ISEM question answers

1. While each group has their own reasons individually children soldiers could be used or encouraged for several reasons for one side. While adults may be older and know more, children are much more impressionable and can be swayed a bit easier into doing something or become accustom to something, in this case, war and blood.
2. While the country the violence is occuring in will have to deal with a lot of things, some of the hardest may be how to handle citizens that have seen first hand child soldiers. While many people can't believe that there are child soldiers. The main reason is that it's hard to think of innocent children as being capable of killing. However in Ishmael Beah's "A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier" Ishmael explains of a time which he and his friends were at risk of being killed by grown men who feared that the six of them were child soldiers. This creating not only a risk for the children that aren't child soldiers but also hurts the families that need to be refugees because of major trust and fear issues associated with this idea. Also another situation that causes issues is what they must do with them when the war is done. While they were taught to kill and be violent it's hard to tell how they will act when reintroduced to society and whether or not they will be a danger.
3. Ishmael Beah's experiences really shed the light on a few things for me. While we often have books we read that explains what happens they often seem unreal of fictional in way. The biggest thing that made me feel it changed my view on is how our society views war and takes war victims or veterans lightly. We have many war themed video games, lots of younger kids that play violent like games that it is easy to see the dangers we put ourselves in. However the biggest fact is how hard it is to come back when you saw the ugliness of war and hear people say that it's "cool" has to be so hard seeing as they don't know what they are saying entirely since they haven't seen something that Ishmael Beah talks about and expresses in his book. Other wise perhaps there would be less war in the world if everyone knew the dangers that it faced.