Word: komura
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Major Than Maung, 54, the reserved and dignified officer in charge at Komura, could not be more insistent. Soldiers are not drafted until the age of 15, he says. When children show up in war zones, most are sent back. But why not send them all back? Pause. "It depends on the situation," he says...
Stress takes its toll on civility. A brutal assault by the Burmese troops that September left 40 Burmese and two Karens dead and made something in Major Than Maung snap. A few days later, a journalist visited Komura and found the major resting quietly in his bunker, surrounded by dozens of skulls mounted on stakes and planted in tidy rows. When a young Karen soldier playfully stuck a cheroot in the grinning teeth of one skull, the major chased him away. Then he grew quiet again and didn't want to be disturbed...
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...
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...
...meet the demand for fresh troops at Komura, the customary three-month training course at the Manerplaw headquarters was speeded up to five weeks last year. On this soggy summer day, more than 100 youths are in training, most of them between ages 16 and 18. But more than a dozen are no older than 14. All are very raw recruits, children of farmers, sent to the army because it is their duty -- and also because the army provides clothes and two meals...