The Children's Crusade
You know - we've had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves. We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock. 'My God, my God - ' I said to myself, 'It's the Children's Crusade. — Kurt Vonnegut
Here’s a consequence of Covid that I didn’t expect! Reduced contact with people for a few years makes familiar things novel again, and you get the chance to see them again for the first time. And I’ve gone through about eight heckin’ airports in the last month, so the people-watching is pretty intense. In particular, the soldiers.
If I recall correctly from the Before Times, it’s unusual but not strange to see large groups of soldiers moving through airports in uniform sometimes, particularly around the holidays when all the bases let them out. But for obvious reasons I hadn’t observed the phenomenon in a few years now, so it’s the first time I’ve had unfiltered contact with a large gaggle of soldiers in quite a while. Talking to them is a pretty fun game; the uniforms make them even more self-conscious than people usually are at that age (which is a lot), so if you can trick them into smiling they immediately blush because they’re not sure if they’re allowed to look happy or not.
But there’s the rub, right? “At that age.” When I say I haven’t seen a large group of soldiers in a while, what I mean is that I haven’t seen a large group of soldiers since I was firmly in my 30s and thinking of myself as an adult by default. I looked up the stats; the current average age of an enlisted soldier is 27, and that’s considered surprisingly old by historical standards. Probably I was seeing some boot camps being let out, because the age range I was seeing was well short of that, more like college students. And one of the things that changes in your 30s is that people in that 18-24 year old range start feeling a lot like kids.
I don’t mean that in a patronizing way, at least I hope not. Certainly I’m not saying that people of that age should be treated like small children or denied the advantages of independence and adulthood. But my instinct when faced with a 20 year old is to cultivate and teach; the default is to ask myself what I can do for them and what my responsibilities to them are. Basically I’m looking at them from the tall side of a power differential. Probably I have a more acute case of this than most, because of my history teaching folks in that age range, so a lot of my background involves actual formalized power over these kids. But I have to figure that most people start feeling this way at least a little bit by the time they’re in their mid 30s; there’s a reason for that ‘half your age plus seven’ rule.
Anyway, my point is that 20 is the modal age of US soldiers killed in Afghanistan. I don’t know the age distribution for the other guys, but I doubt it was much older.
That’s what hit me all at once, when I was going through the airport. We sometimes make those “How do you do, fellow kids,” jokes about 25 or 30 year old actors playing high school students, right? But even more often, Hollywood does the same thing with soldiers, in a way that’s far less questioned and far more depraved. Sampling randomly from the cast of Saving Private Ryan, the age of four actors playing the rank of ‘private’ was 28, 28, 30, and 31. A PFC is generally going to be in their first year of military service; a realistic portrayal of these people would put them at 18 or 19 in most cases. We’re systematically lying to ourselves, pretending that the front lines of war are a contest between these powerful, mature warriors. But that’s not what war is.
Jennifer Lawrence was 22 when she played Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games, and Josh Hutcherson was 20. That’s the closest that Hollywood has come to realistically portraying the age of soldiers who fight in modern wars, I think.
It’s not like this message doesn’t already exist in culture here and there. “They were so young” is a steady refrain when people talk about death in combat, in real life and on tv. When Kurt Vonnegut- a veteran of WWII himself- had his narrator write a book about that war in Slaughterhouse Five, he named the fictional text The Children’s Crusade. I may be a little more sensitive to this interpretation than some, but once you hit a certain age and have a certain relationship with these kids, there’s no way not to see. It’s just glaringly obvious. We know what we’re doing, and we know the words for it: child sacrifice.
That’s what war is, once you get past all the bullshit. It’s not only that. It’s a few other things too, some of them practical and in a local sense necessary. But it’s never been other than the large scale and systematic effort to sacrifice our children more effectively than our enemies do. It was the foundation of Feudalism, it was the foundation of the Wars of Religion and the Crusades, it’s the foundation of the Westphalian Nation-State, and unless we’re very, very lucky, it will be the foundation of whatever political order comes next. When we beat the Nazis in WWII, we did so because we managed to kill the Nazis’ kids faster than they managed to kill our kids.
