YOUNG MEN, AND ... YOUNGER
War is the way our species eats our young. It’s been so at least since Homeric times – three thousand years, give or take - but probably much longer. The Iliad is considered by many to be the first great work of Western literature, and is, of course, a war story. But reading Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey turns up no mention of 8- or 12-year-old warriors. The warriors in the story were young men, not children. Achilles, Agamemnon, Hector, Patroclus,
Odysseus, Paris, Greater and Lesser Ajax - they were all fully grown – if not always grown up. By 1579, the practice of recruiting and conscripting adolescent boys into Europe’s armies had grown to the point that the word used to name groups of foot soldiers was Middle French/German infanterie, Old Italian infanteria, Spanish infanterÃa. Though combat has always been a young man’s game, the phenomenon of child soldiers has acquired a whole new meaning in recent decades. There are now an estimated 300,000 combatants in their early teen and pre
teen years(43) in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and,especially, in Africa(44). The youngest soldier I’ve read about was a combatant with the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), in Uganda. He was 5 years old. Not 15; he was 5(45). The AK47 is a bit heavier and more awkward than the M16, but even a young child can carry one. And anyone has the strength to pull a trigger.
So far, not many U.S. soldiers have been younger than
17(46); just the ones who lied about their ages. But our
soldiers have lately met children in combat. P.W. Singer
43 See “Child Soldiers: The New Faces of War,” by P.W. Singer. http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/issues/winter05-06/singer.htm; also Council on Foreign Relations, “Child Soldiers Around the World,” http://www.cfr.org/publications/9331/ by Eben Kaplan
44 P.W. Singer, Children at War, Pantheon, 2005. Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, cites such references as UNICEF and Human Rights Watch reports, John Keegan’s A History of Warfare, etc.
45 ibid., p. 20.
46 The youngest U.S. soldier on record as having been killed in Vietnam was 15. His name was Dan Bullock. The Website for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (“The Wall”) (http://thewall-usa.com) in Washington, D.C.says that 5 Americans aged 16 were killed there, and 12 aged 17. The same site says that more than 25,000 aged 20 or under were killed in that war.
writes in his book on child soldiers: “U.S. Marines fighting in the battle to retake Falluja [Iraq] in November 2004
reported numerous instances of being fired upon by ‘12 year old children with assault rifles’ and wrestled with the dilemmas it presented.(47)”
Among the many instances of child soldiers cited by Singer is the Indonesian island of Ambon, where “thousands of Muslim and Christian boys have formed local paramilitary units that protect and raid against the other community.” He quotes an aid worker: “’They are so proud of their contribution. It’s a common thing for them to say they’ve killed. Since the government can’t seem to do anything, they all say they have an obligation to protect their families and their religion.’”
During the 1980’s contra war, with President Reagan leading the anti-communist crusade, re-institution of the draft was being widely debated. Because I had written articles in local newspapers about my own military experience and my two trips to Nicaragua as a journalist, more than one young man of draft age asked me for advice about what he should do if the United States went to war in Nicaragua and the draft were reinstated. Part of my response was always that if they enlisted in, or were drafted into, the military, they should be prepared to be looking at 12 year old boys across their rifle sights, based on the ages of some of the kids I had seen under arms in Nicaragua and southern Honduras during the contra war.
It is this deadly mix of young men – or boys - and big ideas which I want to address. With us Marines it was Semper Fidelis: always faithful. It was “ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do or die.”
47 P.W. Singer, Children at War, Op. cit. University of California Press, 2006; p.24.
I boarded the chopper with the Marine grunts bound for Tho An, having virtually begged to go on the mission, and joined the line of Headquarters Platoon, F/2/7, as we approached the village. I already had my bayonet out of its scabbard and was sliding its ring over the flash suppressor on my M14 rifle to engage the bayonet lug when Captain Love, the “F” company commander, a few paces in front of me, turned around to check on the new guys who had been attached to his company for this operation, saw me fixing my bayonet, and said “That’s it, that’s what I like, gimme some steel on the end of it.”
I was there because of my faith: faith in that confusing entity variously known as God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit; in my country, and in the United States Marine Corps. Sure, I was nervous and afraid. The firing had already begun in the village, not many paces in front of us. I had been a Marine for 3½ years, but that meant nothing if I did not perform as a Marine today, my first time directly under fire. I was ready to fight. I wanted to hold up my end of the Great Bargain.
The night before, I had prayed as I always did, with that truncated childhood prayer I used because it was the only prayer I knew: “...if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take....” It wasn’t much, but I hoped it would make up the difference between my own level of personal courage and whatever might be required of me this day. And of course to get me into heaven if I died. That was what prayers were for, right?
