One Day the Soldiers Came by Charles London Read Free Book Online Page B

in the war, I did not believe he was too young to have an opinion. He had been expressing complex ideas all morning.
    He screwed his forehead in thought, his eyes focused past his shoes, seemingly through the floor at the mud just below the boards. I waited for him to continue. It had started to rain outside, and the drops played the tin roof of the center like a xylophone. I wanted to know what Paul would do if he had power; I wanted him to finish his sentence. Would he get revenge? Would he outlaw war? I thought these answers would tell me a lot about his “psychology.” He looked up and told me his answer in a level voice.
    “Everyone is killing people, dying for nothing.”
    Paul understood the reality of the war in the Congo. He understood it through all the propaganda pumped into him by the army. He didn’t know the nuances of the political scene,the names of the players, or the interests profiting from it, but he understood an essential factor of the war: the reality for most Congolese civilians was that neither the victims nor the killers were fighting for any reason anymore.
    After five years and an estimated four million people dead, the war in the Congo was declared over in the spring of 2003, though sporadic fighting continued in the east and the threat of renewed full-scale war looms. The violence of the war has its own momentum, not so easy to stop with treaties. Even in 2002, when we met, when the end of the war did not seem anywhere in sight, Paul did not want to discuss it much. There was not much point in discussing it, he told me. His worries when we spoke were about school and his future.
    Paul took an active interest in what would happen to him next. He expressed hope for himself if he could go to school, hope that he could have a good life, as a mechanic, he suggested, if he could get out of the center and go to study.
    “There is always work for a mechanic here,” he said. “The roads are bad, cars are always broken.” He smiled because he had seen the car in which I pulled up, a busted up taxi that my translator (who was a cab driver too) borrowed to take me around. When I mentioned our car, he laughed and suggested to the translator that he let him fix it, even though he had not been trained as a mechanic yet.
    I didn’t really know how to think of him at first, this little boy who was quick to laugh and smile, who had fought with one of the most brutal militias in the world, with some of the worst killers of the twentieth century, who called himself a soldier and denied that he could be afraid, and who desperately wanted to leave the life of war and go to school.
    He had a lot of self-confidence, which I was inclined to call a defense mechanism against all the stresses he had experienced. As defense mechanisms go, it seemed a pretty reasonable one. He had learned not only that he could not rely on adults to have his best interests at heart—adults had abducted him, after all—he had learned that he could have power over adults when he was a soldier. He could take control of his own situation, for good or ill, and behave like an adult himself. Considering his regard for others at the time we talked, I hope he will continue to nurture the impulse towards kindness. It could easily go the other way. He had been trained to kill and told it was okay to do so. I have no way of knowing what happened to Paul—fighting in Bukavu has displaced many residents since we met. He could have been compelled to rejoin the militia, or targeted by another army. He could have stopped being thoughtful of other children, started getting in fights. I like to think he got what he wanted, the chance to go to school.
    “I don’t like it here, in the center,” he said over and over. “I want to leave. I don’t have anything to say to you except that I want to leave here and to study.” I imagine he did not like the confines of the compound, nor the boredom and uncertainty of waiting for parents or other