back home and just witnessing people who were running away from war and what had happened to them. You know, some people had lost family, some people were carrying their children who had been shot, and they were trying to still run away with them. And there was just a kind of restlessness and a kind of disbelief about what had happened. And everything felt different. Even the air felt like it was going to choke you to some extent, you know? So that was my first introduction, really, to the reality of war. In the book, in one of the books, a long way gone,

you write about seeing babies and kids just covered in blood and dead people in cars. You know, did you realize there was even a civil war going on? Or did you just think, well, that's weird. There's, like, people that are bleeding. You know, was it obvious that there was a war? Or did you just think, wow, these people have been the victim of a crazy crime? I'm confused. Because it seems like, you know, what I'm used to is an American being here, and our wars are,

okay, the news is on, we're at war, it's over there in Iraq or Afghanistan, and this is what's going on, and we just watch it. You're sitting there, and I would imagine it's confusing in the beginning, because you don't really know what's going on, and nobody's able to tell you there's a large-scale conflict. You might just think, like, these people got robbed or attacked. Well, it's more than confusing. It's very frightening. And obviously, one of the reasons why I wanted to write that book is actually to take away that mystery or demystify that idea when people talk about war. Sometimes there's this element that is cool because it's happening over there. We're going to go and liberate these people. We're going to fight and do this and do that. Let's send soldiers because people don't know what it means to really be in war or in a situation of war. So I started writing this book when I was in the United States and it was a response to that. When they would say, oh, where are you from? Sierra Leone. Oh, there's war going on there. Yes. Oh, how is it? So for me, When the war started in my country, we knew there was a civil war because there was a political climate that had led to the war and it started in the eastern part of the country.

So before it came to my part of the country, I had heard about it quite a lot. So I knew the devastation that I'd heard of it, but then I experienced it firsthand. And it is beyond frightening because what happens is that your life cease to exist as you know it immediately. There's almost like you go to the store to get something to drink and you can't come back home for the rest of your life, because that home may not exist anymore. So I wanted people to understand what that feels like. So people understand how volatile life is, you know, how quickly things can shift for the

worst and you can never get them back. So really, that's what war is. All of a sudden, your town is attacked, and you start to run for your life. You don't know where your grandmother is, your grandfather is, where your parents are, where your siblings are. You try to find them and you can. You've got to run for your life. And basically, you just start to run.

Because imagine you're a civilian. This is not a case of where police are chasing you. This is people armed with weaponry, sophisticated weaponry, and their object is to either capture you or kill you if you resist. And there will be no trial at that moment, probably never. And so it's basically very frightening, and it is not as cool as sometimes people make it seem in war films, you know, where you're kind of running around and hiding behind, none of that stuff.

I don't know. I think most adults, most mature people realize, war is horrific, but most people have never seen it literally in their own neighborhood. And we'll get to that in a little bit as well. I know there's some sort of up close and personal stuff that you dealt with. That's primarily is what the book is about. But who's doing this? You know, you say the rebels in the book, but who are the rebels? You know, what are they rebelling against? It doesn't really make a lot of sense. If there's a functioning government and most people are living peacefully, who are these people? Well, but that's a good question.

So for the book, a long way gone, when I wrote it because the war came into my life when I was a very young kid, I wasn't very politically involved because I'm a kid. Yeah. I worried about what children worried about. I wasn't walking around thinking, oh, the political climate in my country, so I think I didn't care, you know. I was just doing what kids do. So when I wrote the book, I wanted to honor that. But in retrospect, after obviously I went through the war and I understood what the reasons were behind it, which was that we had a political climate and a government. in power at the time that had basically destroyed the country, the infrastructure, the way things

were, the rule of law, everything, and there was a need to get rid of that government. There was a need for a revolution. And often when people prescribe a solution, which is a revolution, then you have other outsiders who influence the outcome of that by then, you know, seeking a violent solution, which is basically let's go to war. And then when a war begins, you kind of control what happens, you know? It's the same thing. Let's take the U.S. for example.

The U.S. decided we're going to go to Iraq. Afghanistan for whatever reason they want to go there for, when they get there, that reason does no longer work because that's the nature of war. You would have an idea, you start it, and then it gets out of hand. So basically, there were people who felt there was a revolution that was needed through the RUF. They wanted to jump on the one bag on to get rid of the government that was in power at the time, and a lot of people supported it, but they realized that the RUF itself was

doing the same thing that it was advocating to be against, even in the course of the war that led to it, you know? And so, realized that the country was more rotten than that. So basically, at some point, if you read my book closely, what I tried to explain, it didn't really matter what part of the war you were in at some point. Everybody was basically doing the same thing, including the government army. Everybody was doing the same thing, because there was no command structure, you know, there was no something like a Pentagon where they'd be like, these are the rules, this is what we're going to do. If you had a little area, that was you were the man there, you became your commander there, you did whatever you could. If you took a dime on mind,

you made sure you guarded it, and other people from external forces used you to get those resources and you got ammunition, and you did what you could. If you had a weapon, you're part of a group, you looted because the only thing you could get now was to loot. If you came to town, you have a weapon and there were three, four bags of rice, some water, and whatever you had the weapon, you get access to it because you can make sure you get it. The war became that. It lost its focus completely, as most wars do. Yeah, at that point it becomes about survival, and people can rationalize or justify pretty much any action that they take. Because we hear about some of the atrocities, and we'll get to that in a bit here, surely these people committing these horrible

atrocities, they still thought they were on the right side, even with all the psychopathic shit they were doing to civilians, right? Of course. They still were able to justify it. Of course, that's the nature of war. In war, for war to function, there's a requirement for the order to dehumanize the order. And to do so, you have to justify why you're doing that. You have to basically say, I'm doing this because so and so. You come up with your explanation, right? For example, during the world, we're like,

okay, we're going to get rid of these guys who are destroying this country. Then it became, okay, those people destroy my town and my village, and we're going to find justice. So we're going to create our own group, and we're going to fight for that. So it just becomes that. You find reasons to explain your actions that are completely crazy. That's why in war there's always everybody, feels they're a good guy. Everybody feels they a good guy. Even if you fight somebody else, if you're

fighting against the rebels think that they are good guys because they're fighting for people and you feel like fighting against them because they're coming and destroying your livelihood and whatnot. So everybody's a good guy. Nobody ever wants to say that I'm the bad guy in the war. I've never anybody said that. Everybody says, well, I'm the one who's trying to fight this war because I want to protect my people. Take what's going on anywhere in the world, right? The United States Army goes to Afghanistan or wherever. They fight ISIL, Taliban. I used to say, well, we're fighting for our people, and the U.S. say, well, we're fighting to free you from, you know, everybody is always right.

But what is true is this is just an explanation to dehumanize each other and gives us the leverage and excuse to kill each other. Because once you engage in war, everybody loses. Because life is not valuable anymore. It becomes a piece of lint or water bottle or cap you can throw and do whatever you want with it. Right. So when we cannot talk, whatever our differences are, our problems are we, We cannot discuss it, and we get to that level where it becomes that survivor to that extent.

Which is where sometimes people are shocked when soldiers come back from fighting, wherever the U.S. is fighting and they are traumatized, and sometimes they shoot themselves, they become violent. And people are worried about why is that? It's because when you go and take out another life and dehumanize it, in reverse it, dehumanize yourself, your own spirit, your own being, and it takes a lot of undoing. It doesn't matter what the reason is. And when you're fighting, you cannot really say, hey, Jordan, I used to know you're a nice guy. You're running with that weapon towards me.

Let's talk about it. You can't. You want to survive. You've got to fight. You've got to shoot. You've got to do things you didn't think you'd be able to do. Otherwise, you can't live. You tried to escape that area, of course, after you saw some of the violence coming to where you were.

And you realized, it sounds like you realized you couldn't even opt to be peaceful because people thought you're a rebel. You're coming to cause us problems. getting beaten and tied up and captured by local villagers. Tell us about that because that's kind of horrifying, right? You're just saying, hey, look, I'm a civilian and they're saying, no, you're a military aged male. We're going to hog tie you or, you know, cut you into pieces because we just don't trust you because we can't trust anybody who's not somebody who grew up next door to me right now. No, but even people who grew up next door to you, if you haven't seen them for a month or two,

they become suspicious. This is the nature of civil war that is very difficult to end because civil wars are in the country where people are the same from that country. So, for example, if people are coming, I don't know, from Russia to fight us in Sierra Leone, be able to distinguish the Russians coming to Sierra Leone. But when Sierra Leoneers are fighting Syrianians, most people look the same. Most people have the same common names. If people speak similar languages, it becomes very complicated to determine who is the perpetrator, who is the peaceful one.

And sometimes that decision, if you don't make it the right way, could cost you your life. So what happens is that people then begin to survive, just take the high ground in terms of saying that everybody's bad. Because from their own, you can survive. But if you say, well, maybe if this guy used to be good, he's stayed good, that could cost you a life. So as a boy running, one of the difficulties in the Civil War and Sierra Leone that happened was that because they started recruiting children,

it changed how people perceived childhood. It changed how people perceived innocence, right? So when you came through a town where there were adults who had survived brutal experiences from children who had been coerced into fighting, who had been drugged, who had been traumatized, when they saw you as a child now, they did not really see you anymore as, oh, this little boy or this little girl who used to run around. They saw you as a threat because they've seen children who look like you who did something to them.

So then you have to explain yourself that you're not that person in the climate where that's impossible to do. So that's basically, it became difficult to be a child, you know? Because anywhere you came, people would want either to kill you or to recruit you. So basically, one way or the other, you had to find a way to survive one of them, or you had to join one of them. You really don't have much of a choice. So this is kind of a hellscape at this point.

