Her eyes kept yelling message after message at her killer, the only person at her side as she died. In her eyes, I could still see signs of her resilient youth trying to repel the horrors she had been living for God only knows how long. But coupled with that flash of resistance was the realization that there was nothing left for her to do: her life was over. She knew she was dying, if a child can know that in a fully conscious way. Pain, loss, resignation, memory, love: an overwhelming torrent of emotion and history spoke to me from her eyes, which would not close, that could not close, that could not yet give up on life. Yes, her suffering and humiliation and trauma were also coming to an end, but so was everything else, positive or negative. And I had been the one to end it all for her.
Kill or be killed. That just didn’t sound right to me now. It felt completely foreign to everything I had lived by, even before I became a soldier. Yet I had done that: kill or be killed. And the result was the death of this young girl who was still holding on to my pant leg, her eyes wide open but now suddenly totally silent. There were no more messages. She had died without making a sound.
Held in place by her fingers, I finally looked up and around at my position. The battle was over and although we had won the day and saved many of the villagers, there were losses among the civilians and even more terrible losses among the rebels. They had been stopped dead in their tracks after they crossed the first line of huts and had withdrawn in panic and disorder, leaving their wounded and dead in the red mud, which was getting redder by the minute as the blood of all the victims spread in the little rivers of water still flowing toward the centre of the village. It was dead silent and that is how it is after a firefight, dead silent.
23.
Everyone still standing seemed as caught in a stunned stoppage of time as I was—the post-combat silence was deafening and disorienting. I smelled gunpowder on the grass and in my clothes, and burning flesh coming from inside the hut beside me. I felt like I was suffocating, but in order to find myself some air, I had to release the girl’s grip on my pant leg—I didn’t have the heart to touch her. And so I pulled my leg away from her, shuddering as her body twisted even more grotesquely in the mud.
Then the silence was broken by a songbird, and I felt like I was being released from a binding spell. I began to walk, looking for the sergeant and the rest of the section. We had to deal with the wounded and move these people out: they couldn’t stay on here now. I spotted the sergeant and my heart rate spiked in exhilaration. All the bullets and grenades that had been looking to tear us apart had missed: we were all standing and my own flesh was intact. For one moment I felt invincible, a rush of relief and release that was startling in its intimacy.
But then it was as if the girl had grabbed my pant leg again, and those few precious seconds of renewed contact with life were shattered. I felt a wave of complete unease, of total transgression. I was parched, my tongue glued to the roof of my mouth. The thirst was so intense I could hardly speak, but thirst was nothing compared to the sudden onslaught of mental pain and anguish and guilt and even a sort of fear, which literally bent me in two. I threw up the bile in my stomach and had difficulty regaining my breath, my warrior ethic, my veteran composure.
I told myself to get it together, and managed to straighten up and look around. The villagers were moving around shakily now, and over the moaning of the injured, civilian and rebel both, the sergeant was issuing orders and speaking on his vehicle’s radio. Other members of the patrol were responding, fatigued but determined to do their duty, helping to stabilize the survivors, to comfort the panicked, to assist in providing medical aid right there in the mud beside the mostly destroyed huts. So much activity and yet I couldn’t seem to join in, to get on with the next phase of the security and support job that I was mandated and ordered to do. When I finally began to move, I felt like an imposter. I felt like nothing would ever be the same.
24.
Shortly after that engagement, my tour was up and we were driven to the airport for the trip back home. The mission was not over—in fact, the fighting was spreading. At best, we had stymied it for a while, had helped some civilians not get killed and helped others get to the camps where they would exist—only exist—aided by numerous NGOs and donations from far-off countries like mine. Countries that generously poured out their hearts for a time and then forgot the poor people again and carried on as if nothing much had really happened in the scheme of significant things in the world.
Yes, we’d safely conducted convoys of essential aid to those camps, so the people could eat and not die of cholera and typhus. It was something at least.
Not much of a welcome party at our home base after six months away on another planet, but I was just as glad that it was low-key. Much as it was great to see my wife, to hug my kids, I felt as if I wasn’t really home.
People talk about culture shock and I had it in spades: it struck me as weird that the streets were safe, and even our little house seemed revoltingly opulent compared with where I’d just been. The pace of life seemed insane, and I couldn’t find any way to cope with the demands coming from my family, my bosses, even the bank teller. I yelled a lot. Or hid.
I tried. I went to watch Sara play soccer, delivered Jeff to his guitar lessons, sat at the kitchen table chopping vegetables for the stew I always made when I was home, as my wife browned the meat on the stove and I tried not to react to the smell. Other times when I’d come home, I slipped back easily into our family life and felt nothing but unrestrained joy and relief to be back with them, especially when I hung out with the kids.
But this time I couldn’t make that easy connection. There was a wall between me and them, and to be honest I didn’t really want to climb over it, and doubted that I could. That surreal action in that far-off village had killed more than that girl child soldier. She was embedded where my heart used to be, had caked all my senses with the red and slippery mud of brute reality. I simply could not feel the way I had before.
