Boy soldier under fire

Ishmael Beah appears to have joined the club of writers who have got rich on memoirs of victimhood and wickedness, only to be found out.

His book A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier has sold 650,000 copies in the US and has been awarded the commercial honour of being sold in Starbucks. He has become the darling of the talk show circuit and is an ambassador for Unicef, the UN agency which rescued him.

Beah, 27, tells a story of being forced into the ranks of child soldiers in Sierra Leone's civil war in the 1990s. A Long Way Gone describes how he was taken to the extremes of human savagery by drugs and terror. These were the kids who cut their victims' hands off and beat each other to death on command.

But how much of the book is true? The newspaper The Australian was contacted by an aid worker and has published a series of stories which suggest: 'Not much'.

They discovered that the rebel attack on Beah's village of Mattru Jong happened not in 1993, as the book has it, but in 1995, the year before Beah was 'rescued' and taken to the States by Laura Simms, an American writer.

That would mean that Beah (left) could have been a child soldier for only a matter of months, and he would have been 15 at the time - hardly a child in African terms. On Friday, the newspaper found further proof of distortion when they tracked down classroom records showing that Beah was still at school in 1993.

Beah insisted - before the school records were discovered - through his publishers Farrar, Straus and Giroux that there had been earlier rebel attacks when he lost his family and fled into the bush. But he also writes: "My story, as I remember it [my italics] and wrote it, began in 1993." This retreats from earlier assurances.

As the book was being edited in 2006, A Million Little Pieces, the 'memoir' by James Frey, was famously exposed as a fraud. Grilled by his editors, Beah insisted that every detail was accurate because "growing up in an oral tradition had honed his memory" and publication went ahead in 2007.

Laura Simms (left), who discovered Beah in a camp in 1996, claims she was captivated by his open laugh and bright-eyed gaze. She brought him to America, adopted him, and nurtured him through university, where he was inspired to write 'the truth' by fellow students who thought it 'cool' that he had grown up with real guns in a real war. A creative writing teacher is also said to have helped.

It was a remarkable recovery, considering boys like Beah have been lost in a juju world going back centuries, and there was always scepticism. A Washington Post critic 'had trouble' with the book, and William Boyd (left), the English novelist whose books include A Good Man in Africa, wrote for the New York Times that Beah's memory of his brand of sneakers "had the idiosyncratic ring of precisely remembered truth" while the "horror" did not "add up to moments of lived personal history".

America gave Beah the benefit of the doubt because he offered a palliative to their 'smart bombs' landing on Iraqi women and children. At least the Americans didn't chop the Iraqis up.

Today, Beah looks like a survivor of a different sort: he got through the civil war unscathed and then spotted his opportunity to get rich in America. ·