And, you know, spoiler alert, it gets worse as you go. but you mentioned the lack of trust. This is a little detail from the book that I thought was very interesting. You were very into rap music and these villagers captured you essentially and they found a tape and they're like, what is this?

Right? And they start interrogating you and you're telling them, oh, this is down with OPP and they're like, what is that? Right. So tell me how naughty by nature saved your life in this particular instance. Well, I mean, one of the things,

you know, because I was living in the U.S. and I started writing this book, and I began to realize that when people hear about a place like Sierra Leone or other places where there's conflict, they think it's almost on another planet. They don't realize that actually the people there are consuming, particularly your age group, the same content you may be consuming elsewhere. Maybe you'll get to them a little later, some months later than you,

but they still are doing the same thing. And so I realized that the same, you know, like a kid born in the 80s, other people were born in the 80s who were consuming the same. music I was. You know, I had a cassette tape. My father worked for an American mining company in the southern part of the country. And through that company came American popular culture, through the quarters, because if your family worked for the company, you had access to the quarters, the mining quarters with a common area. So they had mounted televisions. And so they would play the yo MTV rap will come on, you know. So, you know, I didn't have electricity,

but when I went there, I would see it. So you see the Rondi. DMCs and these people rap, you know? And I was like, wow, these guys look like me, and they can speak English so fast and versatile. I kind of, I'm down with them. This is how I was introduced to this rap music. And my older brother, who went away for school, then brought me this cassette tapes with like the OPP,

with the Notting by Nature OPP, and then with the LL Cool J, with the RON DMC. And it would always be in our pocket. And in those days, you have the Walkman, like the original Walkman, you know, with a battery. and if you didn't want your battery to die, then you had a pen so you flip the cassette like this to rewind it, you know what I mean?

And then you put it back in, you know? I don't think this generation even know what that is. No, they don't. That's funny that you would rewind it manually to save battery, though. I didn't think about that. Yeah, that's a good idea. Because the battery wasn't, you couldn't buy it. This is a remote area, so you couldn't just get batteries like that.

So you had to make sure when you press play, you were listening to what you wanted. So anyway, these cassettes were always in our pockets because you're also doing the Ronnie Man, the MC Hammer, all of that stuff. So at some point, because as I mentioned, the ways in which you could have spoken about your innocence was no longer believed in this community that people were looking for other ways. And I happened to have a cassette in my pocket. So when they pulled it out and they said, well, what is this?

And I said, well, this is a cassette tape. And so they put it, they brought a cassette player and they put it in. And then obviously, you know, who's down when OPP started playing? And they're like, what is this? and I try to explain to that what it is, you know. So it's kind of like a parable. Like, I still kind of say, and they'd be like, if it's your cassette, can you mind it?

So we know. So obviously, I'm there. Who's down with old people? And afterwards they put it at a culture and I was saying, I need love, you know? And I was taking my head. I was like, I really need love right now when nobody's giving it to me. But hey, I'm still going to do the rap. And afterward, the chief was laughing.

They were like, yeah, it's just a kid. So that was what made them believe that I'm a kid because they thought what I was doing was silly. And so they gave me back. How did you explain, were they like, what do these words mean? And then you had to, because I'm imagining you sitting in front of a village of like armed people tied up with ropes and they're like, what does OPP mean? And you're like, okay, you're probably not going to like this.

No, no, I didn't have to get into the details of what OPP meant that time. I think it's more, I just said it's the name of the song. I thought that would get me into all other areas, you know? Yeah. So, but I just try to explain to them the equivalent of this in our culture will be like a storyteller, who is very lyrical, who's telling parables and doing things and kind of, you know, driving with the audience. And so they got that part, you know. So for example, when I was saying, who's that with OPP? Hey, you know me? So it's like a call and response. And I'm like, yeah,

like that. So I was just, at this point, I was just trying, whatever they could latch onto, I was trying to go with it, because I thought that would make them understand that I was in who they thought I was. I wanted to think of me as whatever it was to save my life. Yeah. You know, so whatever that was, I was willing to go with it. Wow. The idea that you could have been killed except you had a naughty by nature cassette in your pocket is pretty wild to think about. Yeah, it is. I mean, it's very interesting because, you know, like when I was writing the book, I had to get permission from naughty by nature and from

RONDMC, from everybody's lyrics I used. So my publishing house reached out to them. And they were like he can have it. They were like, they were like, you can have the permission. When they heard the story, they were like, oh man, you know,

when we were making this music, we didn't think that it would be in that setting to do that for somebody so you can have the permission to use the lyrics in the book, you know? Yeah, they must have been pretty surprised

because most of the time when they get a request for lyric permission, it's like, oh, we're going to use this in a video game, we're going to use it in a movie, we're going to sample it for another song, and they're like, okay, write me a check.

Yeah. And then there's this other request from this guy who was going to get executed by villagers in Africa, but then he wrapped part of your song and they spared his life. And they're like, okay, give this guy a free pass on using the lyrics in the book.

Now, that's basically what everybody did, and including Ron DMC, because I use some of the lyrics too in the boy and I talk about them. And so actually, funny story, I was on my way to Aspen, Colorado, to give a talk, to give a reading. And I am sitting at Denver airport,

and I see this guy, and I thought to him, I said, oh, I recognize guy. That's like DMC from Ron DMC, and he's sitting at the airport across from me. And so he kept looking at me, and I'm saying to him, man, should I go up and say, yo, man, you know, like when I was a kid

all the way in Sierra Leone in this village in Africa, I used to listen to your song. And then all of a sudden, he's standing over me. And he's like, your name is Ishmael. I was like, yeah. He said, yo, man, I'm reading your book. Wow. And you're talking about us and all the lyrics and stuff.

He was like, where are you going? And I'm like, I'm going to ask me. I was like, me too. I have a concert there tonight. And I was like, yeah, that's giving a talk there, you know, at the Aspen Institute. And he was like, you know what, man? Do you want to come on stage and tell that story to introduce me? Wow.

He was like, this would be the best way to ever introduce me as a rapper. Because I've never had any of that. And I was like, sure, you're sure? He was like, yeah. Wow. I could not have even made that story. I mean, I couldn't imagine. I was like, wow.

I was like, all right. I've come a long way from home, you know. Yeah, that's incredible. So you're sitting there thinking, should I approach him? I'm a huge fan. He approaches you, he's a fan, you end up on stage at a run DMC concert. Yeah. Telling this story.

I mean, that's, it's got to be a highlight of your life experience to have something like that happened to you. Of course. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. No pressure, though, because you're standing up there. I would imagine what, you know, you're used to telling stories you used to media.

But going up in front of however many thousand people at a run DMC concert, that's a lot pressure. Yeah, it is a lot of pressure. And I was sort of the hype man, you know. Yeah. So I was trying to say, well, you know, I come from this country. There's war, but tonight we're not going to talk about war. But just let me tell you, you know, like, let's stay party, you know. You know, there's a story now. Don't worry about it. I'm here now, you know. So which means I survive. It's all good. You know, I was trying to like amp it up like that. Yeah, I can imagine, you know, if the story had kind of gone a little bit toward the dark stuff that we're going to talk about here in a minute, people would be like, yo, whose idea was this? Like, we're trying to,

I got like two drinks in. I'm ready for a rap concert. This guy's telling me this, I didn't sign up for this, you know, so it could be a bit, but I can see that how interesting that must have been both for him and to be in your position. But yeah, you probably had to think good and hard about what you were going to say so that you didn't just go off the deep end and start talking about, yeah. I mean, I was just, what I basically was trying to explain to them was the power of the arts. Like, when you create something or whatever you create in the world, you don't know where it goes and what it does to people. And how that playing field is so wide, you have no idea the things you say, what you put out in the world, who it touches, whose life it changes, whose life it saves.

You don't know. So that's basically what I try to talk about, the power of that, you know? It's such a contrast from the reality of your situation as well, right? You're using rap and music is kind of, I guess it's an escape, right? And justifiably so, because you don't have a lot at this point in your life as a kid going back to your childhood in Sierra Leone. You don't have a whole lot to look forward to. You know, you're separated from your family. And this is horrible, but I just want to go over some of the atrocities that you were seeing

during this time, because it's easy for us to say, oh, there was a war going on. But this is very graphic, the things that you're dealing with. And I think it's helpful to get an idea of the sheer inhuman brutality of this conflict. And by the way, if you're listening to this right now with your kids or you're in the car with your kids, I would turn this off and pick it up at another point and put on some cocoa melon or something because this is not going to be a kid-friendly part of the show here. But in the book, and this is just some of the things from the book, there are kids showing up in your camp or that you're meeting along the way with RUF, which is the Rebel Force name, carved into their chest

and all of their fingers are missing, right? Yes. What is the purpose behind something like this? Is it just a message to others? Is that the idea? Well, I mean, at some point during the war, every other side was trying to show the other that they are stronger, that they are capable of violence more than the other side. This is basically what you try to tell the other person or the other group that you have power over them or that you can bring more violence to them. So you destabilize whatever they hold there.

You start with their communities. You come to a town. You get some young kids. You give them weapons and you have them shoot their grandparents in front of everybody. So from there on, everybody knows you means business. You understand? The idea of war is to bring terror to people. That's it. And how you bring that terror, the more you augmented, the more it shows you're the stronger side. So that's basically what everybody was doing. For the RUF in particular, they're also trying to make sure that sometimes when they capture kids and recruited them, they did not escape. So by carving RUF on your body anywhere, if you escape, any other group found you and pulled your clothes over and they saw RUF, they will kill you.

