THERE ARE MOMENTS when time actually stops dead in its tracks. The moment becomes an eternity. The moment lives in your being from that point on, even when clock time starts up again.
The blue-helmeted peacekeeper who shot and killed the child soldier at the end of chapter four would have been dumped into such an endless moment. The account that follows is my best attempt at feeling, seeing and hearing what such a moment would bring that soldier, who is fictionalized here but is also as real as my intuition and military experience can make him. The violence committed against the world of a child when he or she is forced to pick up a gun is extreme, but at least most of us know in our bones that such a transgression is wrong. But our peacekeepers, facing child soldiers in the field, are told that they just need to do their jobs, trust their training, keep their focus on the mission and apply the rules of engagement. That doesn’t seem to me to be all we need to tell them.
Facing a child combatant in battle strains to the limits the parameters we set for our soldiers. Often idealistic, our peacekeepers and peacemakers believe that they will use their training, their power, their expertise and their weapons to protect life, not take it. During training we teach our maturing recruits how to trespass against the instinct to protect life in order to do just that: protect life, home, country and the vulnerable in foreign lands. It’s a powerful contradiction, drilled into the nerves and reactions of a soldier.
Using the instruments of death to defend one’s life, or the lives of others, against other human beings who are your equal in species and evolution but who have been set up to be your enemy—your own potential destruction—defies the prohibition against killing that we have taken centuries to articulate in law, in philosophy, in religion and in written and accepted humanitarian conventions and procedures. To destroy another human in order to vanquish him or simply to survive to fight another day is an act that has no place in one’s natural growth as a human being. I would argue—against the sociobiologists who reason that war is innate—that the killing impulse has been inculcated, instilled, drummed into our decision loop of actions, surrounded by justifications that enshrine soldiering as a higher calling. On the field of battle, we are trained to accomplish our duty not only at the risk of our own lives but also at the risk of destroying the lives of comrades-in-arms and foes alike. In our military institutions we are taught killing skills that become reflex from training, bolstered by moral defences of the highest order, so that we can kill if we have to and spiritually survive that act.
Every soldier who actually sees action, becoming a veteran of the fear, gore and unforgiving consequences of combat, still has to find ways to deal with the actuality of killing. To truly comprehend the reality of what you are doing—using your expertise to end another person’s life—can create the most heinous of consequences on your mind, soul, moral fibre and humanity. You question endlessly if you really saw the other human being, the enemy, as a human being. Through your gunsight, you see arms and legs and a head and torso and all the normal body parts. Those body parts are most likely acting in a concerted and coordinated fashion to defeat you with extreme prejudice.
You may not even be able to tell whether your target is big or small, depending on how far away you are, the quality of the light, the clarity of the air, and the obstacles between you and a clear and unobstructed view. In a skirmish or set-piece battle, we don’t often get the chance to contemplate the humanity of the targets picked out through our gunsights. With the cacophony of explosions, with earth and debris flying into the air and falling like rain on and around you, with the snap or crack of bullets whizzing by and the hissing sounds of super-hot metal fragments being propelled in your direction from rifles, machine guns, grenades, shells and bombs, adrenalin and the survival instinct kick in full force. Are you even thinking? You shouldn’t be, or you may not survive. No, your senses are at the pinnacle of their sensitivity. You can discern the acrid smells of gunpowder, the pungent stench of burnt flesh, the wet-metal taste of blood, accentuated by sounds that eerily make their way to your ears through the impact of the explosions—voices screaming in fear or shouting orders, whimpering for help or crying out in grief. Shock waves from the exploding munitions stun you as you fall or are flattened to the ground, dizzy with your ears ringing. As you stagger to your feet, you are almost deafened, almost blinded, unable to speak—and deadly aware of your vulnerability.
It is then that you, the professional soldier, discover that you are moving again, adjusting to your situation according to the drills, the discipline and tactics hard-wired into your brain to override your basic instinct of self-preservation and self-effacement from this horror show all around you. You balance on the knifeedge of survival and you act according to your training. But does that training close down your mind, your heart, your soul, your morality?
