MEN AND WOMEN, BOYS AND GIRLS
(NOTE: THERE WILL BE A 5th PART, CONCLUDING THIS ESSAY)
(NOTE: THERE WILL BE A 5th PART, CONCLUDING THIS ESSAY)
In the earlier chapter “Lasa Tinghni([1]),” from my trip among Miskito and Sumo Indians in southern Honduras and northern Nicaragua in January 1985,
I mentioned photographing “a striking-looking young Miskito mother, one child on her hip and another clinging to her filthy skirt, wearing an old T-shirt with the Playboy Bunny emblem on the front.” Though I spoke with other members of her group, this woman spoke neither Spanish nor English, so I didn’t speak with her. But I will never forget her face.
She was a young mother, and she was worried. She was worried to the point that it visibly affected her whole being: her face, her posture, the way she held her child, the way she looked about her.
She was worried in the way that millions of young mothers around the globe are worried, every day: How can I feed my children? WHAT can I feed them? Not what will we wear, not where will we live, not what will we do for money, not where will they go to school or how will we afford books for school, but How can I feed my children?
In the myriad wars currently in progress around the world, women and children usually suffer even more than the combatants. Increasingly, in fact, the combatants are children. This leads to some realities that are so awful to contemplate that most of us in
59 See above, p. 428ff.
the Western world deal with them in the only way we know how: we simply don’t think about them.
Though this has been true throughout recorded history, it is, if anything, becoming worse as we enter the 21st century. Wars currently playing out across Africa and Asia, and some in Latin America, gobble up males as young as 8 (and even younger), leaving women and girls to fend for themselves in a war-blasted world, often preyed upon by men and boys from the same social strata as those forced – or seduced - by war to leave them unprotected.
One thing this has meant in practice has been that young men and boys, cut adrift from home and family and community and thrust into war zones, bring their sexual appetites with them, even as the normal constraints on those appetites are left behind. Depending on relative levels of decency, apathy, and avarice among the leaders of military groups, this has come to mean that, as combatants have become younger and younger at an alarming rate, so have their victims.
So now we have children killing children, children raping children([2]), usually goaded by adult male leaders – sometimes in pursuit of political goals, sometimes by religious, nationalistic, or tribal loyalties; sometimes by simple greed. Greed is often mixed with the other motives.
There are also girls among the ranks of child soldiers. The Human Rights Watch report “You’ll Learn Not to Cry: Child Combatants in Colombia” takes its title from this:
Ángela, who joined the guerrillas at twelve, had a story that became disturbingly familiar as Human Rights Watch conducted its interviews:
I had a friend, Juanita, who got into trouble for sleeping around. We had
been friends in civilian life and we shared a tent together. The commander said it didn’t matter that she was my friend. She had committed an error
and had to be killed. I closed my eyes and fired the gun, but I didn’t hit her.
So I shot again. The grave was right nearby. I had to bury her and put dirt
on top of her. The commander said, “You did very well. Even though you
started to cry, you did well. You’ll have to do this again many more times, and you’ll have to learn not to cry.”([3])
Women, and their children with them, have always been lesser beings in human societies.
This is wrong.
Women are not the least of us; women are the best of us. A woman has carried in her body for most of a year, before we ever drew breath, every human being who ever lived. Most of our literature has dealt with the deeds, heroic and otherwise, of men, because it has been written mostly by men. But no noble sacrifice in battle, no crossing of formidable mountain ranges or uncharted oceans, matches the quiet (yet sometimes noisy!) heroism of what women do and have always done to give us life, and to keep us alive.
I’ve come to this: if the world is destroyed, men – in their unceasing quest for power and/or wealth (which is increasingly becoming the Greatest Power) - will destroy it.
If the world is saved, women – like Azar Nafisi and Shirin Ebadi and Neda Agha Soltan in Iran, like Graça Machel and many others in Africa, like Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma, Malalai Joya in Afghanistan, Arundhati Roy in India, like the Saudi poet Hissa Hilal, like ordinary women all over the world who simply struggle to keep their children alive in the face of men’s abandonment and depredations - will save it.
In her wonderful Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, the Iranian professor of English literature Azar Nafisi writes of the regime of Ayatollah Khomeini as conducting a “war against women....([4])” She also notes that during the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88, Iran used child soldiers to clear minefields ahead of tanks by walking over them. P.W. Singer, in Children at War, quotes Khomeini as saying that the children’s sacrifice in that war was “helping Iran to achieve a situation which we cannot describe in any other way except to say that it is a divine country([5]).” Singer also notes that the young boys walking over mines wore keys around their necks “to signify their pending entrance into heaven.” A military history website lists the ages of those Iranian volunteers who cleared minefields by walking over them as “from only nine to more than fifty([6]).”
Divine country.
Just now I am remembering lines from the “Rifleman’s Prayer” we learned in boot camp:
To God and Country, Home and Corps
Let me be faithful evermore.
Amen([7])
It will anger some that I draw a parallel between U.S. soldiers and their Nazi enemies wearing GOTT MIT UNS belt buckles. Or a similar parallel between us Marines being marched to chapel in boot camp to sing “Onward Christian Soldiers” led by a chaplain with officer’s insignia on one point of his shirt collar and a cross on the other, and Islamist extremists who call our soldiers “infidels” and “crusaders.”
But that’s my point. “Divine country” says it all: Your country will send you to war. We will give you a reason. The reason may or may not be true, or it may be a mixture of some truths and some outright lies. But the truth or falsity of those reasons is not your concern. Your job is to do what you’re told, without question, attack the people we tell you to attack, and risk or give up your life as you do this. Your country thanks you for your sacrifice. If you do not come home alive, we will thank your mother. We will give her a folded flag and a prayer to replace you.
[2] I am particularly thinking of Democratic Republic of Congo, where a deadly stew of mineral wealth, tribal loyalties and intertribal hatreds, rebel groups from Congo and from neighboring Rwanda, and the flourishing practice of voluntary and forced recruitment of child soldiers who at times are permitted, even encouraged, to rape; and the culture which stigmatizes women and girls who have been victims of rape, even if they are pregnant.
[3] Human Rights Watch, copyright © 2003 http://www.hrw.org. P. 73. The report was written by Sebastian Brett, senior researcher in the Americas Division.
[4] Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. Random House, 2008, p.111
[5] Children at War. University of California Press, 2006; p. 22.
[6] http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/iran-iraq.htm
[7] From the Marines’ “Rifleman’s Prayer.” See above, pp. 93-94.
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