So which means that you did not escape. Because if you did, even civilians would try to kill you, any other armed group would try to kill you. You would not be afforded the explanation that you were kid and this was inflicted upon you. You will not. So this was a way to make people stay. But even in the war itself, as a kid, when I was in the war,

to make sure that you complied, they would show examples by killing people in front of you. So you understood that if you didn't follow the order, this is what would happen to you. So it wasn't like some silly thing where you'd be like, oh, do you want to join us? think about it, no, you did not join, you'll be killed and you will be shown what the consequences are if you don't do what you're told. So at some point, you begin to realize that whatever they

ask you to do if you do it, your life depended on it. The more violence you committed, the chances are you could survive the next day. And if you didn't, you won't be able to live. Now, with this main meaning and hacking that started in the war, it started because somebody in the area of but decided that to make sure that the population knows that they would not vote for the next people who wanted to run, the government, they would cut people's hands up so that you won't be able to vote. But what they didn't realize? What if that person wanted to vote for the RUF?

If they became a political party, they don't have any hands anymore. So what then? So these things were, again, in war, things don't make sense. It sounds like you could make a great sense, but then when you really think about it, it's just violence being inflicted on people. And sometimes they're also cutting people's hands. children who are not of a voting age. So how do you explain that then? You know? And some people that haven't caught in their hands had not even registered to vote or they don't even vote in the

beginning. Like I said, the madness of war, it starts with an idea. People think, oh, this is really great. Let's go for it. And then they do it. For example, the drugs that were introducing the war came out of that. They just wanted people to be so high, to not question the violence, that people started taking mismatch of different drugs. We know, we had all kinds of things that were terrible for our health, but people took it because you needed to survive the violence, you know, like the brown-brown, for example, you know? Yeah, let's talk about that. It's very weird to hear that you were doing this brown-brown, which is essentially gunpowder and cocaine mixed together, which, like, why gunpowder?

It doesn't do anything. Is it almost like a wives tale of folk belief that, hey, it's for battle, so we're just going to put gunpowder in there? Well, the mixture does something to amp up the effectiveness of the cocaine in a way. Oh, really? Yeah, it does. recommend that you try. Okay. No, don't, you know. I don't have any gunpowder here to mix with my cocaine, so I'm just going to have to stick to the... There you have it. But there are all that weird kinds of mixes. But it's also, you know, again, there's a little bit of mythology to it, but there's

a little bit of reality to it, which is also that people are just trying to put substances together so that they didn't have to deal with what they were seeing and doing and being part of it. and whatever could get you as high as possible. So you feel like you were kind of in a long nightmare, you took it, you know? So that's basically what happened. And people just went on with that. And sometimes people got addicted to the violence. There are even situations where people felt like if they drank, you know, blood,

it would make them stronger. And they did. People did all kinds of crazy stuff. Like in Liberia, next door neighbor, there was a general who was part of a group called General Butt-Naked, and he would just go fight naked in war. General Bucknaked is his name, or was what you called him? Yeah, General Buck naked. That was his battle name.

Wow. So he would go fight naked. Now, first of all, there's several bad things about that. That's how you know that the person is not correcting the head. Even if you have a clothes on, you can get bullet. Just bullet can pierce you a little bit. Now, if you're naked, there's one thing. Second, you're fighting in the bush.

There are lots of mosquitoes and other animals, you know? So obviously, this person, you know that something is not going up very well there to be like, okay, our unit is going to be. because the butt-naked unit, and we're just going to go out there. But then they will terrorize people because imagine somebody shows up well-armed naked in your town. Yeah. How would you even react to that? You're going to be like, uh, who is this?

You know, like what do we do here, you know? It signals that you're not dealing with anybody with any sort of professionalism that might spare you anything. You're just dealing with a complete crazy psycho at that point. So it's almost like, if soldiers show up uniformed, you might be like, okay, we'll surrender, everything will be fine. They're not going to hurt us. They're here to take over. It's fine. But if people show up naked with weapons, you're just like, run, because you know you can't reason with people like that. Absolutely. But again, that's the nature of war. You want to terrorize your opponent as much as possible. You want even the thought of your opponent, the person who's coming

for it to scare you to the point that you run away. And so that's what people are just coming up with all kinds of different ways to just do that. And it got completely out of hand. You know, In Syria, we got complete out of hand. And anywhere, what will happen? That's usually the case. It gets out of harm. People lose your mind because it's inhuman to do the things that we do in war to each other. So eventually, people are going to break.

They're going to snap. Something is going to happen to somebody, you know? And if it happened to them at the moment when they're still in the battlefield, then they just go crazy. Or sometimes it happens to them when they have left and gone back home. This is why the transition from a military person to a civilian life is very difficult, Because how you operate in war is very fast-paced, thinking quickly, making decisions in almost like a nanoseconds, and then you come back to civilian life, and then you have to abide by these rules. Everything slows down.

But then your brain is so heightened to sin, so many possibilities of damage. So as soon as somebody walks past you fast, you think they're up to something. Yeah. You understand. So that's why when so just come back, they lose it completely, you know, sounds, movements, you know? Yeah, this makes a lot of sense. And you hear about this with like PTSD where guys are in a battle or a conflict or a theater of operations one day. And then like two or three days later, they're at the mall with their family or their friends in Iowa or whatever.

And they are not able to relax and not able to adapt. And it's because they've been ripped from one environment and put into another so quickly. Or that's one of the reasons. You know, the other reasons are, of course, trauma and things like that. But it makes perfect sense that you can't adapt quickly to a peacetime environment. especially if you're in a very disorganizing chaotic war environment where everyone's taking drugs, the brutality is off the charts, there's no place that's safe, you don't know who to trust, even your own team or side or village might not be friendly to you at some point.

You are also taking these white capsules. What were those? Did you ever figure out what those capsules were that they were giving you? Is it methamphetamine, some sort of speed? Probably some sort of speed. I never figured out what they were, you know? Okay. When I was writing this book, this is one of the questions I always,

was asking myself, you know, I think if you're a journalist, you insert yourself in war, you come prepared, maybe you have a sample bag to take what you see, make notes, take, you know, but when you go through the reality of war, of life itself, you're not thinking you're going to survive. So you're not thinking, you know, let me keep one of these capsules. Maybe later, I can try to sample it. Right. And see what it is. You're just going through it, you know, and when you come out on the other, you'd be like, wow, how did I come out of that? Yeah. I wish I knew what it was, I wish I could find out. But I know that it wasn't something that I want to take.

Sure. I mean, I always try to look at whatever has happened to me to try to extrapolate something good from it. And one of the ways that I used to look at it was when I started school in the United States, when I was in high school and then when I went to university, you know, and some of my friends were for their first time beginning to experiment with drugs that left home. And I was looking at them and I've been there, done that, you know. Yeah. Yeah.

I was taking drugs we didn't even know. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. You know, it was a complete ball game. No, but also it was just the fact that, you know, I think because it was of such a young age that had taken so many drugs that my system, sort of, the intake of what could get me to be high, was very, had gotten really, really high. So if I wanted to use drugs in high school or in university, I needed a trust fund for it, because it wasn't going to be that I would just did a heat up cocaine and it would work. I would need, like, backs of it. I'm serious. Yeah. Like I remember when I first, my adoptive family took me to the dentist and they wanted to clean my end. They put Novocaine. Like this guy put maybe like 10 shots of Novocaine before it could walk. And he was looking at me. And I said, where are you from? And I was like, oh, you know, I'm from the East Village in New York. Because I was like, if I say anything else, it's going to just, nobody will believe me. I just say, I'm just weird like that, you know. I've never met anybody. So for me, even on the practical level, I thought to my say, if I start to take drugs, I may need to find a trust for. somebody you have to. Yeah. Yeah, you're going to have to take a mortgage on your house or something like that, to take a loan out. I'm imagining this dentist being like, how is it possible that you're still feeling?

Like, I can't legally give you more of this pen killer. Yeah, this is the unsafe amount at this point. But okay, so during the war then, if you're taking all these drugs, I assume at this point, you're just full on addicted to drugs at this, right? You're not able to function without it at some level. Yes. There is that, and then obviously, and that becomes a new reason to fight, because then if they tell you whoever at town or other group that we're going to attack, they may have this stash. So obviously everybody becomes quite violent because you want it, right, including the ammunition.

You didn't want to come down from the high. But there's also, because you're on the high, you also get addicted to the violence itself. So all of these things go hand in hand. So to the point that that's constantly what you're doing, either drugs are going to a fort war or something happening that is in between those two. Constantly, because if you stop, then everything comes back to you, and then that's going to really mess with you, with your being, you can sleep, you're going to have nightmares, so you constantly keep yourself moving, being high, engaging in more violence, until you remove from it.

You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Ishmael Beah. We'll be right back. Thank you so much for listening to the show. I love creating these conversations for you. These stories are incredible, as you can hear, all those codes you hear for the sponsors and the discounts and all that stuff, I don't expect you to memorize that. We put them all on one page. Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals is where you can find it.

Please consider supporting those who support this show. Now, back to Ishmael Beah. Do you know where the cocaine came from in Africa? Because you don't cultivate it in Africa, right? So did it come through Europe or just from South America to Africa? Who was distributing it? Do you have any idea? Oh, if only we knew those people who are distributed.

They try to find them to prosecute them, but everybody tries to hide, you know? This comes hand in the hand with the weapons. Whenever there's war, what you have to realize, that whenever there's a war anywhere, it becomes a place where there are few folks in the world who this is where they come to make money. Because the border becomes very porous. There's no longer a border. So you can go in and out of that country without anybody knowing you were there. So it's not like if you wanted to come into Sierra Leone during the time of the war,

that your passport would be stamped to say that you were in Sierra Leone. You could land the plane in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night, and on float whatever you wanted, and fly back out, collect your money or collect minerals, you know, diamonds in return for it and leave. So that's why wars continue longer because people profit from it. So there are people whose business is that. Whenever there's a war somewhere, they come and bring those things that will make the war continue longer so that they can pillage more. So nobody knows who they are. People know who they are, but it's hard to find them to prosecute them. This is sort of a sad state of affairs and a fact of every conflict is that people will go in and take humans out so you have human trafficking.

