No matter what we think, child soldiers are a brilliantly “effective weapon system,’’ Dallaire writes. Weapon of choice for warlords in some 30 conflicts around the world, mainly in Africa, children are fearless, don’t ask many questions and, thanks to the proliferation of small firearms, can carry and fire guns as well as adults. They can be easily manipulated with drugs and indoctrination, and just seeing them can unnerve opponents. “Child soldiers are a commander’s dream come true: the perfect low-technology, cheap and expendable weapon system, which can perpetuate itself ad infinitum,’’ he writes. To end the use of young combatants, he says, we need to first understand their appeal as a fighting tool to the adults who recruit them.
Dallaire writes from the earnest yet unsentimental perspective of a career military man. A retired lieutenant general in the Canadian army, he saw genocide up close and described it in “Shake Hands With the Devil.’’ Recovering from that experience took “constant therapy and an unrelenting regimen of medication,’’ he writes, and one wonders whether it wasn’t a desire to protect his sanity that kept him in this book from delving much into his own run-ins with child soldiers. After that first searing image, his subsequent descriptions feel a bit clinical and second-hand. About a quarter of this book is, in fact, a novelistic tale of a girl’s induction into an African child army, where adults feed drugs to 10-year-olds and turn them into human minesweepers and sex slaves, ending with the girl’s fatal encounter with a burnt-out peacekeeper who sounds a lot like Dallaire. He draws heavily on published accounts by former child soldiers, particularly Ishmael Beah, who wrote a harrowing war log from Sierra Leone in “A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier’’ and a foreword to this book.
