At 12, Ishmael Beah was a bit of a naughty boy. He didn’t bother to tell anyone where he was going when he, his older brother and a friend set off to walk from their village in Sierra Leone to rap and dance in a talent show 16 miles away. He thought there was no need, because they’d be back soon. Rebel troops chose that day in 1993 to attack his village, burning the houses and slaughtering or driving off the inhabitants. Ishmael never saw his family again. When he was 13, the Sierra Leone government army press-ganged him into a unit of boy soldiers to fight the rebels. By 15, he was a hardened cutthroat, too drugged and traumatized to feel any pity when he killed.

Beah did ultimately escape that life, through luck and cleverness. Now a 25-year-old American college graduate, he has written A Long Way Gone, a memoir of exceptional power. Beah doesn’t bother much with the convoluted politics behind the civil war that seems now finally to have ended, though he does include a helpful chronology at the end of the book. This is his deeply personal story. In vivid detail, he takes us inside the mind of the boy he was: frightened, depressed, hungry, helpless, alone. When the little boy is first handed an AK-47, he is terrified of it. His superior officers, including a lieutenant who quotes Shakespeare, make the boys into killing machines by feeding them drugs and playing on their desire to avenge families massacred by rebels. Beah’s own psychological turning point comes when two friends are killed while fighting beside him. After that, he has no trouble pulling his trigger. Even after he has the good fortune to be turned over to a United Nations rehabilitation program, Beah’s shell shock doesn’t end. Weeks of monstrous behavior is followed by years of migraines, flashbacks and crippling survivor’s guilt. The recovered Beah now works with Human Rights Watch and speaks out for children’s rights. A Long Way Gone is compelling evidence for that cause.

Anne Bartlett is a journalist in Washington, D.C.

Although journalist Tom Bissell was only an infant when South Vietnam finally fell to the communists in 1975, the war that culminated in that event has cast a particularly tenacious shadow across his family and his own psyche. Bissell’s father was wounded in Vietnam and after leaving the service in 1967, watched in disgust as politics and ineptitude sullied the blood that he and his comrades had spilled there. As Bissell sees it, the injuries the war inflicted on his father had a lot to do with his parents divorcing when he was only three years old.

In an effort to better understand his father and the war, Bissell constructs parallel histories of each. The first part of The Father of All Things imagines his father’s mood and actions at home the day Saigon fell. On April 29, 1975, my father was losing something of himself. . . . This was the certainty that what he had suffered in Vietnam was necessary. Interspersing these agonizing scenes are well documented, near photographic accounts of how Saigon and the U.S. Embassy in particular were overrun. In the second and longest section of the book, Bissell describes the journey he and his father made through Vietnam in 2003. Alongside this personal chronicle, he lays out the stages of that country’s turbulent evolution and assesses what it has become today.

Bissell’s obvious adoration for his father is balanced nicely by his ongoing annoyance at the older man’s caginess and unpredictability. While there are many revealing moments between the two, there is no epiphany that cleanses everything. The father’s sense of self will forever be shaped by his war experiences, but now the son can feel that he’s shared in them, however minimally.

All this ruminating about the tentacles of the past might have become intolerably grave or dreary. But Bissell’s wandering and deliciously wicked eye keeps this from happening. Still, war is always a horror story. And as Bissell strives to put the ghosts of Vietnam to rest, one can see the ghosts of Iraq arising behind another generation. Edward Morris reviews from Nashville.