They'll bring weapons in so you have arms trafficking. There's drug manufacture because there's no rule of law in the area and militias need money so they will manufacture drugs and then distribute them from that area out to other places. Like right now there's a massive Capagon problem. I don't know if you know what Capagon is, but it's essentially a drug that's manufactured. I think largely in Syria, and the government is manufacturing it and selling it all over Europe and all over the world because it is something they can make in pharmaceutical factories and sell for hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars, depending on how much they're making and moving. And it's all so that they can profit off of and fund a conflict. So you end up with

war profiteering, but you also end up with some of that profit creating and prolonging the conflict because they're bringing in more resources for each of the sides that are fighting. So it's really, unfortunately, it's kind of a vicious cycle. Absolutely. You don't want to cut off your source of funding unless you're winning. Unless you've won, I should say. And even then, you're like, well, why am I going to stop the train now? I'm getting rich.

Yeah. And in our case, in addition to all of what you say, we have natural resources that everybody wanted. Right. We have diamonds. We have timber. We have boxer. So this was the time to get it for free, practically for nothing. You know?

So you're going to fund that person who has captured the area of the mine where diamonds are, and then they're going to capture civilians. who then dig that diamonds for free. So free labor as well. You know, so all of these things were happening. But one thing I really want to make clear is because for many years, people would always say this whenever you talk about civil wars, in a place like Sierra Leone or other countries that have been that have had war,

people always think that, well, the weapons are coming from China. Everybody always blames China or former Soviet weapons from Russia, the AK-47s. But the weapons are coming from everywhere, everywhere, including the United States. So, like, for example, during the war, we had some M16s that had been brought in. We had G3s, which are German rifles. You know, we had guns from Israeli Uzi's. So everybody was coming to sell stuff. It wasn't just, like, one bad, everybody was profiting.

There are middlemen making sure those guns were coming in and being sold, and those bullets, because a gun is not effective without the bullets. So there were people making the bullets and bringing them. Like, if a gun doesn't have a bullet, it's just a big, metal piece of stick that you can fight somebody where you can beat them with it, but you can't shoot them. So you need the bullets. So who was coming with the bullets? There are no factories here making bullets, but yet we had a lot of it to cause a lot of damage with it. So there are people who were bringing in knowing very well that I was going to be put in the hands of children,

in the hands of people who will kill children and women who would destroy their country, but yet they said it was business, right? And so they did it. And so this is what happens in war as well. So then how if the external factor are not there that exacerbate this. Sometimes these things cannot continue much longer, really. But because there is that coming, you have a problem. And how do they get here? On planes, on sheep, on different things. So it's going through the ports that people know. They know what's in it, but they still allow it to pass. Yeah, the incentives are disaligned, because the people with no power who are fighting the conflict and are stuck in the conflict,

they have absolutely no way to often survive unless they get involved in these illicit markets. which perpetuates the market. It's like a prisoner's dilemma. The first person to stop selling drugs or stop human trafficking or stop drug manufacturing and distribution, they risk death, right? So you don't want to be the first one to say,

okay, I don't really need to do this anymore. You want to be the last one to do it. And then at that point, if you're the last one to do it, well, you're making more money doing it. So it's like, well, now I'm making more money than I ever dreamed of. Why would I stop now?

Right? So you almost have to have this external pressure to do it, the wrong direction. It's really horrific. Absolutely. There's almost no limit to the brutality, and I know I mentioned no kids in the car. I meant to go over this list earlier, but I'll just briefly list some of the things that you wrote about in the book, which is old people executed with their genitals cut off, beheading people in front of their kids and parents, cutting open pregnant women and killing the babies, slicing babies and young children in half because they made too

much noise, forcing sons to rape their mothers. I mean, this is like depraved shit, man. How long did it take you to sort of wrap your head around this after the fact? I assume in the moment you're just blocking it out, right? You have drugs. You're going through this violence. You're perpetuating the violence in many ways. After the fact, how did you start to even realize how horrific that situation was? What was that process like? It takes a lifetime. I think I'm still dealing with some of it. The majority of it I've learned to, but it took quite a long time, very, very long time. I mean, first of all, even the basics, like when I came out of the war, when I was removed from the war, and I went to a rehabilitation program for about eight months just to learn to function, to learn how to sleep, to sit in one place without being restless, to not resort to violent means to solve any problem. Like all of these things, I had to learn to just basically be a kid again, even though I really didn't have those things, that sort of innocent that children have towards the world, I didn't.

because every time I walk now, everything about me was heightened. I had seen the word for what it is, from the best of it to the worst of it. I was very restless, and to this day, it takes a while to wrap your head around how this can happen. But what you get to realize is that this situation was not only isolated to a place like Sierra Leone. Anywhere where there's war, this is what happens. All of these things happen. In some places, you're able to record it like I wrote about it, and in some places you hide it, because you don't want people to know that kind of brutality.

But anybody who is in war, these things, you would witness them or you'd be part of conducting them. There is no other way. Even wars that are forced to save people's lives, these things exist in them. Because people lose themselves in trying to dehumanize the order and trying to go in battle and do all of those things. Because everything collapses. And in our war, particularly, you know, what was horrible about it,

at some point there was no rule of law. It wasn't like if somebody shot you, you could take them to the courts. Right. Or the policeman could come and intervene or anything like that. Even policemen didn't want anybody to know that they were policemen because that could make big trouble for them. You know, so if you can imagine living in New York City where there's no rule of law, there's no police, there's no, that everything goes. You can see what happens with people, right? And the closest I used to, when I used to say to people that I grew up in a place where if you had come and said to any of us that the things that happened was possible,

nobody will believe you and nobody believed it until it started happening and when I lived in New York and I would tell my friends they said no but these things only happened there and I said okay and then when 9-11 happened in New York

people that I knew who were very well educated got so upset in that moment the weeks and months that followed that other Americans that looked different from them they were willing to kill them on the street or attack them imagine that

with no police no law in a place where everything just collapsed What would you do? You will go further than that. The only reason why people stop. Even till this day, people are still doing that, right? When coronavirus started, people started attacking people who are Asians because they think they're responsible for it.

They are all kinds of violence. This is what happens. Human beings are capable of the worst things, but giving them the space where there's no regulations. People just roll. Before these things came to us, everybody said, no, we would never be like that. We can't be like that.

We were very nice to each other, and we were. But then we realized that, yes, we can lose our humanity. If everything is set in place for that to happen, we will. Yeah, I want to clarify, though, that I don't think this is inevitable, right? I think there can be times where things fall apart or there's problems, and I don't think we're just chained up, barely holding on to civilization. I think a lot of things have to happen in order for people to lose their humanity and especially to go down that road.

And it's not just my opinion, Rutger Bregman, who was on the show, episode 494, talks about There's a lot of science and sort of real-life case studies that show, you know, we're not buffered from acting on our vilest and most selfish instincts by a thin veneer of civilization. We actually have quite a thick bedrock of civilization and civility towards one another and good nature towards one another. But like you said, when things start to fall apart in multiple areas, right, so you have violence, but you also have food insecurity and you also have people perpetuating violence against you, and you have no rule of law, and you have no sort of hope for the future, and you also can't escape the area, among other factors, then you have the ingredients for a brutal civil war,

like the one that you faced. But it's not, I don't think that if the police went away in New York tomorrow, the whole place would turn into a post-apocalyptic nightmare. Some areas for sure, and there would be bad actors, but I don't think everyone would start. There's a famous quote, I can't remember who this was, but I agree with that. He said something along the lines of, I rape and pillage and murder as much as I want to, which is zero. I already do that as much as I want to, which is zero. That said, if people were trying to kill me at any given moment and it was the majority of other people that were afraid of me and I was afraid of them, then we have a different

scenario on our hands. You know, I think people can theorize all the one, but I think this, even this idea of civilization or civility, it depends on where, what the situation is and what is happening. I think the fear of human beings who have not experienced the depravity of life and the violence, how it really gets into a community and changes everything around, the fear is that they don't want to believe that they too can be capable of those things. Right. So we come up with this explanation and say that where we have layers of things, no, no, no, no,

people can lose it very quickly when their life is threatened, their family's life is threatened, they don't have any, they can lose, they can do things they don't imagine they can do. It's very real, it's very possible. But I think we say these things because we don't want to accept that we too can be like those we condemn. I agree with you. For example, let's look at the American Civil War. It wasn't that long ago. The American Civil War was very violent. There was still a level of civility at that time in these United States of America before that happened. But people lost themselves very quickly between the South and the North. For reasons, some people even went to the same school. Some soldiers went to

West Point, and all of a sudden they were pulled them from the South and from the North, and they were willing to inflict violent on the other because of an ideology, a small way. You know, think about it. I think we don't want to believe it because we think that it will make us feel like, well, we are not really as civilized as the other. Maybe it's not about civility. I think it's about when you, like you said, when you push human beings to a corner, when you take away certain things from them, they would go to their most corner instinct, which is to survive. And survivor requires sometimes lashing out. Think about what happened during coronavirus, right? People who are going to the stores buying everything they could, not thinking that, hey, maybe my neighbor is old.

