And so they were away from home, waiting to perform, when rebel soldiers attacked their town.

The war in Sierra Leone pitted rebels (the Revolutionary United Front, or RUF) against the government's army, with civilians caught in the middle. The fighting moved from village to village; at each one, houses were set ablaze, and villagers were burned or shot or bayonetted.

When news reached them that their town had been attacked, Beah and his friends tried to return home but discovered that everyone was fleeing. This was how the immense unkindness began: they saw a man vomiting blood; three dead children in the backseat of a car; a woman carrying a dead baby on her back, shot as the woman ran for her life.

Later, Beah and his friends began walking south, trying to find safety. Eventually, Beah lost his brother and his friends, and walked alone. Later still he found another group of wandering boys and walked with them. One day they heard rumors that their families were alive in a nearby town. As they approached, rebels again attacked, burning Beah's family alive before he could reach them. Eventually, hungry and lonely and scared, the boys were convinced to join the army.

But to abbreviate Beah's story in just a few sentences is like saying "The Odyssey" is about a man who went on a trip. The horrible beauty of Beah's account comes from the layer upon layer of searing detail, his ability to remember not only how the birds sounded but how exactly it felt, on his first day of battle, to watch two friends die.

He has a photographic memory, he says, and attributes it in part to all those hours spent listening to grown-ups tell stories. A young listener never knew when an adult might ask him to repeat a story, word for word, gesture for gesture. He also learned how to be a good observer and to engage his audience, "how to bring them to the landscape of the story."

The army officers fed the boy soldiers Rambo movies and drugs, including brown-brown, a mixture of cocaine and gun powder that both numbed them and made them feel invincible. The officers reminded them, over and over, that the rebels had killed their families, and this was their vengeance. The boys learned not only to kill but to laugh about it, to give each other high fives if they shot a rebel, to watch dispassionately as they forced prisoners to dig their own graves.