One Day the Soldiers Came (2 page)

Childhood and War

I
t happened to Keto. He was sitting in school with his brother listening to the teacher recite their French lesson.
Je m’appelle, tu t’appelle, il s’appelle
….

It happened to Michael. He was at home with his mother and father. He sat in the back room doing whatever it is that teenage boys do in back rooms, daydreaming, making plans, goofing off.

It happened to Nora on a sunny day. She was playing in the front of her house.

Patience and Charity were too young to remember what they were doing when it happened.

It happened to Nicholas, as it happened to the others. To his entire village, one day, it happened.

The soldiers came.

“It was a sunny day,” Nora says, as if the weather were the most amazing thing. How could it happen on a sunny day?

“They put a knife on my neck,” she says, the little blonde.
Picture her at eight years old, smiling and playing in the yard on a sunny day. They put a knife to her neck. “They wanted to rob us and they saw my mother’s wedding ring and they told her to give it to them,” she says. But the ring was hard to get off. Her mother struggled with it. The soldiers laughed. “Hurry up or we’ll just cut off your finger!” they shouted. Her hands shaking, she got the ring off and they let her daughter go.

They shot Nora’s uncle, though.

“They shot him with a silencer and then wrapped him in a carpet so his body would burn more easily.” It happened on a sunny day in the Balkans when she was eight years old. When she was playing outside.

Keto and his brother saw people running, cattle running, the entire village near Baraka in the eastern Congo on the move. They heard gunfire. The teacher told them to go home; it was time to flee. Keto ran, clutching his schoolbooks to his chest. Barely four feet tall, charging through hell.

“The Mayi Mayi were yelling ‘fire, fire,’ commanding the village to be burned,” Keto says. Flames tore at the thatched roofs of houses. People ducked low and tried not to catch the fury of the soldiers. They were looting the marketplace.

“When I went home, I didn’t find my parents. My brother and I didn’t know where my parents or grandparents were.” They stood for a while in their empty home, calling for anyone they knew. With gunfire and flames around them, the two boys decided they must escape on their own. They made their way to the lake still clutching their schoolbooks to their chests. “They were our only possessions when we fled. I still have them.” He nods, proud that he had held on to his books all these years, through such a long journey, after so many people have died.

Nicholas doesn’t like to talk about what happened. He’s thirteen years old, originally from Burma, though exiled in
Thailand now. He has seen crucifixions, executions, abductions.

Michael has seen the damage a machete can do to human flesh, his mother’s flesh, his father’s flesh.

Patience, from southern Sudan, has been raped, repeatedly.

They all draw pictures. Whether they like to talk or not, they jump at the crayons and markers, remake their world on paper. Their visions are at turns dark and painful, others are hopeful, light-hearted, nostalgic. It depends on the child, depends on the day. They all draw. We draw together. It’s one of two activities we do. We draw and we play soccer. It is with soccer that everything begins.

You cannot know the children of a world at war until you begin to play soccer. You can interview them, as many have done, as I have spent countless hours doing, and you can read reports and studies and you can watch them do all manner of things and you can hear and hear and hear about children in war from just about everyone: charities and warlords, generals and social workers, parents and doctors and politicians. Everyone likes to talk about them. Children are the canvas on which societies paint themselves; their hopes, their hates and fears, their nationalist fantasies, their impossible dreams. The rhetoric is everywhere. Save the Children and Islamic Jihad use images of children in terribly similar PR campaigns.

Who are these children, though? The ones we see on the news, all wide-eyed and suffering in refugee camps. The ones we see in magazines, dressed in camouflage, firing rifles taller than themselves. The ones overflowing in history, the anonymous displaced, disenfranchised, photographed but not named, talked about but not remembered? Who are they?

Play soccer with them and you’ll know.

The Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, January 2002.

I’m in a center for demobilized child soldiers run by a nonprofit organization in the city of Bukavu. Built on the coast of Lake Kivu, the city rests like a blanket on the hills. Dilapidated colonial buildings command views of lake sunsets and jungle horizons. In the morning you can hear fishermen singing on the lake as the sun comes up. The smell of wood fires fills the air, cooking goat meat and ground cassava. The wilderness around the city is as stunning as it is dangerous. Stories of massacres and banditry trickle in from the outlying areas. When it is quiet, you might hear the mist crackle with gunfire. Children from all over the eastern Congo seek safety from the fighting and some kind of livelihood on the muddy and crumbling streets. Some estimates put the number of homeless children in the city at twenty thousand.