Nobody thought of that. They just said, I want the most so that I will survive. That if it's uncontrolled, you know, there are so many other things, you know. This is true, although I will say there's a lot of instances of people helping one another during coronavirus as well. Yes, of course. The news and the media focused on the worst part of humanity, as they often do, but there were a lot of instances of people banding together as well. And look, don't get me wrong. If someone comes after me or my family, they're going to get cut in half, right? But I'm also not going to cut their children in half just to make them miserable. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? Like, there's a little bit of a difference. But listen, even in the war in Sierra Leone, there were

a lot of good moments. But because we're talking about the nature of people to slip into the horrible, that's why we're emphasizing that. Even in the war in Sierra Leone, the Sierra Leone, the Syrian war ended because Syria Union has wanted it to end. They started happening. Even when all of these things were going on, there are people who were very kind. And it cost them their lives, who took children like me coming from more who nobody believed that could ever change or do anything with their lives. So these things were still happening at the same time while these other things were happening where people were losing themselves completely. So it's not necessarily one or the other. You understand what I'm saying? Yeah. So I think what it is is that I think I've heard this

a lot. For example, I'll give you an example. Some years ago, I think it was in Canada or somewhere. I was on a television show and I had sat in this chair right after a Canadian soldier at the time, I think, was fighting in Afghanistan or wherever, and they were asking him all these very heroic questions about war, about, you know, dissenting war, you know, rules of war, all of these things. And then afterwards, it was my turn to be interviewed. And so as soon as I sat down, the host basically said to me, wow, it's the first time somebody has sat in this sit that actually kills somebody. Yikes. And I said to him, well, what about that soldier that just left? And he said, No, but it was a professional soldier in the war in Afghanistan.

And so what do you think it took for him to come home? I lie, you know? Yeah. Yeah, what do you think it took for you? You think he was just there being like, hi, I'm a nice Canadian, hey? I'm here, you know, let's talk, hey, hey, buddy. You know, no. War is violent.

It requires killing somebody so you can live. But I think it's easy to say that whether the others are more barbaric to do it like that, and we can't. Yeah. Because often we don't see the wars that have fought on our behalf. So it's very easy to put the hero thing around our people who come. But whereas the way it happens so as it is in the naked

version because we see it. And there's no hero at the end of the day in war. It's because we all see it. We all see what becomes of everybody in that moment. And some very nice people, decent people who can go back. I have met, you know, I'd also do this work as a UNICEF Goudoull ambassador.

I've gone to places where I've met warlords that are completely feared by everybody. And they have grandchildren who come running in their arms in the village and be like, hey, grandpa is back. because Papa is back, and they love them dearly. But when they enter that bush to fight, completely different. So what I mean, that these things exist everywhere in the world.

It's not because some people are there or some people. And I think we all have those tendencies. Well, sure. Those situations are ripe, you know. I won't lose it. I don't want to lose it. Of course. I've been through it.

I came out of it. I have a family now. I don't want to go there. But I will never make a promise to anybody that if things come to that level, I'll be this nice, peace-loving guy. I'd be like, yeah, you know, I've been to war before. I love human rights and everything now, man. If somebody tries to kill me, I don't, I can't promise you what I will do to them.

I can't make any promises ahead of time because I know what that is. Yeah, I think there's definitely sort of a difference of philosophy on this. I mean, I don't have an opinion one way or the other. I'm bringing the counterpoint from Rutger Bregman that shows, you know, and historically humans have not acted on their most base instincts, just given the ability to do so. It does take a lot of the downfall of what we consider civilization. before that will happen, right?

It's not just but for the police in my neighborhood. I would be murdering my neighbors because they have a nicer TV than me. There's a whole lot that has to happen before that. And it sounds like what you're saying is, yes, there's a whole lot that needs to happen, but those things can happen very quickly and very suddenly without you realizing that they're happening.

Absolutely. Am I on the right track? Absolutely. Tell me about trying to find your family, right? You had quite a journey, you know, you were this close and it's kind of a heartbreaking. Well, the whole book is heartbreaking, but it's a particularly heartbreaking part of the book.

Tell me about this. Well, during the war, I think one of the things that kept me alive and going was that idea that I'll be able to find family, particularly the immediate nuclear family, that I'll be able to find them and that whatever I was going through and seen and surviving, there will be a reason for it, for me to have gone through them. And obviously, so each time I heard where they could be,

that gave me more zeal to continue, you know, to continue moving and running towards wherever I was going. Because what you have to realize, when the war reached most people in Sierra Leone at the time, most people were not really leaving their areas going anywhere. So it was the first time most people ran away from home. So it's not like, and it wasn't around the time where you have, like, I don't know, Google map where you could be like,

all right, if I go left, I will go to the capital zero this way. You can't want just instinctually. You'll be like, okay, there's gunshots coming from that area, so we go this way. You know? And the next one is they're coming from that area, so we go this way. And so that's what I did, and I almost found my family, and then I lost them again. And so that really devastated me, and I thought to myself, well, what's the point of going in this war anymore? You know?

Why continue? And I was with a bunch of other kids who had gone through the same thing, with lost complete hope. And at this point, again, this is the part that I really want to highlight in wars, and particularly the one we had in Sierra Leone. People are very strategic of who they recruit. They're already recruiting people who are fed up with society, who are the bottom of it, who basically have been given the short hand of existence in the society. So they're angry. They want somebody to be responsible for why their lives cannot go forward.

So those people are perfect recruits. The second is people whose lives have been completely decimated. They've lost family, community, homes. They have nothing to go back to. They have nothing to lose. When you recruit those people, they are very dangerous because they don't care whether they live or die. So this is the group of people that they recruit. And I was in that category where there was no reason to be alive anymore.

So I might as well do whatever I can while I'm around, you know, to survive. And also, lastly, then that idea of revenge, somebody is going to pay for what happened to me. And then there's somebody who tells you, this is the person that did that to you. In the midst of all this madness, this trauma that you have, you believe them. And then that becomes your reason to fight. And so for me, all the kids that are always dealt, we were in that category. And then we were willing to do whatever because we thought, hey, they've done. destroyed our lives. We want to make sure it doesn't happen to other people and also those who are

responsible can, you know, can be held accountable. Because there was no justice system. There was nothing going on. Yeah, of course. So you knew that it's either you're going to take revenge or people are going to get away with it. And also you didn't have, I mean, in the book, you're very clear. They told you, you can leave if you want, but there's nobody who's going to protect you and there's war all around you. Also, you can't take any weapons or food with you. So good luck out there, man. Or you can fight with us, we'll protect each other like brothers, and we'll get these bastards who killed your parents. And to just go over very briefly, you tried to find your family. A friend of yours said, hey, your family's in this village, but first help me get some firewood.

And you go with him to get firewood, and you come back, and the whole village is on fire. And you just knew at that point that your family was likely in there. And it sounds like afterwards, there was a couple of soldiers you saw, and they said, well, we killed everyone. Nobody got away and they had like human heads in their hand at that point, right? It's just like a scene straight out of hell. So if you hadn't gotten firewood, you might have seen your family again, but also it sounds like you would have been murdered right alongside them, right? Absolutely. But this is also the nature of just war or any kind of violent situation. Sometimes it's the most meaningless thing that saves your life, you know, if it's not your time to die.

life. And for many years, I wish I had gone there because the pain was so unbearable that I wish I was there. And then it would have just ended my own existence and I didn't have to worry about it. And I blame my friend for stopping me to do that. But at the same time, probably that's what saved my life. Because if I had been there, I wouldn't have survived. And there are so many stories you hear from Vietnam, from World War I, World War II, of moments like that. So just a line up going somewhere and somebody decides that I really need to go to the bathroom. I really need to piss around the corner. And they stand. And then that's when everybody gets gone down. There's this famous German writer, Hunter Grass, who wrote an article some time ago, I think was in the New Yorker, about how he was in the German army.

And then his unit was pinned down somewhere. The Russians were firing at everybody and they were in a bike store. And the commander said, well, if everybody gets on these bikes, we can just ride across and get a position over there. But his father never thought him how to ride a bike. And he thought to himself, man, I'm going to die because my father never taught me how to ride a bike. Oh, man. And so the commander said to him, well, you wait here, we'll get on the bikes. we get on the other side, when we take the perimeter, you can come. They all got on the bike

and they all got killed. The only reason why he survived is because he didn't know how to ride a bike. Like, how do you even, you know? So there are always these moments in, in world that's kind of happened that you're like, all right, you don't like it. But at the same time, it's the thing that save your life. So sometimes I'm always thinking to myself, well, if I don't know how to do something and something is not happy, maybe there's a reason behind it. This goes to be a reason to be lazy about many things, but, you know, there's a fine line. Sure. Anyway. It is interesting how fate sort of determines those things.

There's a couple of stories. One of the guests on the show recently, his father was a resistance fighter in World War II, and for some reason he got stuck on a fence, crawling under a fence, and it took him another 30 seconds or something to get his clothes away from the barbed wire that had caught his clothing.

And at that point, he was the last one in the truck that was taking them to go on their resistance mission against the Nazis had started going, and he goes, if I run down the road after that truck, everyone's going to see me and it's going to attract attention. It's going to endanger everyone. So he stayed behind and went back in and looked.

And as soon as that truck turned the corner, they ripped through it with machine guns and killed every single person inside because somebody had either ratted them out or they were spotted, I guess, on their way out escaping from the Jewish ghetto in, I think it was Warsaw or something along those lines. And a friend of mine who was in Vietnam, he was not well liked by his squad or his platoon. They always picked on him. And he was in some sort of tank driving column situation.

And they said, you can't ride on the tank. You know, screw you, Marty. You've got to walk in the ditch. So they made him walk in this muddy, wet ditch that had water kind of up to his ankles. And he said, my boots are full of water, and everyone was laughing at me. And then the tank had hit a mine or something like that, blew up, killed every single person on the tank. And it blew over his head because he was in a ditch. And so he has bad hearing, but he's the only one who survived out of

of all those guys. So it's just, it's scary to think how close we are sometimes even in non-war situations to not seeing tomorrow. It really is terrifying if you think about it and you let it get to your head. Yeah, if you let it get to you, absolutely. Like when I live in New York City,

even after coming from all that experiences, I always talk to myself, it's a miracle every day that you don't get run over by taxi caps. Yeah, you walk down, you know. That's true, especially in New York. Like literally, you're like, how did I even make it through the day, you know? Because any moment, anything.