Do such circumstances eliminate or at the least reduce soldiers’ sense of humanity in order that they can employ destructive force? In the heat of the moment, can they still hear the orders, can they still understand the rules of engagement, can they objectively process ethical, moral and legal dilemmas? Is there still a track in their brains that permits some overriding constraints or limitations to what a human can do in combat? Can they still see the enemy as human or has the enemy become a target made of metal, wood, fabric and flesh, all of equal value and posing an equal threat? Is the enemy still human and are you still human too?
These questions arise from combat between equals. Here’s another. Can you kill a child if that child is dressed and armed as a warrior? If so, how many times can you do that deliberately before revulsion and disgust and self-doubt fry your brain?
There was no warning. The pounding of the rain on the metal corrugated roofing of the school and nearby church was deafening and had blotted out the normal noises of dawn breaking in the surrounding dense bush and of the villagers waking to start their day. Puddles of water formed instantaneously and we were awash in small rivers of reddish mud where the paths between the huts used to be.
We had arrived late the previous afternoon, after a long day on bumpy and dusty roads, weaving our way past endless lines of people milling and moving in every direction, crowding into every open space, as they searched for safer areas to settle until the aid agencies could get to them.
Rebel forces made up of a mixture of adults, older youths and armed children had already raided this hamlet with its small church and school complex before, seeking to create fear through horrific acts of violence and to steal whatever they could find—goats, maize, children—to sustain themselves. They had many uses for children—as porters, cooks, bush wives—but the most important was teaching them how to use their weapons in order to fight their war. I take that back: this was not war, as I would define it, but a descent into hell in a nation that was imploding. Opposing political forces, government troops and rogue rebel groups were all preying on the population, stealing, kidnapping, raping, mutilating and killing their own people.
These villagers had already paid a price: they’d lost several children, and the schoolmaster had been dismembered in the central clearing the last time the rebels hit. But the people had lived here for decades, as had their ancestors before them, and they did not want to run away from their school, their church, their land … and so the UN peacekeeping force commander had sent out a small patrol—twelve of us—to offer some protection until we could encourage them to move to relative safety in the nearest IDP camp.
The sergeant had spent most of the evening in discussions with the elders, who still hadn’t resolved to go but said they would meet about it again in the morning. The rest of us had deployed in and around the village in what we thought were the most advantageous defensive and firing positions against a force that would attempt to attack from the bush. That thick bush line, lush and green, neatly isolated this hamlet from the closest village, about a kilometre away along the spine of the low mountain range, and provided great cover for the rebels.
Our rules of engagement were clear enough: we were to use deadly force if necessary to protect the population from any group that endangered them by the use of deadly force. We were to make our presence known by parking our white Jeeps with their light blue flags so that they could not be overlooked by any reconnaissance elements stalking the area. So far the rebels had steered clear of engaging with any UN forces, although bravado and lack of discipline on their part—among the younger ones in particular—had led to some hair-trigger confrontations where we had miraculously avoided opening fire on each other.
Once we had the elders’ co-operation, we were to escort the civilian population to the closest camp, where aid and security could be guaranteed until the political situation stabilized. The work ahead was pretty straightforward, for me at least, if not for them.
This was not my first mission, and the rest of the patrol was at least as experienced as I was. Conflicts seemed to be exploding around the world, and all too often in impoverished countries like this one in central Africa. We had learned our trade diligently over the years, through trial and error too, learning ways to minimize the use of force and maximize the power of deterrence. All of us had seen our fair share of suffering and abuse and lack of success in other theatres of operations. But that night, for some reason, I was hopeful. Maybe because the air was fresh, the night sounds peaceful, and when I craned my neck to look up, the sky was clear and so full of stars it looked like someone had splashed white paint in great sweeping swaths across the sky. It never got stale, the way the stars shone in places like this, where there was little pollution and hardly any ambient light. It put the sky at home to shame.
