One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [80]
In many contexts, former child soldiers are feared by the adults to whom the youths return. Like most adults, they believe that children who have committed terrible acts will have internalized violent behavior as normal. They have been in a terrible war (for wars that use children are by that very fact terrible) and have done unspeakable things, and therefore, it is believed, will be tainted and distorted by violence. They will have become the violence they have inflicted on others and will live in a moral vacuum. I cannot count the number of times in reading the literature on child soldiers that I have read the phrase “moral vacuum.” I have written it myself countless times.
This view, however, does not take into account the fact that children who are forced to fight do not usually have a choice. Or rather, they have an impossible choice. Many of the young soldiers I met had a strong moral sense—Paul for example. He recognized that some actions were “bad”—looting and killing civilians for example. The incidents of nightmares and social problems among former child soldiers is evidence of the moral struggle going on inside them.
After Xavier finished painting the picture of his battle for me, I asked if he ever thought about it when he wasn’t being interviewed by some white guy. He looked at me and laughed. “Yes, sometimes,” he said. He told me that he still had nightmares about his time in the army. “All the suffering,” he said. He kept picking at the splinter on the table. “I have bad dreams about the things I’ve done.”
He did not want to tell me what he’d done, but I could imagine. He told me he was nervous that women would see him and punish him for “the bad things that I’ve done to women.” He leaned back when he said that, no longer picking at the splinter. He crossed his arms again, but this time said nothing else. He was not eager to continue this line of conversation. It seems that Xavier had been a rapist.
It is not that Xavier lacked moral discernment. He had very much internalized the moral repertoire of his society in which murder was wrong, elders should be respected, and those who have been wronged in life exert a force on their violators even after death. He referred to both the translator and myself as sir. He, like Paul, showed great regard for the other children in the demobilization center.
He believed in a moral code that did not spontaneously appear in him after he got out of the army, just as Johnny and Luther Htoo believed in the Christian moral code even as they waged their guerilla war in Burma and took hostages in Thailand. Xavier, the Htoo boys, Paul, and countless other child soldiers simply did not have access to life choices that reflected the moral sense they had.
Xavier would have been murdered himself if he had not carried out the wishes of his commanders. Paul had no love of violence, even though he was sent to the front over and over again. He had to kill because the situation demanded it of him. It is not the internal realm of a child soldier’s psychology that turns to a “moral vacuum,” it is real circumstances around him that necessitate violating his fledgling moral sense. Looking at all those photographs of child soldiers that run in papers whenever violence flares up on the African continent, it isn’t the children that upset me. It is what their use as soldiers suggests about the world of adults surrounding them that is so unsettling.
Child soldiers are seen