Yeah. Man, you could be, in New York, anywhere for that matter, you can be texting and you fall in an open, freaking, you know, manhole or something like that, and that's the end of you, man. Absolutely. You see those videos on Reddit of like a kid puts a firecracker into a little sewer grate and like the whole block blows up, you know, it's just insane. Yeah, absolutely. So how do they train you guys for battle? Because you aren't going through boot camp. You're not a professional soldier.

You're just some, at this point. How old were you at this point? Like 11? Yes, I was at this point, I started when I was, uh, 13. 13, okay. So you're a kid. How do they train you to fight?

They don't have time to run you through 10 weeks of physical conditioning, you know? What are they doing? Well, this is the thing about war that is very interesting, particularly at civil war. It's not like professional soldiers, they go to, you know, military barracks or whatever, they train for years, you know, they march every morning. No, you're being trained in the middle of war. So clearly, you know you're going to be going there very shortly, right? So there is that reality that you see already. So you learn on the job.

So basically you're giving the basics, which is that these guys who are wearing this thing over their head or wearing this type of shirt are not us. If you see one of them, you shoot them. Rule number one. Secondly, these are some basic commands. If we do this, you crawl, we do this, you go, you do da-da-da-da, all this stuff, right? The thing about civil war also or guerrilla warfare is the unpredictability. Anything goes. There's no rules of engagement.

So whatever walks is what you do. That's why it's so difficult and dangerous. That's why most people don't want to fight it. Because it's unpredictable. You will come in a place thinking that if you're walking in the bush with your platoon, there will be an ambush somewhere. Maybe everybody will be up in a tree waiting for you. You will not know.

There are all kinds of techniques that people come up with. And these are things that you just come up with as you go along, as you learn to understand your environment. But the most basic part is just how to shoot a way. weapon effectively, and this is not difficult to do. People always think that weapons are not that complicated to operate. Now, obviously, if you're in a war where you're fighting every day, then you get good at making sure that you're not wasting that many bullets, right? But to actually disassemble a weapon and shoot it, it's not the most complicated thing in the world. People fear

it because they don't know what it is, but it's something that you can do fairly effectively. And so particularly if you have weapons like the AK-47, those very light weapons that little kids at the age of 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 can handle very well, you have a problem. You have a problem. This is probably a dumb question, but how do you even know who the enemy is, right? You don't have uniforms. Yeah. So is it just the five guys that you're with or the people you know are maybe not going to kill you and everybody else is fair game? Yep.

That's basically it. You got it. Wow. Like, basically, it's instinctual. Like, for example, if there's, okay, during the daytime, you can distinguish, right? For example, the squatter that I was with, usually when we go to fight, we all find some type of green cloth that we're tied on our heads, right? Okay.

So if you see somebody had a green bandana on their head, you know they're on your side, right? And also, if you come to attack, you usually have a formation or some loose. You have an idea where people are. So during the day, you can see somebody else doesn't have that, they're the enemy. But then take nighttime, for example. You hear fighting, firing. You think you're going to ask, hey, is that my friend over there? Is that John in the bushes?

No, you shoot. And then tomorrow morning you check if it was John or not, you know? If it's him, too bad. That's basically the nature of it at the time, you know? And that's it. You know, so basically this is also why a lot of kids, they love recruiting kids because kids then form cliques. Because children like to form friendship in cliques. And that happens even in the battlefield.

So they had what they called small boy units. So it basically means there would be like 10, 15, 20, 25, 50 group of kids who then get to know each other. And they fight for each other to keep each other alive. But then they would do whatever the commander tells them. So they become very dangerous, you know, because they know each other, they know where each other are. They fought for a bit. So they kind of know where everybody else is going, you know? And this range from kids from age nine all the way.

And by the way, girls too. In my book, I didn't write about girls because I decided. that I wasn't a girl, so I didn't know what it felt like to fight as a girl with the added element of, you know, being sexually abused, being the wife of a commander and all of those things. So I left that story so that a girl can write about it. So that's why I deliberately decided not to write about it.

But there were girls who went through the same recruitment, the same hardship, in addition to other things that happened to them. And they fought, you know. So it was children of every age and every gender. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Ishmael Beah. We'll be right back. By the way, you can now rate the show if you're listening on Spotify. It's a relatively new feature. This is a big help. I'm convinced it makes the show more visible on Spotify. Just go to Jordan Harbinger.com slash Spotify or probably easier. Search for us in your

Spotify app. Click the dots on the upper right hand side and make it happen. Now for the rest of my conversation with Ishmael Beah. Tell me about the first time that you saw combat. Like you were, I almost say voluntarily, but that's not really what I I mean, tell me about the first time you saw combat where you were involved in the combat as opposed to running from the conflict. I mean, before I was trained to be an active soldier, I'd already seen so much violence that I was already quite traumatized. Yeah.

But the first day that we went to war, I think it was the most terrifying thing that ever happened to me just on the way there, knowing what we were going to do, but it hasn't yet happened, right? thinking, having this feeling that I was descending into some kind of darkness, into some place that was going to chip away from who I had been, that I would no longer get back truly. I felt that as we were going. And then there was an ambush, and then we started exchanging fire,

and people who looked like us were shooting at us. And there was a kid that when we were training had looked up to me. He was next to me. And there was an explosion, and his body flew, and basically his whole entire back frame, fell on the stump. And he was scared. There was blood all over my face and everything.

And I just lost it. I realized at that moment that, listen, if I don't shoot, I'm going to end up like everybody else who's been killed next to me. So I needed to shoot, and I started shooting. Shooting to kill. When I was writing, I was very, I wanted to be really clear about that when I wanted to write this book, because I don't want people to look at war and underestimate the violence of it.

You know, I could have written this book. I came out as like, oh, this good kid who was in a war and refused to shoot and just said no and hid when there was war, but I wasn't that kid. I wish I was. I was not. And most kids who are in war are not. Most people who are in war are not.

They will not tell you that because it's hard to admit that. Yeah. But for me, I wanted to write because I wanted people to understand that I was once a kid who loved hip-hop, run DMC, you know, LL Kool-J, learned Shakespeare, wanted to be an economist. And then I became a soldier. and I started doing things that I didn't think I would ever be able to be in the position to do, but I did them.

And I want people to see and understand that. That is possible, you know, but it's also possible to come up the other end as well. So I really wanted to paint that picture without kind of being like, oh, I could have written a book that glorified me. Yeah, I was this victim who just went around and people ran all over me. I wasn't going to do that because that would not be the truth. You mentioned that you didn't really take any prisoners, right? you kill every combatant that you come across.

There's no, like, oh, lock these guys out. No, civil wars don't have Abu Ghrae prison or things like that, where, you know, you bring that guy, put him here, we interrogate him. You don't have that. There's no nature. First of all, when you move to towns and villages, you burn them down completely.

So where are you going to take anybody? And you don't have the burden. It's not like you also have rations. You're like, hey, okay, if we have this prison, you got to feed him rations, there's not even enough for the people who are in your unit. So why are you got to carry somebody around, you know? So these are the things people don't understand about the nature of

when war gets to that level, there are no prisoners are not needed. The only time you kept prisoners was so that when you recruited people, they can learn how to kill somebody, practicing on them. That's it. Besides that, there was no prisoners needed. What are you going to do with them? Oh, wow. Take them to the next prison set where, you know? Sure. The whole place was completely falling apart, you know. What about civilians? Well, I mean, you're only a civilian until you're no longer one, you know, that was basically the nature of a civil war as well. But also, civilians were determined in the way that as a soldier, you determine who is a civilian when they live or die. Also, if you're a civilian, based on where you are, can make you the enemy of this or that

group. If you're behind enemy lines, if you're in a village that is taken by another group, notwithstanding the fact that you could not escape there, nobody wanted to have that explanation. It's the same way I was telling you earlier about the RUF when they write their markings on you. nobody's ever going to say to you, oh, they forced it on you. As soon as they see you, they would just shoot you. You're an REOF. You see what I mean? It was much later after the war

that people started trying to do things like that. But in the midst of the war, you can't make that distinction, you know? Again, I'll bring it to Monday. It's the same thing when people come from fighting in the Middle East and they say, oh, yeah, I saw somebody who had a turbanon and they were coming towards me and freak out, you know? It's like you don't have time to say, well, that could be my friend Abdul or that could be, you know, you don't.

because that's the nature of war. You make one mistake. It costs so many people's lives. So to avoid that, sometimes you just did the most violent possible to avoid that mistake that could cost your life or other people in your unit's life. You talk about killing prisoners with a bayonet and then you say like two sentences later,

I hoped later I would have time to talk about Shakespeare. This is like a crazy juxtaposition, right? Did you at the time, did you in real time sort of realize how split in half your personality was or did that only come out later? That only came out later. Whether you're in war, you don't have time to process all of that. Right.

The reason why you're jumping from one emotion to another is because you don't want to sit in one. It's too uncomfortable. Yeah. It actually can kill you. It can weaken you from being in that world, you know? So you switch back and forth. But for me, what I thought in retrospect,

what I thought about this was that most of the kids who were in the war and even some of the adults, our commanders, were people who wanted something to happen to their life. I mean, why would we have a unit of people who know Shakespeare? It means that they went to school before, right? So they were not just people who were uncivilized, didn't go to school, but something happened, and we all found ourselves in this moment. It was also a way to normalize a little bit this madness that we were in.

