6 Years Old

I think the hardest parts for me here are stories about children.

For some reason they always seem to be 6 years old. Maybe it’s because Sarah’s 6 and I only hear the age when they’re briefed. It’s not always what you see on TV—sometimes it’s the bad guys using them to help the bad guys, sometimes (well, actually, always) they’re innocent victims, sometimes they’re just in the wrong place at the wrong time. As far as helping the bad guys I really think if I told Sarah that Santa Clause was a bad guy she would believe me and do whatever I asked of her to help stop him. I wish I could go into specifics on what I get to see but I can’t. Suffice it to say that if I end up waking up at night when I go home it will be because of these kids.

I remember the first time I yelled at Sarah. I think she was 2 or just under. She had dug into the kitchen cabinet and gotten into a box of dry food (I think it was rice). We had scolded her many times for getting nosy like toddlers do but of course she didn’t listen like toddlers don’t. Amidst her digging the box of rice fell out onto the kitchen floor and spilled everywhere. I don’t know why I lost my temper (it’s happened many times since) but I guess my voice was louder than it had ever been up to that point in her life because she jumped. Without crying or running she squatted down on her haunches and feebly began trying to pick the rice up with her hands to put it back in the box, except her fingers were too small to grab even a grain of rice. I felt smaller than she was. I have tears in my eyes writing this now and that was almost 5 years ago.

What motivates a person to bring something as precious as that into the front lines of a war? Most of them don’t have a choice—again being in the wrong circumstances. But to willfully use a child as a “soldier” in your own sadistic and twisted war…that, like many of the things I see the insurgents do, I can’t understand.