A few hours later, after the long moments with the screaming baby boy and the screaming mothers and the
silent old man with his stare of hatred and after the firefight when I was ordered to move up(48) because I
had the only automatic rifle in the group, and to stand alone in the open and cover the other Marines as they pulled back, that cloak of faith had already begun to slip from my shoulders. Not because of fear, but because my experiences were showing me that faith wasn’t working.
The cloak of faith would continue to slip for the rest of my tour. The burst of rounds from an automatic weapon that snapped past my ears – they were close enough to hit one man standing nearby, and to puncture at least one of the canteens held by a Marine standing near me at the well – had contributed to my loss of faith. So, earlier in the year, had my failure to get a medevac chopper to the desperate platoon when my efforts had been met with an accusing “You’re too late,” meaning we had lost a man, and his buddy the radio operator blamed me.
My faith would take an especially big hit two months after Tho An during the night-long mutual slaughter between Staff Sergeant Jimmie Earl Howard’s 18 Recon Marines(49) and two battalions of NVA, a few kilometers from our base at Chu Lai. I had the midnight-0400 watch in the DASC (Direct Air Support Center) that June night. We helped coordinate helicopter and fixed wing air support for Howard’s men. When I
48 I wasn’t directly ordered to move up. In those days before 1st MarDiv units in my area were issued M16s, one man from each infantry squad would be issued a selector for his M14, and be designated that squad’s automatic rifleman. As far as I knew, neither Captain Love nor the First Sergeant who had just now called for an automatic rifleman to move up knew that I, a stranger to their company as of that morning, had the selector on my rifle. Since the detail was a pickup group of guys who had volunteered to return to the well for water, no provision had been made to include specific weapons in the group, because Tho An was considered secured. No matter. The order applied to me because I had a selector, and if nobody else present knew this, I did.
49 Actually there were 16 Marines including Howard, and two Navy Medical Corpsmen. That night, they were all Marines. See Wikipedia, “Jimmie E. Howard.”
stepped outside our radio shack shortly after four in the morning, I saw flares and tracers from the firefight off to the west, still at its height.
One man standing near me at the well in Tho An had been hit; I had not. Some people find Jesus, or some other holy being, in similar situations. Others, even in the same group, have that connection violently and forever severed. I was among the latter. The 23-year-old who had
prayed his final childhood prayer the night before looked around for his Christian God during the firing at the well
and saw that such a being either did not exist or was very, very far away. This was because I was doing something
which I suddenly saw to be wrenchingly, brutally wrong, while acting precisely on my values as a Christian, a patriot, and a United States Marine.
When I threw my weapons and 782 gear on the truck to leave Chu Lai in August of that year (1966), I was a troubled, angry, and nearly faithless young man. By the end of the year, some months into my intensive studies at Colorado College, I was a “born again atheist,” a state of mind and heart that had begun to exist while guarding the women and children and the old man at the well in Tho An earlier in the year. I’m still an atheist. Of the many instances of phenomenal luck that have allowed me to survive being both a combatant and a journalist in the Vietnam War, hitchhiking up the Mekong through
Cambodia and Laos at the height of that war, through
some close calls at sea aboard fishing boats, and later in construction work, as well as some dicey journalism situations in Central America, that day in Tho An was the luckiest of my sweet life. Not because I escaped death – that’s happened many times - but because of what I learned.
More importantly, because of what I unlearned.
Since those days, when I see a public appearance by anyone in garb intended to impress people with the sacred, therefore exalted, therefore authoritative, status of the wearer - I call them “long robes and funny hats” - the cynic in me says, “Okay, here comes the bullshit.”
I am a cynic, but of a certain ilk.
I get itchy and edgy whenever anyone talks about “pride.” I feel that way when I’m in the bank parking lot in my home town in northeast Oregon surrounded by the red, white, and blue bumper stickers handed out as freebies by the bank that say “Proud to be an American.”
Don’t get me wrong. I’m okay with being American. I love the stubbornness of our independence, our rascality, the creativeness that has given the world jazz, Motown, and Elvis; some great and many pretty good movies, some great and a lot of good literature, Walt Disney cartoons (50). I especially love that shining gift our people gave to the world, the United States Constitution. I love and am inordinately proud of the circumstances of the American
Revolution, and the Declaration of Independence and other events in the desperate time which birthed that Constitution. (Yes, I too am painfully aware that that great document conveniently left out women, people of minority races...in fact, everybody but propertied white males. What, and whom, it left out constitutes the task currently before us. That task is monumental, and many of us worry whether we’ll ever succeed.)
50 Upon arrival in Managua, Nicaragua, in October 1983, I caught a ride into the city from the airport on the back of a flatbed pickup driven by some Sandinista teenagers. I noticed as I climbed aboard the truck that it had Bugs Bunny mudflaps. The boys’ antics as we drove through the city seemed to have more in common with the mudflaps than with either side in the 4-year-old war between the fledgling Sandinista government and the Reagan-backed contras.
