"YOU'LL LEARN NOT TO CRY."

     There are also girls in 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:

  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.”(59)

      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, 

59 Human Rights Watch, copyright © 2003 http://www.hrw.org. p. 73. The report was written by Sebastian Brett, senior researcher in the Americas Division.

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 will save it: 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....(60)” 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(61).” 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      

60 Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. Random House, 2008, p.111

61 Singer, Children at War.Op. cit., p. 22.

who cleared minefields by walking over them as “from only nine to more than fifty(62).”

     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(63)

       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. [My words, not a quote; and offered without apology.]

62 http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/iran-iraq.htm

63 From the Marines’ “Rifleman’s Prayer.” See above, p. 83.