Boys have always been at high risk in wartime. Some primitive societies made taking part in mortal combat a central rite of passage to manhood. As recently as the 19th century, drummer boys marched into battle in both the United States and Europe. Twentieth-century American teenagers dreamed of running off to war and coming home as heroes, and a few actually did it (page 46). But history alone can’t explain the Samuel Bulls of the world, a growing legion. The front ranks, hospital beds and battlefield graves of the armies of poor nations around the world are increasingly filled with mere kids–boys well below 15, the minimum age established for combatants by international conventions.
The era tempts military men to violate children’s innocence. At the same time as the average age of the global population is sinking, high-tech infantry weapons are being made ever lighter and more powerful; modern assault rifles weighing less than seven pounds are easily shouldered by a child. War, industrialization and migration from the country to the cities have torn at the family and clan ties that traditionally governed conduct in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Meanwhile, entrenched poverty and the glorification of violence– the same forces that help turn U.S. slums into war zones–have contributed, too.
Whatever the causes, the trend is unmistakable. Estimates of how many children are currently at war range from 50,000 to as high as 200,000 in 24 conflicts. Liberian rebel leader Charles Taylor gave the kids their own regiment, the Small Boy Unit–and made them subsist from looting, called “snake patrol.” Tamil rebels “enlist” boys as young as 9. Underage troops were a fixture of fighting in El Salvador and Nicaragua in the 1980s-and still fight and die in Guatemala. Mozambique, Burma, Angola, Afghanistan, Sudan, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Cambodia, Iran, Mexico: the list is long.
Boys will do things grown men can’t stomach. “Kids make more brutal fighters because they haven’t developed a sense of judgment,” says Esther Guluma, a UNICEF worker in Liberia. She deals with children like the 13-year-old who admits slitting open the belly of a pregnant woman with his bayonet; other former child soldiers in Liberia tell of tying prisoners’ hands behind their backs and throwing them into swamps or cesspits. One boy broke down as he told of being ordered to chop off a soon-to-be-released prisoner’s hands because the handcuff keys were lost. “I hear that man’s screams in my dreams,” the boy told a clinic supervisor.
The violence done to some of the child recruits is equally horrifying. In Mozambique, children fought both for the government and for the rebel movement (Renamo) during a 15-year civil war. Renamo actually seems to have preferred children over adult conscripts; a study conducted by the relief group Save the Children found that the average age of Renamo recruits in one region was 11 years. Renamo commanders first terrorized the boys–often by hanging them upside down from trees. They forced many to shoot or slit the throats of their parents. Later the boys would willingly terrorize others. “I killed and I robbed and I feel ashamed,” says Rodrigo Novela, now in his teens and enrolled in an elementary school in the district capital of Chibuto. He says his entire unit was composed of boys as young as 10, adding, “Many died in the fighting.” He has shrapnel scars on his chest and below his left eye, and his feet are flat from years of forced marches. Franice Sigauque was catatonic when he was freed from a rebel training base in 1988–at the age of 6. He had been forced at gunpoint to set fire to his family’s hut. Only recently he was reunited with a family member, his uncle. Franice still speaks haltingly. “I feel bitterness in my heart, but I can’t express it,” he said.
Other methods of molding a boy soldier are scarcely more subtle. In African bush wars, field commanders often freely hand out drugs–mostly marijuana or amphetamines–to keep their charges pumped up. Before battle in Liberia, children are often given Valium tablets, known in the ranks as “bubbles” or “10-10,” a reference to the dosage. Then there are the charms. In Mozambique, rebel commanders sometimes had their forces drink human blood, a rite that was supposed to ensure fearlessness. In rural Burma, youngsters conscripted by rebel groups rely–like their elders–on Buddha amulets around their necks for protection. Some of these recruits are so credulous that they intentionally draw fire to test how well the charms are working.
Usually there is little need for indoctrination. “Kids don’t have a doctrine or ideology,” says social anthropologist Brian Milne, who has studied the exploitation of child soldiers in Southeast Asia. “They are merely sucked up by one side or another and put to work.” An exception is Islamist movements that have perfected the art of recruiting willing martyrs. “I am prepared to load myself with explosives against the Israelis,” says Rajah Hassanein, an Arab teenager who threw his first stone at an Israeli soldier when he was 9. The mosque-based religious preparation for such would-be bombers is intense. Still, sociologists who have studied Palestinians growing up under occupation say dogma doesn’t tell the whole story. For boys whose fathers have been repeatedly humiliated, the radical Hamas organization also offers discipline, self-respect-and powerful male role models.
In some places, picking up a gun is simply the best survival option available. A child soldier gets a clean uniform with bright insignia, his first pair of shoes and a weapon–symbols of power and status that few enjoyed beforehand. For the first time, these children can count on medical care and three meals a day. Hundreds of war orphans adopted into the ranks of the Ugandan Army have been fed, educated and–in a few cases-sent to university. In faction-ridden Burma, where years of war have drained villages of men, joining a rebel movement or getting drafted into a clique’s army has become a way of life for boys. Ye Htut, 12, got just two weeks of training after the Karen National Liberation Army recruited him two years ago. Now he has a soft job guarding a bamboo bridge over the Moei River on the Thai border; he sleeps, fishes and plays poker with the nine other teenagers who live with him in a hut by the bridge. “My mother is worried,” he says, “but I like being a soldier.”
Robbed of a normal childhood, what will the child soldiers become? Samuel Bull still eats alone, keeps to himself and lives in terror that one of the other boys from a rival Liberian militia will kill him. And he’s without remorse. “I liked the sound of the gun,” he says. Some specialists have been amazed at the resilience boys show if they can break their military bonds- especially if they can return to their families. But the impact of relief efforts is marginal. The United Nations likely will add a protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child that recommends a new minimum age for military service: 18. Sadly, it’s hard to imagine that it will be any better observed-or enforced- than any other human right.