Because when we all talked about Shakespeare, it sounded like we were all in our secondary school classes, right? Talking to a professor, and we talk about it and we'll banter a little bit. Even when we played soccer, when we played soccer, it was all of that. to normalize the moment a little bit, you know? Even when we watch Rumble films, we were already fighting a word that was more violent than Rambor films, but we watched them to kind of make what we were doing light for us, you know? And we watch Rambor, if you'd be like,

ah, but Rambor, we noticed, it was during the war that I actually noticed that Rumble film, I was like, what kind of people are this? There's no way one guy can run around for like 15 minutes shooting one magazine, you know? It's like, well, these guys, they don't know what they're talking about. You know, I remember all of the commanders laughing and saying that, These people who made his film I've never been in the war because this guy is just running around

by the same, he said shooting that one guy. He didn't change the magazine yet. You have to change at some point. You can't just, he changes too late. But anyway, but imagine in that environment, watching that thing, be like,

well, C-Vesson-Talon is going over there, you know? It's crazy to me. The majority of your training was watching Rambo movies and then actual real-life practice. That's so insane. Of course. It's just unbelievable.

Because also for children, you want to make it like it's almost like a child's play for them as well. So you want to see that element of play, even though it's more deadly. So people who recruit children are very clever. That's what people don't realize. They think about this world. I think they do this crazy mad people. Yes, they are.

But they're also very clever. They're very charismatic. They know exactly where to tune you. What your psychological breakdowns are. What you need to hear at that moment. What you need to be more angry because of what you've lost. What they can deprive you or so that they can give you something. here and there you can feel beholden to them.

They know these things. This is what happens in any other military as well. It's just not as naked as that, you know? You know what I? In every other life. You have a company. You want your employees to, you know, you have to have a sense of leadership. When you walk in there, everybody sits like they're doing their job, you know.

But this is more peered on to a more corner level, you know. These things are just part of how, you know, and these guys are very smart. And people don't realize that, you know. You wrote that there was so much blood everywhere on the ground in the rivers and creeks and streams that there was even blood in the tap water and you had to run the water until it looked like water and then you could wash up. And I assume you meant that literally. Like are you brushing your teeth and washing your face and cooking with water that's literally running with human blood? No, no. No. No. What I was saying is that, you know, at some point in certain rivers,

because of how there's certain parts of the country in Sierra Leone and where there's a lot of rivers and you have to cross them to get to the other side and sometimes people have gone down in front of it and if you arrive there, right after it's happened, there's a lot of blood on the surface of the water. So if you wanted to like get to the water, it said if you have to move the blood a little bit so you can get to the water to wash your hands.

Now when I came out of the war, when I was a rehabilitation center because I was still reliving, for the first time I was no longer in war and I was not moving constantly. So when I would go to open the tap to take a shower, I would literally feel like I'm seeing blood coming out of the tap. This was more the trauma that was happening, or PTSD.

You got it. The time that I was going through it, PTSD hadn't been, that word hadn't been coined yet. So you were just like some crazy guy who's seeing things coming out of the water, you know, who had this headaches. Yeah. You know, it's much later, everybody said, oh, it's PTSD. You're like, ah, okay, yeah, that's what we had, you know. That makes more sense because I was envisioning like a faucet with blood running out of it. And I thought that almost just doesn't make any sense.

No, no, no. No, no. No, no, no. That is a little bit of a relief because I would just imagining you having to use that water, and it was just like one horror on top of another. Okay, so you get selected by the United Nations to go and speak about this, and you travel from Sierra Leone to New York City. Now, were you at all familiar with New York, or is it just like, yeah, I saw this on MTV

once, or, you know, in rap videos, and that's it. No, that's it. I mean, I've seen it on your MTV rap, and some of the videos that I've seen were basically, you know, rappers driving fast and shootouts. I actually wasn't looking forward to going to New York because I thought to myself, man, I just came out of war. I don't want to go anywhere where this is going to be something I have to do again. Right.

Yeah, I don't want to go to Queens. It's worse to Sierra Leone. Oh, wait a minute. I was like, I don't want to go where I have to like run again and fight. But what was very interesting because I had come out of this war, I didn't think I would survive. And then all of a sudden, actually, the way I was selected, is actually a very interesting story because I was asked along with several other young

people to go to a building down by the government working area in the capital city here in Freetown, to interview, to be selected to go to New York for this conference that was about the impact of armed conflict on children that the wife of Nessimandel then, Grasse-Machelle, had done a study and had come to Sierra Leone interview some of us, and this was the presentation of that study and testimonies. But they needed to find people to go. So I was asked to go by my counselor who was counseling me at that time, that go and see, I think you'll be a good fit because I was very quiet. I never said much about what had happened to me to anybody. But he thought, listen, whenever I spoke, he said, whenever you speak, you say something in a way that I think

people would benefit you so you should go. So when I went for the interview, there were other people, there were actually sons and daughters of the then ministers who were in power, who had not experienced war, because at the time, the war hadn't reached the capital city. So they were being interviewed to come to talk about things they did not know about, which is some of the reasons that I led to the war, that kind of giving opportunity to people who don't do. So I was so upset that I threw some benches and left. I never actually went through the interview.

I told them off, I said, this is the reason why there was a war here. You guys are still doing the same thing that will cause another war here. You don't even know what that is, and I left. And then I was selected as one of the people to go. So I never actually went through the, but I guess I saw the anger that I had. I was like, we better let that guy go over there

because he probably would say something. Yeah, yeah. He's got a really authentic voice. That's what they probably said. He's got a really authentic voice. Yeah. Let's just make sure he's not still crazy, you know, because it just came out of that war. Yeah.

You know, and it was the first time in my life I had a passport. When what comes to your life, you lose everything. So I didn't have any paperwork. I knew when I was born because I had gone to school. So they took me and the government made sure I got a passport through the UN. And I remember going to the American embassy to interview for a visa. And the guy asking me, only way we can give you a visa, if you can give us two documents to show that you intend to return

to Sierra Leone after you go to New York to this conference. And I said, well, what are those documents? He said, one, a bank statement that shows you have some money in the bank, and two, a document that shows ownership of property. And I just started laughing at the American Embassy. And everybody was looking at me, why are you laughing? And I was like, this guy is out of touch with reality, you know? Seriously, there's a war going on in this country. And at the time, I'm only like 16 years I've come from a war. And I told him, let's assume I had a bank statement. Do you think that when there was a war and there was gunshot, I was running from an

I was like, you know, let me print my bank statements before I leave, you know? Yeah. Or let me get my document. I was like, you know, are you serious, man, you know? Yeah, like, you're running out of your burning house and you're like, I need my ATM card. Yeah, yeah, my ATM card, my bank statement, get those bank details, you know? I'm like, really. And the only reason why I got the visa is because I had the UN backing, because the guy

was kind of frozen looking at me like, what was this kid? And I'm like, listen, man, there's no proof I can tell the fact that I don't know where I'm going. I've never even thought I'll go to New York. I've never even been on a plane in my life. So, I mean, I have no intent on staying there until you brought it up. Now I'm thinking about it, you know. Yeah. Oh, you mean, I never thought about the idea that I could just never get on the floor. Yeah, I could just come back, you know. And I thought that was funny. But people who work for the government, particularly in immigration, have no sense of humor whatsoever. Yeah, yeah.

They have none. You're like, no, man, it's cool. I'm going to be a rapper. I got a plan and everything. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I got a plan as a record company waiting for me. But anyway, so we finally got the visas and everything. Then they got us these suitcases, like big, rolling suitcases.

And I just come from this. So at the time, I only had four pairs of clothing, you know, two long pants and shirts that went with it and two short pants. So I could have probably wore everything and sat on the plane with all of them and I would still look like nothing was going on. Right. So they got us this big suitcase and I remember going to the airport with this empty suitcase with those few things I had in it and just having them checking in.

And then looking at me kind of like, okay, why is he checking in an almost empty bag? You know, it's like, yeah, maybe I'm going to get some things over there and bring them, you know? Anyway, we got on this plane with a chaperon who was coming with us. Also, I don't know why he was a chaperon because he was also his first time going on a plane and a trip. So I'm like, but who is Sheproning who? Why are we going with this guy? Yeah, no kidding.

He doesn't know anything like that. So we get on this plane myself and another kid. It was also a former soldier. It was a KLM flight from Freetown then to Amsterdam to ship all airport in Amsterdam and then from there to JFK. We sit on this plane and the plane starts to take off and it's cold on the plane. Like I'm saying, this is the first time in my life that I felt cold so much, my teeth were chattering.

And it was because the AC was on, you know, the thing on the top. Yeah, the AC. I didn't know at the time that these things, you could turn it all, you could regulate it. So I'm literally sitting there thinking to myself, I got to jump off this plane. Literally, I was thinking that. I was like, I got to jump up before we actually leave the airspace of cereal because I knew even if I broke my leg, I would be guaranteed warm weather. So I'm going to jump off. And I started thinking, I whispered over there.

Let's wait and see. And then the flight attendant gave us a blanket. She realized what was going on. The whole thing. It's like, we're going to another planet. I never imagined. Yeah. I would be good. And we came to New York. It was in the winter.

Oh, my God. And nobody told us. That must have been a wake-up call, man. Nobody told us. New York in the winter. And also our chaperon didn't know where we were going. So none of us had any jackets. So we got out of the plane at JFK and we're standing by the door and there are these white things falling out of the sky. And I'm thinking to myself, well, that's strange. I've never seen that before. And my friend said, no, you've seen this Christmas film. It must be Christmas. Because, you know, this Christmas film that I've seen before, things like that fall out of the sky.

And I'm like, ah, so maybe it's Christmas. But how come it's not Christmas where we're coming from? Anyway, we step outside. It was so cold, I felt my face was going to fall off. I said, I want to go back. So contrary to what people say that when immigrants come, they want to stay, I wanted to go back. I was like, I'm going back to what weather. This is in human.

