They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children

by Roméo Dallaire

  The vets gave the summer cadets the sense of being part of something much bigger, steeped in history and traditions, sacrifice and glory. They made and applied the thousand-and-one rules around the camps that ensured we remembered we were in the army now and not somewhere in upstate New York bunking down with a bunch of bored rich kids. Rain or shine, they never seemed to either sleep or waver in the maintenance of the “standard” of perfect order and good discipline, and heaven forbid if you dropped a candy-bar wrapper on the grounds. That wrapper went into the garbage pail, but not just any pail, as some were there just for show and were spotless inside and out.

  Although all the veterans smoked like chimneys off duty, they had a particular aversion to finding cigarette butts dropped even on the grass. We wanted to learn to smoke in order to emulate these old sweats. We would roll our cigarettes individually with varying levels of success—I ended up smoking more paper than tobacco for the longest time. We would try to talk and do odd jobs with the cigarette in the corner of our mouths and the longest possible ash still attached. But either the smoke got into our eyes and nearly blinded us or the ash fell on our clean boots and made a mess. We were very careful where we dropped our cigarette butts.

  Still, for the longest time, we were allowed to remain kids playing at a grown-up game. I was a boy soldier, an apprentice at some of the skills, but I had not yet acquired the ethic of the warrior class in our democratic and peaceful society. We were playing at soldiers. We never really believed we were preparing for war. We never really thought it could happen. The closest we ever got to a battlefield was the odd evening war story from a veteran, although as a rule they tended to be quite tight-lipped about their war experiences. But boy, did we love the stories they told, stories edited to stress the valour and not the horror.

  We also loved Saturday movie night: black-and-white Hollywood epics featuring great First or Second World War battles were shown in the huge drill hall, with all of us sitting on the floor downing the only Coke and chocolate bar we were allowed to purchase each week. The echoing drill hall amplified the sound of the guns and screams on the soundtrack, and the brave words of the combatants. When the lights came up, we would be marched back to our tents, high on sugar and often still dazed by the scenes on the screen.

  Dreams came easily once we’d quieted down and closed our eyes. On my favourite nights for sleeping, light summer rains beat on the canvas of our large, canopied tent. Some of the canvas walls bore graffiti from others who had slept on the top bunk, close to the roof, like I did. Were they soldiers of the war or were they last summer’s cadets? I never could read the faded scribbles, but this did not stop me from thinking about them each night as I entered my own secret, special, boy world.

  Yes, my world. That totally imaginative place that was everywhere and nowhere would come to life when I closed my eyes against the reality around me, night or day. At times I would be reprimanded for daydreaming in the most unexpected places, such as when standing to attention during inspection parades, or on the rifle range firing point (waiting with my relay for the order to lay down and pick up five rounds of .303 calibre Second World War munitions), or walking in a column through the dark forest as we practised night orienteering.

  In the poorly lit classroom tents where only an occasional breeze reduced the heat and humidity, I was an ace at escaping into my world. I amazed myself at being able to walk in file surrounded by comrades or to lay cold and shivering under my poncho in the wet grass at first light, and still cross into my world. With a flicker of thought, I would be back in the forests of the Laurentians and I would be free and wild and so very much alive.

  By the time I was into my eighteenth year, I had been back to cadet camp several times and had achieved considerable success in leadership roles. During my last summer camp, the die was truly cast: I received my acceptance to military college. Attending the Collège militaire royal de Saint-Jean for five years and then the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario, were my first steps to becoming a career officer and a university-educated citizen.

  —

  I passed from childhood and became a man—a soldier, an officer, a general—but the boy never really disappeared. My imaginative world remained alive, if often dormant, inside that evolving, professionally trained military commander who manoeuvred in the adult world. Marriage and kids of my own did not reduce my longing to escape at times into my own universe. And I tried to foster a similar imaginative space in the psyches of my children, or at least to help them realize that their life’s ambition was not simply to become an adult, but to become themselves, masters of their internal realm of freedom and imagination first and foremost. I believe that children must have room to protect that place in their brains that makes them different and unique for their short lives on this planet and for the eternal lives of their souls.

  The adult soldier goes about the business of mastering the craft of controlled violence, of living and staying alive in far-off lands for causes that are seldom clear or even tangible. Keeping peace, upholding freedom, defending human rights, protecting the moderates and the innocents caught in the crossfire of conflict, creating the buffer zones of fairness and security—these are definitions of a soldier’s role that have evolved over centuries in which hundreds of thousands of people have suffered, paying the price for change, for reform, for a better way of life. The gallant old soldiers who taught me as a boy created a learning atmosphere that was serious yet very considerate, very human, inculcating lofty ideals and noble-warrior dreams in their charges.

  The contrast between my path as a youth and the path of so many youths and children in war zones and failing states today is stark. We cadets knew all this military stuff would be over in so many days that we could strike off on the calendar. The child soldiers under the gun of inhuman adults see no end in sight. My teachers took care of us and understood we were only boys, but the men and women leading their contingents of child soldiers destroy the children and youth they indoctrinate, literally and spiritually—sacrificing them at the whim of their ambitions and perverse needs.