I also thwarted all attempts by my loved ones to get close. I didn’t want them polluted by what I’d seen and done, and didn’t want to explain what I was constantly remembering. I didn’t want my daughter and son to know I had caused the death of a girl the same age as them. This was not their picture of who their dad was, of what their dad did. The same went for my wife: would she ever be able to look at me with any love in her eyes if I told her? We all were caught in a vicious circle where I wouldn’t tell them what was haunting me and at the same time rejected their every gesture of support as inept and superficial. In the court of judgment inside my head I convicted them of being grossly ignorant of the ugly extent of the wound I’d brought back home to them. The psychological wound. I did this even though I knew it was irrational and unfair.
All around me at work were lots of people who didn’t even try to offer support, who seemed willing to believe that the wound was only flesh deep and that if I left it alone, it would heal in the fresh air and sun of home. I just needed to wait for the great equalizer called time to do its work, and I’d forget that young girl’s eyes and I’d be as good as new, possibly even better because I now had unique experiences of life behind me.
Those arguments sounded so plausible I wanted to believe in them. But they were too facile, too cozy to provide any comfort. I knew that my brain had been physically injured and that the damage was preventing me from handling the stresses and pressures of life as people normally lived it. This operational stress injury was festering, causing a sort of emotional gangrene that ate away at all reasonableness and my sense of security. The events of that day in the village kept coming back like a steamroller to crush all other thoughts, feelings, desires and logic out of me, and I felt too vulnerable and guilty to put up any defence. It seemed to me that it was only fair that I should suffer, though I kept searching restlessly for some peace, some relief.
Late one night, when everyone I love was safely asleep, I picked off the shelf in the den a huge poetry book illustra
ted with pencil sketches, which for a time kept me intrigued. I didn’t remember where I’d gotten the book as I wasn’t really into poetry. In school I’d been told that poets were the voice of a culture, a society and a people, and I guess I paid lip service to that concept in front of my teachers. When my eyes drifted from the sketches to the words, a verse caught hold of me, caught hold of something like what I was experiencing. The poem was Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:
I closed my lids, and kept them close,
And the balls like pulses beat;
For the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky
Lay like a load on my weary eye,
And the dead were at my feet.
…
The look with which they looked on me
Had never passed away.
…
But oh! more horrible than that
Is the curse in a dead man’s eye!
Home to me now meant the exercise of maintaining a veneer of normality so I wouldn’t upset my wife and children, my parents. They wanted me as I used to be, and I was sure they didn’t want to know that for me that “foreign” place was far more real than my life here. When you’ve been caught up in the extremes that humans endure, it’s hard to give this padded world of serenity and comfort any credence.
Part of me—possibly my soul, for all I could tell—had stayed in that faraway place, reliving the assault on the village and the shooting of that young girl soldier, that moment when she metamorphosed from a warrior into a child, that instant where death appeared in her eyes and then disconnected them forever. That was now the most real of worlds for me.
There was no escape from that moment, and because there was no escape, I was uncertain about the future, whether I’d ever be whole again. Sometimes I tried to hide from the memory when it came, but other times I pursued it in anger, reliving every moment in order to see if it was really true. Other times I persuaded myself that if I could stay with it long enough, maybe I could finally correct what had happened, or at least do penance for it. In that village, in that moment, my life had changed inexorably, and most of the time I believed that I would never really make it back.
I know that child soldier, that girl rebel, that martyred youth was killed legally and ethically. But no amount of time can dampen the impact of that act on this soldier’s psyche. I can’t find any possible penance to reconcile me to this sin against humanity. What has caused us to be trapped into having to do such bad things?
9.
THE CHILD SOLDIERS INITIATIVE
NO CHILD SHOULD HAVE TO DIE the way my fictional girl soldier, Rose, died. No peacekeeper should have to become the agent of such a death. After six years’ work on the Child Soldiers Initiative, I wish I could tell you that we are on the verge of eradicating the use of child soldiers in conflict. We know a lot more, it’s true—I’ve shared much of that knowledge with you, along with some new analysis, in the previous chapters. But we are not there yet. The one big certainty I’ve come to as a result of launching the CSI is that we still face a significant challenge—both in the field and inside large and small organizations, agencies and NGOs, security forces (military and police), and political and diplomatic circles—in changing many minds and many old ways of doing things when it comes to the issue of child soldiers.
Before I take you into an account of the sometimes mindbogglingly frustrating roadblocks we are attempting to find our way past, I want to share some ideas of how we can shift the whole exercise of dealing with child soldiers from the current mode—which is still mainly reactive, designed to pick up the pieces through DDRR—to a prevention mode, where all our efforts are designed to stop belligerent forces from using children in any capacity and to prevent child recruitment or abduction from occurring in the first place.