Imagine a story about Fall Blau, a 1942 German offensive, that correctly cast almost all of the attacking Nazi soldiers as teenagers (being composed mostly of 1942’s graduating class). Imagine heroic action sequences in which allied forces- themselves buttressed by the ranks of young people who were still figuring out how to shave correctly- killed these teens by hundreds and thousands, to the sound of triumphant brass soundtracks. Not some 28 year old actor wearing a letter jacket, actual high school seniors. We couldn’t do it. It would be sick, a mockery. Because in our stories, we need to lie. We need ‘soldier’ to be an aspirational thing, a hero to emulate or a villain to fear. Anything but a kid.
I used to think of holidays like Veterans Day as rather unabashed propaganda for cultural militarism, a way to elevate the practice of war and honor those who conduct it. But I’ve since revised that opinion somewhat. Because when the priests pull out their knives, and when the god of war demands more human sacrifices to withhold calamity for another year, you don’t just send your children up the temple steps without ceremony or ritual. You put them in white robes, you give them gold bands to wear on their wrists and around their neck. You throw flower petals along their path. You wrap them in layer after layer after layer of story and meaning and glory, because that’s the only tool you have left to look away, to grab for any reality other than the body of a child crumpled on the floor in front of you.
As someone who’s worked in the Industry, I don’t think this is deliberate pro-war propaganda. We tend to avoid casting real teenagers because, on average, they are less good at acting, and less able to handle other aspects of the job. With under-18s, at least in my country, there’s also awkwardness involving labour laws that I think the army (which I think can still recruit from 16?) is exempt from!
But I still cast real 14-18-year-olds in my production of Romeo and Juliet, because the fact that not-real-teenagers is the norm makes going for realism a strong artistic choice with its own merits, and hell yes I’d like to see someone do this with a war movie. It’d have the same effect of highlighting the senselessness of the deaths and the culpability of the adults in the positions of power.
The people I’ve been staying with have this big book about the history of the A Song of Ice And Fire/Game of Thrones world that I’ve been dipping into a bit, and reading this post caused me to think a little about how subtly horrifying it is when it’ll casually mention some guy being 17 or 16 or even 14 years old at the time of one of the early battles of his career.
Like, people talk about that series being grimdark, often with an implication that it wallows in the ugliness and brutality of the world it depicts (I haven’t read the books or watched the TV show so I can’t say how fair that is), but I feel like what’s really horrifying about that in this sense is there isn’t any dwelling on or even really acknowledgement of the implicit horror of it, it’s just mentioned in passing, in passages like this:
“One such was Dalton Greyjoy, the wild young son of the heir to Pyke and the Iron Islands. Of him, Hake writes, “He loved three things, the sea, his sword, and women.” A fearless child, headstrong and hot-tempered, he is said to have been rowing at five and reaving at ten, sailing with his uncle to the Basilisk Isles to raid the pirate towns for plunder.
By the age of ten-and-four, Dalton Greyjoy had sailed as far as Old Ghis, fought in a dozen actions, and claimed four salt wives. His men loved him (more than can be said for his wives, for he tired of women quickly). His own love was his blade, a Valyrian steel longsword he had taken off a dead corsair and named Nightfall. In his fifteenth year, while fighting in the Stepstones as a sellsail, he saw his uncle slain and avenged his death, but he took a dozen wounds and emerged from the fight drenched head to heel in blood. From that day forth, men called him the Red Kraken.”
Tonally and in context, this passage clearly reads as talking up what a scary bad guy this person was, and his precocious participation in combat is used as a way to communicate and reinforce that. It’s kind of jarring when I take a step back, start to really process the fact that passage is saying this person was a child soldier, and re-examine it while thinking about it in those terms. I’m not sure whether the authors are subtly communicating how normalized this sort of thing is in the world they’re depicting (the book is ostensibly an in-universe document), or if they just didn’t really pause to really think about what they’re depicting in those terms themselves.
