How child soldiers can adapt to life after war

“MY SQUAD was my family, my gun was my provider and protector and my rule was to kill or be killed… I felt no pity for anyone. My childhood had gone by without my knowing, and it seemed as if my heart had frozen.”

So wrote Ishmael Beah, a boy soldier conscripted into the Sierra Leone army to fight against the rebel Revolutionary United Front, in his memoir A Long Way Gone. By the time he was rescued in 1996, Beah was high on drugs, pumped up on a diet of war movies, and numb from…