Nobody can live in this environment. I wanted to go outside. I can't be. You know, I fought in the war. I survived. I'm going to die here in this cold where I can barely walk. I was like, no way, man. And so that was basically my...

Oh, man, this is quite the story. And there's more in the book as well about, you know, you return to Sierra Leone, had to essentially escape again. I mean, I'll go over some of it in the show closed, but it's just absolutely insane. The idea of having to escape your home country again after this civil war really was, it really is just such a harrowing tale. And I don't want to keep you too much longer, but look,

you've since returned to Sierra Leone, right? It's a safe for place now. Is that where you are now? Yes, I'm actually speaking to you from Friton, which is the capital city right now. I move back here with my family. I have three kids now, so I mean, clearly you can see that it's been a lot. I went through it. I survived.

Yeah, you have better internet than I do. Yeah. Now you've got three kids of your own. Is there a part of you that's at all worried that something like this could happen again to them as well? No. I think because I've lived in it and I can see. When such things are going to happen, I try to raise them in environments that they would not have to go through that. Because, you know, for me, I think as their father, I think there's one person in their family line that I've experienced that, and that's enough.

I don't think they need to, you know. Now they go and live in places where they are not certain things that they're used to. For example, before we moved there, we were living in Malibu. So these are my kids. Malibu. Yeah. Wow. We move from Malibu to Frita.

I don't think you see that travel pattern very. very often. Now. That's probably the only people who bought that ticket. But what I'm trying to say is that I try to raise my kids because, you know, I've done something on myself in privilege, but having them also aware that they have privilege, having them aware that it's not like that for the rest of the world, having them appreciate the privileges they have.

And I think everybody's children should have privileges. They should be raised well. They should be able to thrive well, but just as awareness that not everybody has that. do you, what do you do with that? So we try to raise them and travel with them in spaces that they can see and understand those things, you know? And my eldest is seven, she's almost eight in February and she's beginning to ask me questions about things, you know? Like I remember when she was, for example, five years old, she was in school and they were doing a Greek player

and she chose Athena, the goddess of war. And she asked me, so what is the goddess of war? And I'm like, you should talk. As I talk to your mother, she will explain to you. Yeah. Like, I'm not ready for this one. No, no, ask me this question in 10 years. Yeah. But at the same time, I'm slowly trying to explain to them what these things are so that it doesn't become that grand conversation we need to have. One day, this is a story by your father.

I don't want that because it's part of who I am, whether they like it or not. So I want to explain it to them slowly and slowly. And most importantly, what I've observed from people that have been around, from people that I know, you know, I was adopted in a Jewish family in New York. and that Jewish family came from their own suffering from the Holocaust and all of that. Sure. And through that experience, I really learned from them. And so how, if you're not careful, how you can transfer trauma to the next generation of your offspring or people in your family.

Just by this mere fact of wanting to prevent that from happening to them so much, sometimes you can give it to them without even thinking. So then you begin to shape how they see the world. because you've seen the world that way so you don't give them space to see the world anew. So I've been very careful about that. I want my children to make their own mistake, not fatal ones, but I don't want to give them my eyes of the world

because of what I experience. You understand? So for me, as a father, this is what is very crucial to me. So which is why I move back to them because I want them to experience the cereal now, not the cereal and I experience. So that when they talk about cereal,

they could be like, oh, is that place that I went to the beach? I went to Banana Island. You know, I went to canoeing and I did this. I went swimming. I went fishing. I did that. So it's their story. You know, you understand.

Yeah, I do. Man, really, thank you so much. I'd love to come visit you over there someday because I'd love to see Sierra Leone and meet you. You're just an incredible person. Your story is incredible. And I just want to thank you so much for doing the show and being so open. You know, you really didn't hold anything back. And I appreciate that.

And so does everyone listening. Thank you so much for your questions. And I'm going to hold you to that. You have to come and do the show from Freetown, Sierra Leone. Yeah, why not? Africa, yeah. And we got the studio, right. You know, so let's do it.

That's right. Yeah, man, I would love to. And thank you to everyone who helped over there as well. You know, I really, I know this is quite the setup. So thank you very much, dude. We went to the right to the end of the time, and I really, really enjoyed this. So really, thank you so much. Thank you.

Thank you, Joe. It's been a pleasure. You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger show with Pickpocket King, Bob Arno. Pickpockets don't talk. They lift and do everything silent. I have spent 20, 30 years befriending or getting very, very close into how they work. And some of them are very charming, by the way, and that goes for the territory. There's a very good smile and like a ping pong very quickly, boof-bobo-boom, back and forth.

There's nothing slow. The thieves picks it, but pickpocket never holds. So he passes it on to a partner. So if the police catches him two seconds after, he's clean. There's nothing on him. There was none of this usual pickpocketing. The elegance was unbelievable. I had to look at it at least 10 times before I could see.

What the hell did I see? To learn pickpocket tricks of the trade and how to protect yourself against thieves, pickpockets, and scam artists, check out episode 530 of the Jordan Harbinger show. Oh, man, I could have gone on for a while with this. guy, the kids were just left with no choice but to turn into the very thing that they were running from. And that's really what this is all about, right? They were turned into killing machines, watching Rambo every night and strung out on drugs. There's stories in the book of guys,

kids wearing three or five watches on one wrist because they'll kill people and then take their valuables and they'll be wearing five, six, seven watches. And it's just kind of like a disgusting trophy of war. But these are, remember, these are children. So later on, after Ishmael loses his parents. Within a few weeks or months, he goes on to describe going on these raids and looking for food and looking for weapons. He talked about that during the show.

But of course, he's also killing civilians. And now these are someone else's parents, right? So now he's just as bad in a way as the people who killed his parents. And it's just an unbelievably cruel irony. Later on, of course, the United Nations, why don't we do something, right? The United Nations tried to do something.

UNICEF goes in, grabs a bunch of these kids and puts him in school. but of course they just mix kids from all over the place. So there's different sides and different militias and government-allied kids and rebel-allied kids and fights break out and they're killing each other in this UN school, stabbing each other in the cafeteria. I mean, it's just absolutely a total mess

with no easy solution. And after the show, again, like I said, I could have gone on for hours, but after he leaves Sierra Leone to go talk to the UN, he later returns. And when he returns to Sierra Leone, there's a bloody, bloody coup. So the rebel movement finally makes its way into the capital cities and the main cities.

And they're robbing bank vaults and they're robbing people and they're blowing open buildings with RPGs and blowing open anything with money with rocket propelled grenades. They're setting prisoners and prisons free. They're arming these prisoners. So the prisoners then are going around killing people. They're going killing the police. They're killing the judges and the families of the judges that put them in prison. So it's chaos in the streets with literal death squads, executing entire.

families, along with children for quote unquote crimes like listening to pirate radio stations with actual world news as opposed to the government propaganda station, which became the only thing you were allowed to listen to during this crazy insurgency. They were dumping bodies in the gutter. I mean, it truly sounds like hell, like actual hell on earth. So Ishmael obviously made it, right? He escapes again. This part of the story is just bonkers. I really should have just made him stay late, kept him from his family dinner, and made him tell the rest of the story. It's just unbelievable. He decides he has to escape again. He's living with an uncle, right? He has no parents. The uncle caretaker passes away. There's no one left there. He's looking out

the window and seeing this chaos. And he's just waiting to get murdered at this point. So he sneaks out and has to avoid these checkpoints by crawling through gutters with rats and dead rotten bodies in them. He goes to an old bus station. He gets into a blacked out bus with everything painted black, even the rims of the tires are spray painted black, driving through what sounds like jungle back roads to escape. Insanely dangerous. You know, everyone's got to be quiet. Even inside the bus, they're going very slowly through almost non-roads. It's illegal, of course, at this point to leave the city because the rebels want to essentially keep people trapped there so that the entire country doesn't just fall apart and end up entirely deserted. They get stopped

at the border by officials. And these officials, instead of trying to get people, out of the country, they're robbing everybody who's trying to leave Sierra Leone. So imagine having to pay to escape your home country, which is now ravaged by a civil war. It just sounds like the country itself had essentially become a prison where staying in it is a death sentence itself. Unbelievable, just incredibly harrowing. Thank you so much to Ishmael for being so open about something so horrible and bringing his story to us here today. Links to all things Ishmael will be on the website. Of course, he's got some great books. I encourage you to read. Please use our website links. If you do buy the books from the guests on the show, it helps support the show.

Transcripts are in the show notes, and there's a video of this interview going up on our YouTube channel, Jordan Harbinger.com slash YouTube. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram, or you can also hit me on LinkedIn. I love connecting with you wherever you find me. I'm teaching you how to connect with amazing people like Ishmael and manage relationships using systems, software, tiny habits, the same ones that I use every single day. That's our six-minute networking course. The course is free. It's over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course.

I'm teaching you how to dig that well before you get thirsty and build relationships before you need to rely on them. And like I said, most of the guests on the show, subscribe and contribute to the course, so you'll be learning from amazing folks. You'll be in smart company where you belong. This show is created in association with Podcast 1. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Millio Campo, Ian Baird, Josh Ballard and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is that you

share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. And if you know someone who loves incredible stories, I think this is a good one to share with them. Hopefully you find something great in every episode. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen and we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast. Finding a new great podcast shouldn't be this hard, so let me save you some time. If you like the Jordan Harbinger Show, you'll probably like something you should know with Mike Carruthers. It's one of those shows that makes you smarter in a practical, useful way.

Same curiosity vibe we go for here, just in a fast-focused format. Mike brings on top experts and asks the exact questions that you'd want to ask, and the topics are all over the place in the best way. Recently, they've covered things like why we care so much what other people think, the benefits of laughter, why sports fans get so invested, and what makes people like you or not, the through line is always the same. Smart ideas you can actually use in real life.

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