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He never saw it coming. On Jan. 4, 2002, Sgt. Nathan Ross Chapman was the first U.S. serviceman to be killed by hostile fire in Afghanistan. A 31-year-old Green Beret who also served in the Persian Gulf War, Chapman was killed by sniper fire after meeting with local tribal leaders in Paktia province. He knew the dangers he faced but probably never imagined he would die from a bullet fired by a child soldier.
An isolated incident? Sadly, no. Seeing gun-wielding children as young as 7 or 8 shooting at U.S. troops may shock the American public, but war no longer is the exclusive domain of adults. Child soldiers are a growing phenomenon in Third World countries as gun manufacturers have produced ever-lighter assault weapons that can be carried by children. By definition a child soldier is younger than 18. While the United States allows those as young as 17 to serve with parental consent, many Third World countries appear to be robbing grammar schools to support their regimes.
In 2000, President Bill Clinton signed a historic international agreement adopted by the U.N. General Assembly that set the minimum age for voluntary recruitment above 15. It provided governments with additional tools to pressure violators and rehabilitate child soldiers back into civilian life. But, as so often is the case, the U.N. ukase was ignored.
Today, as many as 300,000 child soldiers are engaged in military fighting in approximately 30 countries on every continent except Antarctica and Australia. In addition to Afghanistan, for example, child soldiers are serving in armies in Angola, Uganda, Pakistan, Burma, Sierra Leone, Colombia and Chechnya. Not even little girls are exempt from this conscription. Often they find themselves forced into sexual slavery or used as human minesweepers.
A 13-year-old girl soldier in Honduras quoted in a U.N. study, "Impact of Armed Conflict on Children," put it this way: "I had a dream to contribute to make things change, so that the children would not be hungry later. I joined the armed struggle. I had all the inexperience and the fears of a little girl. I found that girls were obliged to have sexual relations to alleviate the sadness of the combatants. But who alleviated our sadness after [being forced to have sex] with someone we hardly knew?"
The thousands of child soldiers actively fighting are joined by millions of children serving in countries that are not at war. For example, in Iraq thousands are required to serve in the "Saddam Lion Cubs," military units that some analysts fear could create dicey problems for U.S. troops attempting to secure Iraqi cities. Already the numbers of children being recruited are rising in areas where U.S. troops are deployed. Among the mountain guerrillas of Afghanistan, child soldiers constitute "45 percent of their troops -- an increase from the 30 percent" a few years ago, says Carolyn Nordstrom, an anthropology professor at the University of Notre Dame and author of A Different Kind of War Story, which examines the impact of war upon children who have been dragooned into African and other bush armies. The Taliban have kidnapped orphans and young children in Pakistani religious schools, for instance, to become trained soldiers as thoroughly brainwashed as the Hitler Youth.
Child soldiers often are kidnapped during military truck sweeps where rogue armies raid towns and grab everything at hand. When people hear the military is coming, "everyone gets their kids off the streets, because if they don't they get drafted that day," Nordstrom says. Others are forced into the war because soldiers are desperate. "The Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda is now composed of 60 percent children," says Peter Singer, coordinator of the Brookings Institution's Project on U.S. Policy Toward the Islamic World, and who worked on the Balkans Task Force for the Pentagon. "If these groups didn't recruit children they would fail. The organization lives or dies on the success or failure of the children on the battlefield."
Nordstrom adds that the armies "raid villages, kill the children's parents, beat the kids and provide them often with a lot of drugs. The girls, who are used for cooking or sexual slavery, just don't make it. The boys sometimes make it out or live longer, but the girls don't." In Angola and Afghanistan, the child survival rate has been one out of three. The others died of disease and starvation as well as in battle, she says.
Not all children are forced into the military. Surprisingly, Nordstrom says, some volunteer. "This poor kid in Africa, who is really hungry, summed it up," she says. "When I asked, 'Why are you doing this?' he said, 'I wanted a pair of shoes. I don't have anything. They offered me something.'"
