Two children of war

Whatever prompted my parents to take such a youngster to this movie, I will never know. It must have been in the late 40s or early 50s and all that I remember was it involved a group of kids living in the rubble of a city bombed out during World War II. It was probably Berlin, but could have been London or a hundred other cities that suffered the same kind of devastating bombardment. If those parents had a reason in mind for showing me this movie, the guess is it was to bring home the horrors of war to an impressionable mind. I might have said something a kid would say about wanting to go to war and be a hero. I took something quite different away from it.

I saw a group of kids in a Hollywood white-washed version of a war environment having the time of their lives, living in that rubble, scrounging for food and clothing, totally independent and indifferent to what was going on around them. And, that's all I remember though I am guessing everything turned out all right or I wouldn't have such a fond recollection.

Since then the memory of that movie has risen twice at least while reading two books, one this past week, and one several years ago. Both of them showed what really should have been taken from that movie.

In "A Long Way Gone, Memoirs of a Boy Soldier" by Ishmael Beah, the author at the age of 12 in the late 1990s became immersed in a civil war in his native Sierra Leone. A group of rebels attacked his village, killed as many people as they could while the few survivors scattered into the jungle or across a river only to be killed or chased again from the next village where they settled. Beah himself managed to survive several deadly attacks with a group of friends as they made their way almost the length of their country's coastline attempting to escape the fighting and at the same time trying to locate family.

Along the way they encountered numerous difficulties, one of the most telling being chased out of villages or refused entry because the residents mistook them for the feared child solders known for heartless murders in the conflict.

The war caught up with him and he was conscripted into the loyalist army and forced to be a soldier himself, carrying the most modern of infantry weapons including the ultimate WMD as described in the movie "The Lord of War," the Kalashnikov AK-47. He became a killer himself surviving several battles with rebel soldiers and showing no mercy to the enemy, even cutting the throats of prisoners.

This is no pretty story of a clean GI Joe fighting heroically against a common obviously evil enemy. This is about a filthy war in which child soldiers who were apparently quite comfortable slitting an enemy prisoner's throat were feared by the general population. Beah didn't even know if he was with the good guys or the bad guys, just that he was a soldier and killed the enemy. Every step of his journey took him farther from his childhood and turned him into this cold killer as a child soldier.

Eventually a rescue agency was able to pull him out of the army and take him to rehabilitation which he and his friends fought bitterly, wanting only to get back to the only thing they saw themselves as anymore – soldiers.  

After about eight months he was deemed rehabilitated and in the process had discovered an uncle whom he had not known about and who took him in.  But the war followed and the rebels entered Freetown where the uncle lived, bringing the mayhem and death to the country's capital.

Fortunately for Beah, he had been chosen to participate in a UN mission and traveled to New York to address that body about the horrors of child soldiers.  One statement from that time in the book stood out.  He wrote this: "I was sad to leave but I was also pleased to have met people outside Sierra Leone. Because if I was to get killed upon my return, I know that a memory of my existence was alive somewhere in the world."

He made a friend in the city of a woman who later was able to help him escape from the rebels in Freetown, cross into Guinea and eventually return to New York. He was one of the lucky ones. He suspected most of his friends ended up back in the fighting and that most had died.

Similarly Jerzy Kosinski's "The Painted Bird" follows a young boy, abandoned by his parents, as he tries to escape Nazi horrors and persecution by his own people during World War II. Considered at times a gypsy and at others a Jew he, suffered immeasurable hardship as he searched from village to village for a place of refuge. He faced incredible cruelties and observed others. What I recall from reading it several years ago was that at times he seemed to find that refuge but inevitably something new intervened and he was plunged again into the hopelessness of his situation. It's a dark tale about a side of war seldom exposed. Kosinski himself was separated from his family in Poland during the war. Some controversy surrounds the book, but in the end, its message overshadows the criticism. It is another story of the loss of innocence and childhood in the midst of a brutal war.

And, children today are suffering the same victimization in wars beyond their control or even comprehension, in Syria, in African refugee camps and anywhere else in the world where violence can erupt in an instant.

What the two books do is peel away the veneer of romanticized image I had carried for years of those independent children surviving by their wits in the remains of their city. There is nothing romantic about it.

It resonates today when with the flood of information available and the relative anonymity of the internet, so many political and social arguments elevate so quickly to logical extremes, where, in perhaps the worst example, a whole nation charges into war against an enemy that had nothing to do with the catalyst. That's Iraq. But that is certainly not unique. Across Africa and Asia and in South America, violence erupts over what seem on a cosmic scale to be minor complaints. And in our own country, we have people openly calling for presidential assassinations because they don't like a health care program. In this case the root cause appears to be racist. The first African American president is consistently vilified and violence threatened largely because of that unspoken hatred.

Instead of debating the issues, the solution seems to be to kill the bastard. President Obama should be revered just for the composure he maintains through the endless onslaught of scurrilous attacks.

Sometimes I have to laugh at the flag-waving second amendment patriots around us now. It's funny how in all those fantasies about standing up to an oppressive government in a violent war, the person having the fantasy wins. It's like Bob Dylan's line, "You can be in my dream if I can be in yours."

Problem is, if you look at the logistics, you have a bunch of untrained yahoos with handguns facing tanks, artillery, and airborne drones, smart bombs, and probably stuff that is still too secret to show anyone and they think they are going to win. They do it couching their crusade in terms of patriotism and religion. On top of that those people apparently despise anyone who is a true revolutionary. Picture Che Gueverra, not Ted Nugent.

No, in the stark reality of these two books, war is horrible, no one wins, good people die or are changed forever and in particular here, two children lose their childhoods and one even becomes the cold-blooded killer at the tender age of 13. They are tangible faces of those children suffering the same fate today. That is the reality; quickly escalating violence, thousands of refugees, thousands of innocent lives lost, over what? Oil we don't  really need?  Territory that doesn't belong to us? A president from a minority race? Philosophy or religion that is different from ours?

If only the saber-rattling, gun-toting, bible-quoting zealots could spend one day in terror on the bare feet of a child attempting only to survive as he tries to escape the violence in the war-torn landscape of his youth, it might change the perspective.

But then the fantasy of war has always been more appealing than the reality; and there is no romance in a world where children scrounge through rubble just to survive.

Recent books by and about refugees

A more recent refugee situation looking for a writer

Look at the picture and ask yourself WWJD

Syrian refugee wins Olympic heat after swimming for her life

"A Long Way Gone, Memoirs of a Boy Soldier"

"The Painted Bird"