I play soccer in a grubby courtyard belonging to a local charity. It’s not much of a playground, filled as it is with giant puddles, pits, and loose shrubs, fenced in on all sides from the street, but the children have each other and an ingenious ball made of bundled plastic bags and string. That’s enough for them. The game is informal. To an outsider, it looks like a skirmish, all shuffling feet and half-playful shoulder shoves. There are rules, rituals, a code of behavior, but none I’ll be privy to. You could watch these children play for years and never see the current underneath, the history that creates this game, that’s passed it on through generations of kids just like these. They don’t need to learn the rules, they don’t exist in words. They’re in the blood. In the birth. There are no goal posts because there are no goals. Scoring is not the objective here, nor winning. The play is for the sake of play. Goals and points are finite, they imply a beginning and ending. This game has no beginning. It started long ago with other children and goes on in barrios and
slums and ghettos and camps and shantytowns the world over. It will never end.

I’m no good at soccer, and the ball passes through my legs. I twist to stop it, putting my left foot behind my right as I step backwards, tripping myself into the mud. Pratfall. The children with whom I’m playing burst into laughter. The oldest among them is sixteen; the youngest is ten. All of them are trained killers.

The rebel group Rasemblement Congolaise pour la Democratie (RCD-Goma) controls this area, though it is often seized by paroxysms of violence from other factions or ethnic militias. The children have seen combat in a war widely known to be fought against civilians. I’m here to learn from them, to hear their stories, but we haven’t gotten that far. Now it’s time to play. Later, they’ll tell me about their killings, their wars gone by, their nightmares, and their hopes. But not yet.

They’ve fought in different armies and come from different parts of the country. Fate has thrown them into this center together, turned them into a group, labeled child soldiers or ex-combatants or in some documents “youth who participate in armed conflict.” The labels tell you little. In the language of humanitarian aid, there are many categories for children: Street Children, Internally Displaced Children, Child Soldiers, Child Heads of Household, Unaccompanied Minors, Children in Conflict with the Law, Children Affected by HIV, Children Accused of Sorcery. Categorization is a way of processing children for targeted assistance in crisis situations. Most children will fit into more than one category; few children in a war zone will fit into none.

No help there. Want to know them? Play soccer.

Xavier plays delicately at first, kicking the ball as though it were made of glass. He lets the others charge in, lets them do the slide tackles. When the ball goes wide, he’ll chase it and bring
it back toward the group. They cluster in front of him as he approaches, all defenders, no allies in attack. He charges right in, daring the whole pack of them, trying to come through the other side in control of the ball. Now he throws elbows, now the grunts and shoulder-shoves. That’s the game. You get the ball and you try to keep it. Xavier gets the ball and goes into the pack, goes looking for trouble. One doesn’t avoid trouble in this game; safety is not the goal. Risk, that’s the game. Get the ball and hazard losing it the moment it’s yours. It’s a game of constant loss.

I shudder with a thought about little Xavier, who must be about fourteen years old, who plays soccer in flip-flops, whose skinny legs poke out from his ragged shorts, whose Adidas T-shirt is torn and far too big for him. I wonder how many people he has killed.

Paul is always in the fray. He’s about four feet tall with big brown eyes. He has the looks of a boy who could play the cute little brother with the snappy comebacks on any sitcom. He shoves like the rest of them, but he smiles widely, his teeth glowing white (these children have no access to dentists, but they have no access to candy either). When others fall, he helps them up. He makes sure everyone gets to play. He’s thoughtful of me, trying to make sure I get the ball from time to time, trying to make sure I obey the amorphous rules—sometimes touching the ball means the game stops and you surrender it, sometimes you touch the ball and whoever kicked it has to be the monkey in the middle, sometimes it means nothing and the game just goes on and on and on. Paul is an excellent guide, a first-class soccer mentor for me. How did he end up here and not in school or on the set of a sitcom practicing his smile for adoring fans? What does he see when he closes his eyes at night? What does he hear?

