One Day the Soldiers Came Read Online Free PDF Page B

stations. I’d chase away anyone who was already there to get some space. I used to beg and steal, and I was never caught, except for once…me and a friend stole a cell phone, and the owner saw us. He caught us, and heated up a fork and a knife, and then applied them to our skin. I still have burn marks on the stomach, chest, left arm, and bottom. One day I sniffed paint solvent with a gang of friends. We put the stuff on a rag, and mixed it with fresh mint to hide the smell. It had no effect on me, so I threw away the rag, and never tried again. I used to make love to younger boys, but nobody ever did it to me. I had seen a friend of mine who’s leader of a gang of street kids do it, so I tried. I dropped all that when I came to live in the shelter.
    Cultural differences also clash with the Western idea of childhood, given the different ages and circumstances that define a child’s relationship to the adult world through coming of age rituals and so forth. But politics too can dash the fragile and hard-earned status of the young against the rocks.
    Consider little Johnny and Luther Htoo:
    In January of 2000, a group of Burmese rebel fighters from the insurgency group God’s Army took over a hospital in downtown Ratchaburi, Thailand, holding hundreds of hostages, sending Burma’s civil war spilling over Thailand’s borders. The Karen are a minority ethnic group in Burma, primarily Christian. They have a large and sympathetic population along the Thai-Burma border.
    “We want to tell the world how Karen and Burmese refugees live during the fighting. We will not hurt any of the hostages, we will take good care of them,” said one of the gunmen to Reuters Press Agency. The rebels were fighting as part of a long war against the military junta in Burma (Myanmar, as the ruling junta renamed it in 1989—the names matter, the names tell whose side you are on, where your loyalties lie). The junta has one of the worst human rights records in the world: theyroutinely jail dissidents, censor the media, target and displace civilians in order to cut the rebels off from support, and, according to reports from several human rights groups, use rape as a tactic of war. They justify their actions by claiming the rebels want to break Burma apart along ethnic lines, though the various ethnic armies have long disavowed that goal.
    Living in New York City, it is easy for me to condemn violence and espouse pacifism, to urge nonviolent resistance, but I can understand how, for someone living under the conditions created by this regime, fighting against it could be a valid choice. A reasonable person could rationally choose to fight this regime. The question comes down to how much credit we give young people for rationality.
    God’s Army, which was based in the jungles near the Burmese border with Thailand, was led by two twelve-year-old brothers from the Karen ethnic group, Johnny and Luther Htoo: black-tongued, cigar-smoking soldiers whose followers claimed they possessed magical powers to dodge bullets and step on land mines without setting them off. Their legend began when their village was attacked. By some accounts, they rallied the villagers around them and fought back, killing many soldiers in the process and escaping unharmed through a heavily mined area. They were nine years old at the time.
    The God’s Army group that took hostages in Thailand three years later said they wanted attention rather than power. They wanted doctors and nurses to fly to the border regions and aid their injured fighters. They demanded that Thailand stop aiding the Burmese government’s attacks on rebel bases. The hostage-takers freed fifty of their prisoners after the Thai army chief ordered his troops to end the shelling of the guerillas’ base on the Burma border. The only casualty occurred when a stray bullet injured a teacher at a nearby school, according to a local radio station. The next day, the Thai army raided the hospital,killing ten of the