The team that’s writing about “A Long Way Gone” (Shelley Gare, Peter Wilson and Dave Nason) must check Wikipedia from time to time. But the entry on Beah seems to change so fast that any journalist who’s covering the story could miss a significant change. Here’s a link the contact page for the Australian http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/contactus/. The page has an e-mail address for Peter Wilson and may have one for Shelley Gare that I couldn’t find.

If you notice strange things happening to the Beah listing, you’re also welcome to keep adding comments to this post (even if they don’t relate to what I’ve written) just to make them part of the public record. Because anybody can make changes on Wikipedia, there seems to be a risk that a helpful digital footprint could get lost. I am just fascinated by what’s going on here.
Jan

The weird comment that some scenes are “child-like fantasies” is a perfect example. “A Long Way Gone” is supposed to be nonfiction. And Wikipedia is allowing someone to say that the scenes are “fantasies”? The comment hardly meets the Wikipedia tests of neutrality and accuracy. Those scenes certainly aren’t presented as “child-like fantasies” in the book. They’re presented as fact. And it’s incredibly revealing that somebody would try to justify them in that way.

You REALLY have to wonder who has edited that entry. A part of me thinks that if someone could just find out who wrote that stuff, it would blow the Beah story wide open. I haven’t seen any articles in newspapers or elsewhere on Beah’s entry, but they’ve got to be coming. And I’d love to know if you see any, because there may be more posts in this. More on this in another response to you very soon.
Jan

Overall, the entry is supportive of Beah. It characterises (and seems to excuse) many of Beah’s tales of his time as a child soldier as ‘child-like fantasies’. It also seems to suggest that the confusion over time-lines is caused by Peter Wilson’s (and Beah’s publisher’s) misreading of the book. I would be interested to know what you think of this.

Well, that being said, my husband’s bullet passed all the way through his hand, made a mess of it, but didn’t do any “lasting damage”. Of course, one couldn’t say there was “no damage” right after he shot himself. His hand looked like it went through a meat grinder. So, one could assume in the Beah case, if the trajectory was optimum, 2 bullets could pass through his foot and do no lasting damage because the hole just fills itself in, so to speak. I believe a pass-through is preferable to one that’s embedded. It acts like a foreign object and may shift around enlarging the area. You could look at it this way; an arrow shot straight through would be preferable to one that’s stuck in you, abutting a bone and needs to be snapped off, right?

The accident was very traumatic, Janice. I was in the house and he was in our workshop (he also builds machines for automation, from scratch to finished product). There’s nothing like hearing a gunshot out of the blue. You know it’s a sound you should *not* be hearing, so you automatically go into panic mode. Silence was followed by screaming what I thought to be “OMG, I just shot myself in the head!” I have a slight hearing problem and thought I heard head, rather than hand. I wasn’t prepared to deal with a head wound, so it was rather fortunate for me that it was his hand.

This incident is just one of a number of “mishaps” I’ve lived through with this man. I can laugh now over most of them, but shooting himself is not one of them.

Strangely enough, if Beah had gone into as much detail, his story might be easier to believe. He tells you how the doctor supposedly removed the one bullet in his foot. But he doesn’t explain how two other two bullets could pass all the way through and do no lasting damage. Thanks so much for explaining what happened …
Jan

Oh, and one last thing. Call it a public service announcement, if you will. My husband is an ex- Army Major with many years of experience with guns and rifles, Winter Ranger and helicopter pilot, to boot. Just saying, so you don’t think he’s a doofus. He made a dumb mistake and forgot to check the chamber. But we like to blame it on the fact he had taken my car keys to move my car out of the way while mowing our lawn earlier in the day. Apparently he dropped my keys in the grass, and ran over them with the tractor. When he realized what he had done, he got down in the grass to gather the pieces and got his hands covered with the broken Mace canister that hung on my key chain. He managed to get his hands all over his face while brushing sweat away. Needless to say, he was really agitated and compromised for the rest of the day. He shouldn’t have cleaned his gun under those conditions. But, try to tell a man he may not be clear-thinking after tangling with Mace….uh huh.

He likes to boast that he “shot the bastard who did that to me!”