While Singer's book provides an admirable overview of child soldiering, Briggs's and Beah's books present the human faces and stories of the soldiers themselves. Briggs spent six years traveling around the world and speaking to child soldiers and their families in Africa, South America and Asia, collecting their stories in Innocents Lost.

In Colombia, Briggs speaks to Gueso, a 16-year-old fighting with one of the government's paramilitary militias in Medellín, northwest of the country. By the age of 8, Gueso had already learned how to use his first weapon, a .38 pistol. Within hardly a year, he had killed his first victim: "I stabbed a guy in the neck," he boasts cheerfully to Briggs. Wired on cocaine and alcohol during the interview, he keeps saying to Briggs, "Sometimes I feel like killing." Like most of the children who join rebel or paramilitary forces in Colombia, Gueso became involved with the paramilitaries largely as a result of poverty, lack of education and unemployment. "I'm not afraid to die, but I'm afraid to die so young," he tells Briggs. "You can't think about the future here, because the future is a coffin." The tragedy is that for children like Gueso, the future is a coffin whether or not they become child soldiers.

Briggs's book also highlights the plight of an often overlooked group of child soldiers--girls. About 30 percent of armed groups who exploit child soldiers also use girls, and their situation is often worse than that of boy soldiers because they are routinely subjected to rape and sexual abuse by their fellow soldiers and also by their enemies. Not surprisingly, former girl soldiers are more than twice as likely to commit suicide as their male counterparts. In Sri Lanka, Briggs meets Sebastiana Figerardo, a widow and the mother of seven children, the youngest of whom was Ida, a girl who joined the Tamil Tigers at the age of 17 after two of her brothers were murdered by government-aligned militias. While the Tamil Tigers are one of the few armed groups that prohibit sexual relations among their members, Ida was fated for an end of devastating sexual violence. After serving four years as a Tiger guerrilla, she decided to surrender to the government and go home. Assured by government security officers that no harm would come to her from the police or state-aligned forces, she returned. Within months, however, five masked men arrived early one morning at the family house. A neighbor who saw the men before putting on their masks identified them as government soldiers from a local army camp. The soldiers beat, gagged and tied Sebastiana, her other children and grandchildren, and dragged them to the courtyard in front of the house. They then turned to Ida. As the vicious assault on her daughter commenced only a few feet away, Sebastiana managed to free her hands and feet, and ran screaming to the local police station, begging the police to come and help. "We cannot come now," they replied calmly. "You need to go home." By the time Sebastiana returned home, her daughter was dead. An autopsy would show that she had been repeatedly raped, shot in the genitals and mutilated. Faced with the horrific murder of her third child, Sebastiana tells Briggs simply, "I have lost all faith in human beings." The five soldiers who carried out the assault have still not been brought to justice.

A Long Way Gone, Beah's harrowing account of the civil war in his native Sierra Leone, provides the fullest picture of just how inexorable the plunge into war is for many children. "The first time I was touched by war," recalls Beah in this deeply eloquent and moving memoir, the first ever to be written by a former child soldier, "I was twelve. It was in January of 1993." Not long after the outbreak of hostilities between the government and the RUF in 1991, Beah's village was attacked and destroyed by rebels, and he was separated from his family amid the turmoil. As village after village fell prey to the destruction and chaos of war, he and a number of friends took refuge in the forests of Sierra Leone, in order to escape the fighting. It was only a matter of time before the boys--hungry, homeless and in constant fear for their lives--were drawn into the war. Captured by soldiers, they were given an ultimatum: Stay and fight with the army or fend for themselves against the rebels. Detained in a village surrounded by rebels, Beah and his companions were left with little choice. Beah recalls one boy, Alhaji, explaining the dilemma they faced and insisting, "'The rebels will kill anyone from this village because they consider us their enemy, spies, or that we have sided with the other side of the war.... It is better to stay here for now.' He sighed. We had no choice. Leaving the village was as good as being dead."

For the next few weeks, Beah and the others went through a strict regimen of indoctrination and training. The leaders of Beah's contingent spent hours lecturing the boys about the rebels, instilling hatred for them. Beah remembers one lieutenant telling them, "They have lost everything that makes them human. They do not deserve to live. That is why we must kill every single one of them. Think of it as destroying a great evil." The indoctrination soon began to have an effect. Listening to one of the lieutenant's lectures, Beah recalls, "I stood there holding my gun and felt special because I was part of something that took me seriously and I was not running from anyone anymore." In training, the boys learned how to kill. Captured rebels would be tied up, and Beah and other boys would then take part in throat-slitting competitions: "The person whose prisoner died quickest would win the contest." Once they began regularly engaging in battles against the rebels, they were given marijuana, cocaine and "brown brown"--a mixture of gunpowder and cocaine--to increase their energy and fearlessness in combat.

Within weeks of this daily cycle of indoctrination, violence and drugs, the boys became inured to killing. "The idea of death didn't cross my mind at all and killing had become as easy as drinking water," recalls Beah. "My mind had not only snapped during the first killing, it had also stopped making remorseful records, or so it seemed." Surrounded and trapped by chaos, Beah quickly adapted to war as a way of life: "The villages that we captured and turned into our bases as we went along and the forests that we slept in became my home. My squad was my family, my gun was my provider and protector, and my rule was to kill or be killed.... I felt no pity for anyone."

If Beah's memoir depicts how easily children are lured into combat, it also examines how difficult it is for them to emerge from it. At the age of 15, after two years of serving with the army, Beah was suddenly demobilized under a UNICEF program aimed at rehabilitating child soldiers. His commanders ordered his gun to be taken away, and he and several boys were shipped to a rehabilitation center in Freetown, the capital. For Beah and his companions, the transition to civilian life would prove to be a battle in itself. Habituated to the chaos and lawlessness of war, desensitized to violence and addicted to drugs, the boys at first could not adjust.

In the rehabilitation center, the problems started immediately. Child soldiers who had fought for the army, such as Beah, suddenly found themselves face to face with child soldiers who had fought for the rebels, and the two sides instantly turned on each other. In one twenty-minute fight, six boys--mostly from the rebel side--were stabbed and shot to death with weapons the children had smuggled into the center, and the two groups had to be placed in separate compounds. Beah and his companions also turned on the center's staff, infuriated at having to take orders from "sissy civilians." They attacked and beat the cooks, cleaners and nurses responsible for them. When there was no one else to fight, the boys fought one another: "We would fight for hours in between meals, for no reason at all. During these fights, we destroyed most of the furniture and threw the mattresses out in the yard."

Denied cocaine and marijuana for the first time in years, the boys also began to suffer from withdrawal symptoms. Beah remembers, "My hands had begun to shake uncontrollably and my migraines returned with a vengeance. It was as if a blacksmith had an anvil in my head." All of the fear and anxiety suppressed during his years as a soldier began to surface, and he was plagued by nightmares and anxiety attacks. "I would dream that a faceless gunman had tied me up and begun to slit my throat with the zigzag edge of his bayonet. I would feel the pain that the knife inflicted as the man sawed my neck. I'd wake up sweating and throwing punches in the air."

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next »

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.