The use of child soldiers is not a new tactic. Throughout history child soldiers have been used to fight in the world's conflicts, dating as far back as David versus Goliath and certainly during the Crusades. Young soldiers served the Confederacy in the Civil War battle of New Market in 1864 when the boys of Virginia Military Institute held their ground and won the day. The Hitler Youth fought for their homeland in 1945, and the Viet Cong enlisted a small number of children to fight in Vietnam.
What is new is that child soldiers are playing a significant role in Third World armies, and that without children many of these rogue forces could not sustain themselves. Child soldiers are being used to fight in 75 percent of their conflicts, a sharp contrast to the past where they were almost never the central cadre of the fighting forces. For example, in the Civil War there were relatively small units of cadets in the South -- less than 200 children -- most of whom served as drummer boys, whereas today child soldiers often are well-trained snipers and guerrilla fighters.
Are U.S. troops prepared to fight child soldiers? "We are prepared to fight, but not fully prepared for the aftermath," says Singer, an Olin Fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies program at the Brookings Institution, who is putting the finishing touches on a new book, Caution: Children at War. "There is no safety umbrella," he warns. "How are we going to deal with the aftermath of soldiers who kill children? No one is talking about it."
Nordstrom agrees. "Killing doesn't come easy," she says. "It screws people up badly. Soldiers come back extremely broken. Just look at the Vietnam stats and you can see the increase in divorce and mental illness." Adding children to the ranks of the enemy forces makes it even harder.
Singer notes that studies of World War II veterans who fought against the Hitler Youth confirm this, as do those of Vietnam veterans who encountered child soldiers. Certainly, the child soldiers and their extended families suffer long-term problems that disrupt psychological moral developments, Singer says.
Encountering a child soldier always creates uneasy moments. Chapman, at least, never saw his youthful killer. Others who meet them face-to-face sometimes freeze in the presence of a child carrying an AK-47 at a moment when the slightest hesitation can have fatal consequences. It becomes a judgment call on whether to shoot to kill.
Certainly that was the case in September 2000 when a British-army patrol stumbled upon a rogue militia in the jungles of Sierra Leone composed of children. Stunned by the appearance of child soldiers, the British squad commander refused to open fire and surrendered to the band of kids.
A few weeks later, British special forces launched a rescue assault, code-named Operation Barras, to free the unit. The mission lasted 20 minutes and left one British trooper dead and many more wounded. At least 150 of the enemy were killed -- many of them children. The psychological impact of killing kids still is being felt by troops, even though they know that a bullet fired from an AK-47 is equally as deadly, whether fired by a child or an adult.
Both Singer and Nordstrom say troops need to be trained to understand that some impressed kids simply are looking for an opportunity to escape and are more than willing to surrender in hopes of finding a better life. At the same time, many child soldiers have a great deal of military skill and years of combat experience, meaning troops must take precautionary measures. This includes the possibility that some may be child terrorists. Therefore children must go through the same inspection and scrutiny as adults, Singer says.
While engagement with child soldiers can be demoralizing for troops, it also could have a severe impact on the public and "create a public-affairs nightmare," Singer says. TV images were all but banned from some of the bloodiest conflicts in Afghanistan, but it might not be too long before the public sees U.S. troops in combat with Iraqi forces that use children as cannon fodder or minesweepers as Saddam Hussein did in his war with Iran.
Educating the public about what our forces could be up against might begin with getting accurate statistics on child battlefield casualties, says Nordstrom, but there aren't any. "Kids are not listed under casualties. We don't even count kids," she says. "That's a horrible indictment of our human race. People do not know how bad it is out there. We delete footage because it is too upsetting."
Singer says U.S. intelligence needs to focus immediately on strategies to block the recruiting pipeline and prosecute as war criminals any and all leaders who promote such practices. He suggests further taking the profit out of the practice by placing sanctions on countries that trade with regimes using child soldiers. Meanwhile, he says, the United States must develop programs to deal with the psychological aftermath of American troops who must fire upon child soldiers in the course of warfare.
Nor can the American public be ignored, Singer insists. "Spokespersons should be sure to stress the context under which the incidents occurred and the overall mission's importance," he says. "Most importantly, they must seek to turn blame where it should properly fall -- on those who send children out to do their dirty work."