  The world of the child soldier was not portrayed in any of the doctrine and tactics books that had been my soldier bibles before I arrived in Africa in 2003. I was completely unprepared to come in contact with an enemy who wore the trappings of childhood so familiar to me, but who was so different from the soldier I had become. I was so unprepared that for a long time I was blind to the implications of what I was seeing.

  2.

  LITTLE SOLDIERS, LITTLE KILLERS

  I WAS FIRST CONFRONTED WITH CHILD SOLDIERS in the Rwandan civil war. I saw them, heard them, faced them down, and eventually confronted them in the midst of a carnage that swallowed their youth and my professional warrior ethic. They, the once-children in unknown villages on the tops of the thousand hills of Rwanda, were real, determined, deadly, and in some strange way quite adept at camouflaging the incredible fear they must have been experiencing in the presence of professional and adult soldiers.

  At first they seemed to be children just like I had been, dressed up and playing adult games. But I soon realized that these were not students falling into line and listening obediently to teachers who spoke to them of discipline. They were not cadets at summer camp toying with military practices on parade squares and with compasses and maps on field exercises. These were not children sent off willingly by nervous parents to live a few weeks under canvas and be fed heavy meals and bunked in dry sheets changed every fifth day.

  No, these were soldiers. Little soldiers with big guns often grasped in both hands or resting heavily on the shoulder, wearing ill-fitting uniforms and parading before visitors in hidden lairs to show the strength of purpose and of military force.

  The helicopter, shuddering vigorously, was nearly out of control. The Rwandan army pilot was pulling harder and harder on the control stick to slow down enough to avoid crashing into a small ledge near the top of a high hill, among so many other high hills, in t
he middle of the rebel-held zone in northern Rwanda.

  The air is thin at this altitude and the temperature was just hot enough to exacerbate an already tenuous situation for flying. We hit the ground with such force that I didn’t really know whether we had landed or crashed.

  It was August of 1993, and I was on a reconnaissance mission to the region in advance of deploying a UN peacekeeping force. On this leg, I was touring the rebel side of the demilitarized zone (DMZ) established to keep the RPF and the Rwandese Government Forces (RGF) apart. We’d landed at a rebel battalion headquarters in the western part of the DMZ, and from the looks of things (confirmed on the tourist map scrunched in my hand) it was very isolated from the rest of the world. There were no roads, only footpaths, and no electricity or repeater stations to permit any mobile communications. Even in the helicopter, radio communication was iffy at best because of all the hills. I needed as much information as I could get in those hectic few days, to confirm the rebel army’s claims about its force structure, and also assess what I would need in terms of troops and equipment to monitor and observe the ceasefire and the implementation of the Arusha Peace Agreement, brokered between the rebel army and the mainly Hutu regime, which ended the civil war and established the goals necessary to creating a democratic government in Rwanda.

  My legs were still wobbly from the landing when I was surrounded by a squad of keen, smartly dressed young soldiers in high rubber boots, and uniform jackets and caps that looked familiar. On closer inspection, I realized they were wearing a version of East German Army summer-camouflage combat dress, and I wondered briefly how the RPF had got hold of the uniforms. But with the end of the Cold War and the reunification of Germany, huge quantities of military material and hardware had recently become available at rock-bottom prices on the arms market; the offer of U.S. dollars in those days would get you what you needed from most Eastern European nations without too many questions asked.

  Although at the ready, these young soldiers did not seem trigger-happy or overexcited. They seemed efficient and disciplined, and were totally devoid of any expression other than determination. An older chap with no visible rank on his shoulders, but with the air of an NCO, led the way toward a group of huts slightly hidden in the bush, clearly the command post. A tall, slim officer was standing there waiting for me with his staff. After a very smart salute, he smiled and extended his hand in a gesture of warm welcome, greeting me in English with an accent that was decidedly North American. He commented wryly that if my helicopter had kissed the ground a little more amorously it would have been a long walk back to Kigali.

  This commanding officer was au fait with what had happened at the peace talks a few weeks earlier. He knew what the agreement entailed for his side and for the Rwandan government, too, and he responded promptly to the few questions I had as to his unit’s boundaries and tasks on this rear flank of rebel-held territory.

  I wanted to walk over the tactical deployment of his forces—whose territory contained several hilltops as well as a massive volcano that loomed over us where we stood—and his defensive positions. And so he led me on a short tour of the main bivouac area and then farther west of his area of responsibility to show me a spot where the DMZ was so narrow and the opposing forces so close that his troops could throw rocks at them. As we walked, I learned that the commander had been trained in Warsaw Pact countries and had fought in the Ugandan civil war under Yoweri Museveni, the current president. There was no doubt that he was a professional and that he had a number of equally experienced subordinate leaders and staff officers in various posts in his command.

