There
have always been child soldiers. Older boys who played the drums and
fifes in the armies of the French Republic often fell on the front
lines. The Marie-Louises of the Napoleonic armies and the older boys
in the retreat of the Wehrmacht were sacrificed to delay the advance
of the opposing army for a few hours. This is not counting the
14,000 little boys blown up during the Iran-Iraq War so that the
adult soldiers could then attack on a battlefields free of land
mines.
[.
. .]
Imminent
danger leads to problems of attention, which it focuses on the
aggressor, shutting out the rest of the world so that, paradoxically,
intellectual performance improves.
All
on-site observations made today of children at war, be it in Croatia,
Kosovo, Israel, Palestine, or Timor, confirm the surprise of
educators [including those in the U.S. military] who, since the
1950s, have noted “the excellent scholastic results” of children
traumatized by war.
- Boris
Cyrulnik, The
Whispering of Ghosts: Trauma and Resilience (2003),
trans. Susan Fairfield, NY: Other Press, 2005), p.
123, 125.
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