Word: karens
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Like the rest of the soldiers of the 101st Battalion in Komura, Kyaw Lin is tired. A few weeks earlier, he and other men in his squadron waded across the river into Thailand, chasing a battalion of Burmese troops that had slipped across the border to attack the Karen position from the rear. Karen troops battled the Burmese in the Thai village of Wang Kauo; by the time the fighting was over, twelve Karens and 70 Burmese were dead, and the village was a charred ruin. Kyaw Lin remembers stepping over dead bodies, but little else. He likes to keep...
...front line is a classic stalemate, with Burmese and Karen troops separated by only a 30-yd. killing zone of mines, bamboo stakes and barbed wire. Kyaw Lin has been close enough to spot the shovels of Burmese soldiers digging deeper trenches across the way. Ammunition is scarce, and so the Karens rely on mines handcrafted from bamboo and fuse-lighted grenades that are no more sophisticated than the ancient British Grenadier devices that gave them the name. Sometimes the Karens launch the grenades by catapult, stretching thick rubber bands between two stakes like a giant slingshot...
Kyaw Lin hangs out with the other kids at Komura, doing chores and waiting for the orders of Lieut. Brown, 38, a Karen who lost his right leg to a mine ten years ago. His stump is covered by an intricate blue swirl of tattoos. Unable to go out on patrol, he trains the children and the volunteers from nearby villages. Brown insists that the children are not forced to fight, and he says he tries to keep them back. But, he acknowledges reluctantly, sometimes they do go to war. He adds that the children are mostly good fighters...
...Unlike the Afghans, Karens harbor mixed feelings about the use of children in war, vacillating between denial and pride. They revere childhood enough to try to preserve its innocence. A wooden schoolhouse in a village near Manerplaw is a tidy outpost of chalkboards, geography maps and tattered textbooks. Students wear blue-and-white uniforms and recite their lessons in singsong unison. They study math, history, Karen, English and even Burmese, and there is no time for indoctrination or propaganda. The war is only a few miles away, but little of it intrudes into the classroom...
...insists he is 14, and perhaps he is. But his sweet, uncertain face, as well as his dirty undershirt and blue-checked sarong, makes him look no older than eight. He joined after a Karen officer went to his village on a recruiting drive and his parents signed him up. He doesn't have a tattoo because, he says, "I'm afraid of needles." He is homesick but not so awed by his surroundings that he can't dread what lies ahead. "I have to do my military service," he says with a miserable smile, "but I'd rather...