In the first chapter of A Long Way Gone, a twelve-year-old Ishmael Beah describes the first time he was touched by the war in Sierra Leone. He lays out the villages near his home, and introduces some of his friends and members of his family. He also gives glimpses of his life before the war.

As a ten-year-old, Ishmael has a difficult time imagining the realities of a war that has yet to really affect him, even when he speaks with broken families and refugees who are in the process of running away. Although a war is brewing, Ishmael life goes on: he swims with his friends and loves rap music and hip-hop dance. They formed their own rap group were they dance. They are not aware of rap music like us they have a diffrent life stye a much rougher one. When he is twelve, he and his friends leave to visit Mattru Jong for a day trip, first visiting his grandparents in Kabati. His granmother is not a hudge fan of ishmaels father. She thinks hes no good  His grandma made a joke saying "you look skinny. I hope hes feeding you, are you hungry?" He says no and they talk for a while then heads out to Mattru Jong. After reaching and staying the night at a friend’s house in Mattru Jong, another friend joins them and reveals that Mogbwemo was just attacked. Swarms of people arrive from Mogbwemo and nearby villages. Parents running home to check to see if their kids are alright, and kids running out the house to go see if their parents were alright. They were just missing eachother. After both the kids and the parents coudlnt find eachother they lost hope in finding them and ended up having to flee. But, because they do not find or hear about their families, Ishmael, Junior, and Talloi decide to go back and search in Mogbwemo. Ishmael remembers the last time he saw his father with his stepmother, three days before, and his mother and younger brother just after that. More people run in the opposite direction, and one woman warns the boys not to go back there. However, they reach Kabati, finding it deserted until a stream of badly injured people and their dead loved ones arrived. Shocked (and confused about why ‘liberators’ in a political war would kill innocent mothers and babies), the boys decide they cannot go back to Mogbwemo and decide instead to return to Mattru Jong to wait for news. Disturbed by the unreal violence, Ishmael tries to remember the everyday life of Kibati, when he was six years old and could see people in the moon.