After my first two-hour stretch of sentry duty—nothing moving but the usual, wild night creatures—I cleaned and oiled my weapon, then hit my folding cot to grab four hours of sleep. I huddled under my old mosquito net, which had its deficiencies: it let in just enough mosquitoes to buzz you alert every time you became comfortable enough to fall asleep. But at least I had a mosquito net, and anti-malaria medication, unlike the people who lived here. They suffered extensively from various insect bites and stings, malaria being the worst killer for the kids, along with lack of sanitation and clean water. Abject poverty was the curse of these innocent people, and their living conditions were becoming even more abject now that protracted civil war was tearing the place apart. Peace agreements had been negotiated but were unevenly applied and respected by the supposed ex-belligerents. Factions bred more factions, all vying for a piece of the power and loot, no doubt.
Both the rebels and the government forces were telling the people that they were the ones who offered the best path to peace and renewed prosperity, even as they regularly stole food and goods from them and killed them wantonly. Nobody meant what they said, and I would not bet on the ultimate outcome one way or another. I also wouldn’t let myself think about the scale of the brutality in this place, especially what was being done to the women and children. If I did, I risked being overwhelmed with anger. To survive my tour, I concentrated on each task as it came up, keeping my focus squarely on the mission.
Yet everywhere around me I saw signs of people struggling to live an ordinary life, to plant their fields, keep their children safe, send them to school and secure them a future. I think they could have used more help from people like us, definitely more boots on the ground, but that was for the higher-ups to decide, I suppose.
I was so tired that eventually even the mosquitoes couldn’t stop me from falling asleep. As I drifted off I thought of my own kids. Sara and Jeff had both had birthdays while I’d been gone. Twelve and fourteen now. So full of their music, their sports—not so much their school work—beating up the computer, their cellphones and every other possible shiny new gadget that came on the market with which they could talk to or text their friends. Their friends, the most important people in their lives these days.
My kids’ lives were so full of entertainment and activity that I wondered at times if anything stuck in their memory or did it just float away on a wave of more new things? I know they got tired of lectures from me about how lucky they were, but I knew I was lucky too. They were good kids, both of them, and because of what I did they knew more about the world than most of their friends. I tried not to think about the price they were paying because of my long absences. Their mom did her best to hold the fort and keep emotions on an even keel even when I was able to get a call through to them. A good military family, stoically accepting the sacrifices.
It felt like I’d only been asleep two minutes when a downpour started so suddenly I was drenched before I climbed into my rainsuit. I ran for the Jeep anyway. Why be miserable and even wetter? The night was nearly over, and I dozed sitting up until the sergeant beat on the hood of the Jeep and made the sign to standto at first light. It was close to 0600, and another day was upon us.
—
I had just staggered sleepily through the red mud to join the sergeant and the rest of the patrol in front of the school when over the downpour we heard the first sounds of gunfire and rocket-propelled grenade explosions on the far side of the village.
They were not just a few shots in the air to scare people who were barely awake and in the most vulnerable of states. This was a sustained attack and the rate of fire was increasing in intensity as we heard the first screams. Those bastards came after this village even when they knew we were here. Clearly, they were defying us: looking for a fight over a small group of huts in order to prove they could push us back to positions defending the large camps. If they could push us around, these people would feel even more defenceless and would just completely give up.
We were on the move at double-quick time to our defensive positions through the small corn patches between the huts, past the loosely strung bunches of sticks that fenced enclosures for the goats and chickens, slipping in three to four inches of mud and rainwater that had turned the ground into a skating rink. We all took nasty falls, and scrambled to our feet again coated in mud and other substances that do not make your day, but I finally got to my position on the right flank of the forward edge of the huts and there it was: chaos, flashes and explosions, dirt and mud and water and maybe body parts or bits of debris flying ten to fifteen metres in the air and landing all around, the heavy smells of gunpowder and smoke choking the air.