  The bivouacs were impeccably laid out for the comfort of the troops, protected from prevailing winds and with good drainage, and within a strong defensive posture for immediate reaction to any surprise attack. Even though they were young, his NCOs had the demeanour and command presence of soldiers trained by the Brits or by British-trained colonial instructors: I felt as if I was in a British camp like the one I had visited in northern Germany in the 1970s.

  The soldiers themselves, both at headquarters and at the forward defensive positions, were lean but in top physical condition. I saw no layabouts, sick-parade ill, or injured personnel. There were several sections doing squad-level drill to the sound of the soldiers’ own singing. We walked by a platoon listening to a lecture on terrain features and movement, and the use of dead ground (natural features such as gullies) to protect them from being seen or from coming under fire from the enemy as they advanced. Another group was conducting open field formations, and still others were sitting in a circle cleaning their personal weapons as an NCO gave them pointers on the best way to render their guns more effective, as well as relentlessly reminding them never to be caught without their weapons. On a small stretch of open ground, soldiers were playing soccer with a ragged ball that had clearly had its original markings kicked right off it, “skins” against “shirts.” The shirts wore impeccably clean white T-shirts, but all the players were barefoot on a pitch that had more small stones than grass.

  Morale seemed high among the troops, who also seemed ready to respond at any time to a threat from an enemy. I was impressed that this force—months into a ceasefire and with a recent peace agreement supposedly easing tensions—was still at such a high state of operational readiness. I would have expected a laxer standard in a force that had been sitting still for six to nine months.

  But as I admiringly studied these young soldiers and junior NCOs, it finally dawned on me that I was looking not at young men but at teenagers: a good number seemed well under eighteen. These were, in effect, companies of kids or youths being used as front-line troops. It was clear that they were very well trained and indoctrinated: they were there to fight, if necessary, as they had done rather effectively for the last three years. The other thing that struck me as unusual was that there were absolutely no women or girls in sight. The RPF soldiers had left their families in the refugee camps in southern Uganda.

  If I subtracted three years from eighteen, I came up with a disturbing answer. Had this civil war between the RPF and the RGF been fought by youths, by children, led by adult officers and NCOs? The answer came in part from the commander, who told me without hesitation that up to 75 per cent of his troops were already veterans who had been battle-tested at various times during the last three years of civil war. Most of his officers and NCOs also had previous experience fighting in the civil war that brought Museveni to power in Uganda nearly a decade earlier.

  When my reconnaissance was over, and as my unsure helicopter pilot attempted to get us off the ground, I could not come to grips with the fact that these young soldiers, these youth combatants, might have been as young as fourteen when they first entered the fray in 1990. They were veterans and yet had not even reached adulthood. They had fought and seen action against some determined professional soldiers from Belgium and France, who had come to the aid of the RGF, and by all accounts they had held their own. They had killed, and some of them had been killed and wounded in return, and they were not yet men.

  While serving in Germany I had wandered through row upon row of tombstones in military cemeteries in northern Europe marking the graves of young Canadian soldiers who had died in action far from home and for a less intimate cause than the one for which these young rebels were fighting. Far too often the birth and death dates would strike me, and I’d do the math, and feel repelled, even guilty, at the loss of a soldier as young as seventeen; once, when my father was with me in Holland where he had fought, we came across the grave of a sixteen-year-old. My father had been a thirty-seven-year-old, experienced NCO in that war; a sixteen-year-old enlisted man was an aberration, he said, but later admitted that he had felt almost like a grandfather to some of the troops, many of whom enrolled before their eighteenth birthday.

  But being a sixteen-year-old on that hill in Rwanda made you not an aberration but a seasoned veteran. These were combat-ready and experienced boy soldiers with competent adult leaders who
were fully aware of the underage state of their charges. Barely eight months later, these child soldiers would be crossing through the DMZ just south of this position to conduct assault after assault on the RGF and its own youth militias in the civil war and genocide that would rock their homeland. One of the most horrific slaughters that one nation suffered in the last century would be played out by so many youths serving under one flag or the other, as adults manoeuvred for power and supremacy.

  And what of the youths those well-trained young RPF soldiers would soon face?

  In the months leading up to the outbreak of the genocide on April 6, youth militias from Rwanda’s major political parties regularly demonstrated their bravado and disdain for authority, especially the authority of my small force of foreign blue berets. The disturbances and friction that the youth wings of the Coalition pour la défense de la république (CDR) and Mouvement révolutionnaire national pour le développement (MRND)—respectively, the Hutu extremist and the president’s political parties—created not only in the capital, Kigali, on Sundays after mass but throughout the country in every little mountain-top village was emblematic of the aggressive gang violence that was to come. These were not youths out for a good time at the expense of innocent bystanders. They were dressed distinctively in a sort of multicoloured clown suit and cap. They seemed well led by handlers who instilled in the boys through song, dance and the blowing of horns and whistles, as well as illegal enticements and aggressive behaviour, a feeling of omnipotence.

  Before the genocide began, I received inside information that these kids, youngish teenagers, were being taken to the south of the country, to the large forests, and trained with weapons and military tactics by extremist elements of the Rwandan political parties who were supposedly supporting the peace process.