The founding story is more than charming folklore; it tells you how this town reads its own landscape. The Jong River is the organizing fact of life here, a slow brown highway that links Mattru Jong to Sherbro Island and the Atlantic beyond. Fishing fills the canoes, rice grows in the wetlands, and cassava and palm oil round out the local economy. The town is home mostly to Sherbro and Mende people, and it serves as the seat of Jong Chiefdom, governed by its Paramount Chief, Alie Badara Sheriff III. Schools, a police post, and a hospital give Mattru Jong the weight of a real district center rather than a mere village by the water.

In 1950 missionary nurses from the United Brethren in Christ opened a small dispensary in Mattru Jong. It grew. By 1959 it had fifteen beds; by 1981 it had sixty-nine, with surgery, obstetrics, pediatrics, an X-ray room, and a laboratory, a substantial hospital for a rural West African town. Then came the war. In 1994 the threat of violence forced the hospital to close and its international staff to flee the country, and rebels later destroyed it outright. Yet the institution endured in spirit. In 2010 President Ernest Bai Koroma came in person to inspect it ahead of a national rollout of free care for pregnant women, mothers, and young children, a sign that healing this town meant healing its hospital first.

At the end of January 1995, fighters of the Revolutionary United Front entered Mattru Jong almost unopposed; the army had already pulled out. The rebels set up their own administration, looted the hospital for medical supplies, and turned it into a training base, with another camp at a nearby palm oil plantation. For eight months the town lived under their control before the army retook it in October 1995. These are the bare facts, but behind them are the townspeople who endured that occupation: families who lost homes and loved ones, patients who lost their hospital, ordinary lives suspended for the better part of a year. Their endurance, not the fighters' movements, is the real story of this chapter.

Mattru Jong gave the world one of the most widely read accounts of that war. The memoirist Ishmael Beah was a boy visiting friends here when he learned that his home village of Mogbwemo had been attacked. He and his companions sheltered in Mattru Jong until the rebels reached the town about a month later, and the journey that followed became the heart of his book A Long Way Gone, a memoir of a child caught in Sierra Leone's conflict. Through Beah's pages, this small river town entered libraries and classrooms around the globe. For countless readers who will never see the Jong River, Mattru Jong is where a terrible and important story began.