The rebels, in wet, green camouflage, were here en masse. Like coyotes after their prey, they were conducting a direct assault from the length of the bush line about a hundred metres from the first line of huts. They seemed to be enveloping the huts, focusing on the centre of the village as they ran, screaming and firing their weapons.
From my flank position, I was able to engage some of the rebels in depth, but the first attack wave was already too close to the huts to open fire without risking direct or ricochet rounds cutting through the mud and stick walls and wounding the civilians still inside. I immediately moved from my forward position and lined myself up between the first and second line of huts and brick houses. This would give me a clear shot as the rebels continued their assault toward the centre of the village.
Turning the corner of a rectangular hut, I came within ten metres of a rebel who had come around the other corner with his AK-47 blazing from the waist. While his comrades were running straight to the heart of the village, this one was obviously responsible for securing the flank by laying down a wall of fire to protect the others and to ensure no one was left alive inside the huts closest to me.
I opened fire instantaneously and deliberately, hardwired for this type of combat situation, the adrenalin rush making my heart pound loud and fast. The rounds were relatively accurate and the rebel was hit with such force that it countered his forward movement and flung his body backwards like a football player being clotheslined.
One down, I thought, as his machine gun flew in one direction and his body tumbled in the other. As we continued to advance, firing on the other rebels from our flank position, I glanced down by instinct to ensure that the man I shot posed no further risk.
That glance downward was surreal. I got my first good look at the warrior, lying there on his back with his arms stretched out and his legs half folded under him in the mud, and I froze, against all common sense and orders. The rebel with the blazing machine gun who had raced around the corner of the building firing away at anyone and everything, including me, now lay face up and dying in the mud, twisted, bleeding and barely able to breathe. But that was not the horror that instantly burned so many circuits in my brain that it ended up turning me into a casualty too.
The torn uniform was there in the mud, and the machine gun, but the warrior had vanished. Lying in his place was a youth, a young teenager, at most thirteen or fourteen years old. A child. A girl.
I had shot a girl, dressed as a rebel and acting as a warrior and projecting all the attributes of a rebel combatant bent on killing. I tried to doubt the evidence before my eyes: maybe it was a boy—the hair was cropped so short and the smooth facial lines could be male or female—but as I bent close, totally ignoring the firefight still going on around us, I noticed that her raggedy jacket had been torn open by at least two rounds, and that just above her left breast was blood and torn flesh and splintered bone. There was another bloodied area in her abdomen but I couldn’t make out the extent of that wound.
I was paralyzed by what I was seeing and what I had done. I stared and stared and stared. I was witnessing the opposite of a miracle. I was witnessing the grossest of human indecencies. I was, for probably only a few seconds but for what felt as long as my whole life to that point, observing the transformation of a warrior back into a child and that child was now dying—of wounds that I had inflicted on her child body.
I could not move on, I just stared at the girl. She caught my pant leg and I finally met her dark brown eyes, and it was as if I could hear her shock and cries of pain and fear. But there was more to her expression—she seemed to be pleading with me to restore her childhood, her innocence, her mythical world of dreams and wonder, the time when she was serene and protected and loved and cared for in the circle of affection that was her family. To restore her to the girl she really was.
The gentle grip of her fingers drove giant needles of excruciating pain deep into me. Around us, the battle was still going on, but it barely broke into the exchange I was having with this little girl dying in the mud and dirty water, inside a torn and soaking-wet camouflage jacket that had identified her as a warrior for all to see and fear. It had actually camouflaged an abandoned little girl who would soon die for no reason understood by her—nor by me anymore.
My brain stuttered excuses, raced through the logic. If you are being fired upon, you fire back or die. It was selfdefence. Of course it was. No one could argue that this presented an ethical or moral or legal dilemma. But if I had done nothing wrong, why was I so sick to my stomach? I had just shot a young girl who was dressed like a rebel soldier and armed to the teeth and had been shooting at innocent villagers and had shot directly at me but had missed. I shot back and I did not miss. That’s what happened.
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.
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.
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 illustrated 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?