One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [13]
“I want to live as a family with my parents. I want to study,” Luther told the gathered press when he and his brother emerged from the jungles to end their days as soldiers. Their militia was in shambles, starving and under constant attack by the army.
Entering Thailand carrying small backpacks, looking frail and tired, they were received by the Thai prime minister, who promptly patted them on the head, a social symbol in Thailand that immediately reduced their status to that of schoolchildren. One would not pat a god on the head.
The boys explained that they had no magical powers. They found their mother in a refugee camp in Thailand. In 2004 sixteen-year-old Luther Htoo married a nineteen-year-old woman and they had a child together in the camp. Luther says he wants a job so he can support his young family.
Johnny says he still thinks about the oppression of his people. In 2004 he told a reporter for the Bangkok-based Nation newspaper, “If I could, I would exchange a comfortable life [in the camp] and die for the peace of the Karen nation.”
He may have gotten in his chance. It is possible that, at eighteen years old, he left the safety of the refugee camp to return to fighting. A junta-backed news service in Burma reported on July 26, 2006, that Johnny Htoo and several other followers of God’s Army “turned themselves in” to the military junta. The truth of this claim is a mystery, as the media is tightly controlled, but indications suggest that Johnny was no longer in the refugee camp where he had been living. Whether he turned himself in (which is doubtful given the junta’s reputation for torturing prisoners), or was captured is unknown, but as a young adult he had made the choice to return to the war he had left as a child while his brother stayed behind.
Johnny and Luther Htoo stir up questions for me. What makes them so different from the kids I’ve seen in pictures on the news from refugee camps, the victims of war? What makes them so different from American children? What makes them so different from adults? They were physically capable of anything the grown-up soldiers could do. Johnny and Luther clearly had political views, or at least political impulses; they made moral choices, perhaps not always good ones, but regardless, they made commitments to their people and their cause, and they are growing up making choices based on value systems formed when they were younger. If children can make such commitments, what does that say about their childhoods? Were Johnny and Luther robbed of their childhood by the adults who drafted them into the fighting or turned them into messianic symbols? Would it have been better for them to grow up complacent, live under the regime that oppressed them, and remain ignorant of their people’s struggle until they turned eighteen?
One could say their less than ideal conditions forced Johnny and Luther to become soldiers and killers, and this brings up an essential question for me:
When were safety and stability the norm for young people?
Why is it essential to childhood development that safety and stability reign? Doesn’t human history show us that war, violence, loss, and upheaval are far more common than peace and prosperity? It is estimated that since 3600 B.C. there have been 14,000 wars, and at least 160 since the end of World War II. Looked at in this light, children who grow up without knowing war would seem to be the exception in history.
Though forged in violence, Johnny and Luther Htoo have distinct personalities with different goals and values. Which one of them is “healthy”? Luther, who wants the peace of a family life or Johnny, who carries on the fight to liberate his people? Even barring political violence, there are little