Beah ends the book with a story/riddle he remembers being told frequently as a child. A hunter goes into the woods and is about to kill a monkey when the monkey turns to him and says, if you kill me your mother will die, if you don't kill me your father will die. The children, listening to this story in the presence of both their parents, are asked, what would you do? The children would never answer, but Beah tells us what he never told anyone as a child:
When I was seven I had an answer to this question that made sense to me. I never discussed it with anyone, though, for fear of how my mother would feel. I concluded to myself that if I were the hunter, I would shoot the monkey so that it would no longer have the chance to put other hunters in the same predicament.
The end. I cry. Best book ending ever. What a miserable world we live in.
He's right, of course, as far as I can tell. Beah's willing to take one for the team, but on another level its much bigger than all that. Although it's doubtful that anyone will ever come across a monkey that puts them in that predicament, this folktale accurately depicts the essence of the world. Beah joined the army for food, for security. And he's still probably paying the price of surviving. From a more anthropological perspective, I think it's significant that to 
kill the monkey is to kill the mother. Removing the monkey from existence removes the source of moral dilemma, of suffering; but to do so also removes the source of life. No more monkey, no more mother. No more mother, no more birth. The end of war, the end of hate, the end of violence - the end of the world. And anyway, who's to say that there won't be anymore monkeys like that?