Another soccer game, a continent away.

I nearly kick a soccer ball into a passing NATO truck with a machine gun mount. The gunmetal shines in the sunlight. The flag on the side suggests it’s the Swedes. We hold our breath as the ball soars toward the armored vehicle. It arcs over the grass, bounces once and careens into the road. It misses the truck by a few feet and the soldiers keep driving. The truck leaves a trail of dust that takes half an hour to settle. The Serb elementary school students around me laugh and sigh with relief, and the oldest among them, Marko, twelve, runs off after the ball with a roll of his eyes. The kids had been chasing my missed kicks all afternoon. It’s a steaming July day. I don’t just sweat. I lose water in buckets. Kosovo, 2004. The children all ask me the same question.

“Do you know the Battle of Kosovo?”

Marko was the first of these children to ask it, perhaps because he was the biggest, the most handsome, the best soccer player (except perhaps for Katja, who is surgical with her kicks and dazzling with her footwork, but she’s a girl, so doesn’t count, as the boys explained to me privately).

“I saw Kosovo Polje on my drive here,” I answered, citing the field where the battle took place. The field was speckled with daisies and buffeted with high voltage power lines. It did not strike me as a likely place for events of great magnitude. It could have been any number of fields dotting Kosovo. It looked, in fact, like any roadside field in middle America. Flat and slightly sun-scorched, stuck between two major routes, north to Mitrovica and west to Peja (Peč in Serbian—the names matter). The only remarkable thing about this field was that everyone with whom I spoke brought it up. When I asked about the conflict
between Albanians and Serbs, they would say, like Marko, “It’s the history. Do you know the Battle of Kosovo?” Over and over again, this refrain, “Do you know the Battle of Kosovo?”

The field saw a lot of bloodshed, terrible violence between Muslims and Christians, with casualties on both sides. The small province of Kosovo still reels from the battle. The leaders of both armies died in the conflict. The battle on Kosovo Polje secured Slobodan Milošević’s power over the crumbling Yugoslav state in the late eighties. Serb children still draw pictures of it, lamenting Serbia’s loss, the cause of all their present woes. The myth of the battle, the myriad interpretations of the story, of the massacres and war crimes, could easily hurtle the province of Kosovo back into civil war. This is remarkable because the Battle of Kosovo was fought on June 28, 1389.

The soccer game stops. Play makes room for history, and the children begin to tell the story. Marko went to the bench near our patch of field and grabbed a drawing from the table. We’d been drawing pictures before the soccer ball came out and hadn’t had time to talk about them. The drawing belonged to Miroslaw. He was the littlest one in the group and better only than me at soccer. The pause in play must have been a relief to him. He reminded me of myself in middle school, always hoping the ball wouldn’t come my way. Miroslaw was eleven years old, with red cheeks and bright eyes, another child star born to the wrong epoch. Like many children, he stuck his tongue out of the side of his mouth as he drew. He beamed when Marko held his picture up.

It was a medieval scene. Rival armies faced each other beneath a stone tower. A man’s head rested on a pike. A frightening figure stood beside him with an axe. The drawing gave off a melancholy feeling, part Edward Gorey, part Caravaggio (Figure 1). The children began to tell the story, suffused with laughs and shouts.

“The Muslims came to take the Serbs’ land,” Marko said.

“Murat,” the girl, Katja, added, citing the name of the Turkish Sultan who led the Ottoman army onto Serb land.

Not wanting to be shown up—it was
his
drawing after all—Miroslaw quickly interjected the name of the leader of the Serbs, a noble called Lazar, a near saint in their eyes. The other youths repeated the two names, Murat and Lazar, and they sounded heavy with the repetition, shorthand for centuries of meaning to which I was not privy, to which I would never really be privy; this was not my story, as soccer was not my game. I don’t know when, but at some point as they told the story, we started kicking the ball again. Mostly they kicked it to each other and let me listen and watch. Murat and Lazar, they said again. Murat and Lazar, who met in battle on Kosovo Polje. The words sailed with the ball across the grass.