In the best-case scenario we are trying to achieve, no peacekeeper would be so surprised by ending up in a firefight with child soldiers that when shot at by a ragged kid with an AK-47, he’d react in self-defence with lethal force. Instead, my peacekeeper would have been trained, mandated, deployed and possibly armed differently, and would serve as part of an integrated operation where political, security (military and police), humanitarian aid and development workers all pulled together, along with the NGOs and local authorities, to prevent conflict rather than react to it. They would all understand that ending the use of child soldiers in the area is a primary way to prevent the conflict or stop it from escalating. They would aim to both protect children from abduction and to persuade parents that they don’t have to trade their children to the leaders of armed groups for a little money and a promise that their village will be safe. They’d communicate this message of protection in many ways, including over the local radio, which is often the best means of getting news and ideas out in areas where roads and infrastructure are lacking. The Washington-based NGO Search for Common Ground, which is one of my partners in the CSI, developed just such a radio program, designed and executed for local youths in South Kivu in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo by fifteen- to seventeen-year-olds. In a survey, 14 per cent of the children who demobilized from armed groups in that troubled place reported that they were inspired to do so by information that the program, called Sisi Watoto (Swahili for “We, the Children”), broadcast. (Unfortunately, the program is on hiatus as this book goes to press because of lack of funding.)
Peacekeepers would take every opportunity to talk to locals face to face, too, and the mission’s civilian and military members would have studied the best ways to connect and talk with the people of the region, especially the kids. In this best-case world, NGOs would have no qualms about letting military and police forces in on any crucial intelligence they’d gathered when moving through the conflict zone, because they would have established a relationship of trust based on shared aims and understanding of each other’s operational needs. As a result, they wouldn’t feel that aiding the mission “tainted” them with politics and the use of force. In such an integrated mission, there would actually be less risk of the use of force, because the troops and their leaders would have other options in their repertoire, and would only use their weapons as the very last resort.
The military leaders of the mission would reach out to establish commander-to-commander links with the heads of the armed groups, rather than leave them to the political side and to at times ethically questionable negotiations with aid workers over access to humanitarian food and medical supplies. The military mission would make it clear to these leaders that using children to fight their battles was about to become a losing proposition. They would be clear about the sanctions they faced: prosecution for crimes against humanity; the threat of arrest if they tried to cross borders; the apprehension of their child soldiers, who would be taken away from them and placed in DDRR programs; the vow that from here on in, the mission would make it very difficult for those leaders to abduct or recruit replacements.
Ideas like these could go a long way to eradicating the use of child soldiers and some of them are gaining ground. But for much of the time that I have been wrestling to find solutions, I’ve been trying to bridge a gulf between the security forces—both military and police—and the NGO and humanitarian communities that, in my view, really needs to be eliminated, but sometimes feels totally unbridgeable. We are still at the stage of getting people to accept the hard fact that we have to do these missions differently, and not yet at the place where we can get total buy-in on new operational tactics. And so the lives of our peacekeepers and peacemakers, and those of the people they are trying to protect, are being put on the line every minute of every day in conflict zones around the globe.
But at least we do know where we need to go—which is more than I could say when it all started, at the end of my Carr Center fellowship in June 2005. In the CSI we have built something that, against pretty incredible odds, has brought all the necessary players into the room to talk to each other, has sponsored research in the field, has found an academic
home at Dalhousie University in Halifax, and is about to conduct trials of the working field guide we’re developing for military and police forces and NGOs alike. And we have recently decided that beyond this useful work, what we really need to do in order to eradicate the use of child soldiers is to expand the CSI from mission to movement.
I will challenge you in the next chapter to get involved in that movement. But first, I’d like to sketch what I’ve been working to build. I think that one of the benefits of optimism and idealism is that they lead you into things you would never have tried if you’d let yourself imagine how hard it was going to turn out to be. I knew, from my work at the Carr Center in 2004 and 2005, that my research team and I had stumbled on a way of thinking about child soldiers that cracked open the problem in illuminating ways. Until we began to apply that language to the issue, no one had ever really conceptualized child soldiers as “weapons systems.” To most, they were victims of horrible abuse, not agents of conflict: but the truth is that they are both. This was a hard reckoning, I was to discover, and the first meetings I convened were interesting, to say the least.
The hushed, tense voices inside the glass-windowed, high-rise boardroom ceased when I came through the door. On one side of the heavy oak conference table was a group of men in military uniform with polished shoes and solemn faces and on the other side, a more motley crew of young women, scruffy young men and grey-bearded older chaps in bright, somewhat wrinkled, collarless shirts. Even the tabletop spoke of the chasm between the two sides: standard notepads and reference documents, sharp pencils and ice water on the uniformed side and on the NGO side a potpourri of papers and paper scraps, weathered notebooks, eye-catchingly colourful ballpoints and paper coffee cups.