"There was a hunter who went into the bush to kill a monkey. He had looked for only a few minutes when he saw a monkey sitting comfortably in the branch of a low tree. The monkey didn't pay him any attention, not even when his footsteps on the dried leaves rose and fell as he neared. When he was close enough and behind a tree where he could clearly see the monkey, he raised his rifle and aimed. Just when he was about to pull the trigger, the monkey spoke: 'If you shoot me, your mother will die, and if you don't, your father will die.' The monkey resumed its position, chewed its food, and every so often scratched its head or the side of its belly."

I excerpted this story, a traditional story of the Mende tribe of West Africa, from the autobiography of a child soldier. Ishmael Beah was recruited by force into the Sierra Leonean army as a child after having seen and heard more death than any American can really understand. His childhood experience includes forced abduction, killing, fear, the loss of his entire family, running for his life as a pre-teen through dense African jungle, forced drug addiction, and the list goes on. Reading it I was saddened by the amazing array of violence that he had to endure both physically and emotionally. He heard this story in his village before the war tore it apart. And although it seems incomplete, it isn't. After telling the story thus far, it is up to the hearer to finish it. What would you do? Beah says in his book that the answer he held in his heart was to kill the monkey. At least then it wouldn't trap another hunter this way.

His response blew me away at first, but why should it? Forced to choose between evil and evil, he chose the way that would save someone else. How noble. How Christ-like. Beah isn't a Christian, but he writes like one. He understands sacrifice at a level most of us can't. Not don't, but c-a-n-n-o-t, understand. Thanks to his unfortunate past, he understands evil and pain and violence and personal loss in ways that we are simply incapable of ever truly processing. "What a horrible story!" we are tempted to say. But the question remains, what would you do? And all too often in real life, we are forced to answer.