Utilizing narratives of seven different people—soldier, rebel, student, trader, evangelist, father, and politician—I Did It To Save My Life provides fresh insight into how ordinary Sierra Leoneans survived the decade-long war that devastated their country. The book illuminates a social world based on love, a deep, compassionate relationship of material exchange that transcends romance and binds people together across space and through time. Individuals in the town of Makeni narrate survival through the rubric of love, and by telling their stories and bringing memory into the present, they crea ... More Utilizing narratives of seven different people—soldier, rebel, student, trader, evangelist, father, and politician—I Did It To Save My Life provides fresh insight into how ordinary Sierra Leoneans survived the decade-long war that devastated their country. The book illuminates a social world based on love, a deep, compassionate relationship of material exchange that transcends romance and binds people together across space and through time. Individuals in the town of Makeni narrate survival through the rubric of love, and by telling their stories and bringing memory into the present, they create for themselves a powerful basis on which to reaffirm the rightness of their choices and to orient themselves to a livable everyday existence. In situating their wartime lives firmly in this social world, they call into question the government’s own narrative that Makeni residents openly collaborated with the RUF (Revolutionary United Front) during its three-year occupation of the town. Residents argue instead that it was the government’s disloyalty to its people, rather than the rebel invasion and occupation, that destroyed the town and forced the uneasy coexistence between civilians and rebels.