Boy Soldiers

His ferocity in combat won him an honorific stripe: "Captain Bull," rebel comrades in the Liberian outback called him. "I killed three men with my gun," Samuel Bull says. The boy also freely tells of gunning down a woman point-blank with his AK-47 when she refused to hand over some food. It all was long ago, he says, after his parents fled their besieged city without him and the attacking rebels took him in--at the age of 8. Four years later he's back on the government side, the result of his surrender last fall to U.N. observers. In shorts, sandals and a pink shirt, he looks like any other schoolboy. But experts at the rehabilitation center where he lives know better. "Yesterday he said to me, 'The next time someone comes into my sock drawer, I'll take my knife and kill him'," says Seton Korteh, a social worker. "I knew he meant it."

Boys have always been at high risk in wartime. Some primitive societies made taking part in mortal combat a central rite of passage to manhood. As recently as the 19th century, drummer boys marched into battle in both the United States and Europe. Twentieth-century American teenagers dreamed of running off to war and coming home as heroes, and a few actually did it (page 46). But history alone can't explain the Samuel Bulls of the world, a growing legion. The front ranks, hospital beds and battlefield graves of the armies of poor nations around the world are increasingly filled with mere kids--boys well below 15, the minimum age established for combatants by international conventions.

The era tempts military men to violate children's innocence. At the same time as the average age of the global population is sinking, high-tech infantry weapons are being made ever lighter and more powerful; modern assault rifles weighing less than seven pounds are easily shouldered by a child. War, industrialization and migration from the country to the cities have torn at the family and clan ties that traditionally governed conduct in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Meanwhile, entrenched poverty and the glorification of violence-- the same forces that help turn U.S. slums into war zones--have contributed, too.

Whatever the causes, the trend is unmistakable. Estimates of how many children are currently at war range from 50,000 to as high as 200,000 in 24 conflicts. Liberian rebel leader Charles Taylor gave the kids their own regiment, the Small Boy Unit--and made them subsist from looting, called "snake patrol." Tamil rebels "enlist" boys as young as 9. Underage troops were a fixture of fighting in El Salvador and Nicaragua in the 1980s-and still fight and die in Guatemala. Mozambique, Burma, Angola, Afghanistan, Sudan, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Cambodia, Iran, Mexico: the list is long.

Upside down:

Boys will do things grown men can't stomach. "Kids make more brutal fighters because they haven't developed a sense of judgment," says Esther Guluma, a UNICEF worker in Liberia. She deals with children like the 13-year-old who admits slitting open the belly of a pregnant woman with his bayonet; other former child soldiers in Liberia tell of tying prisoners' hands behind their backs and throwing them into swamps or cesspits. One boy broke down as he told of being ordered to chop off a soon-to-be-released prisoner's hands because the handcuff keys were lost. "I hear that man's screams in my dreams," the boy told a clinic supervisor.