Word: burma
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...Afghanistan all boys are urged to fight, even by their parents. Death on the battlefield is not just an honor, it is also the Muslim's guarantee of eternal life. In Burma, where Karen rebels have been fighting for independence for 41 years, combat has become the family business. Northern Ireland is not officially at war, but a state of siege between two religions has made violence the expected. As Alexander Lyons, a Belfast psychologist, dryly says, "It's the children who don't throw stones that are abnormal...
...murders in 1988, 107 of them in South Central, a 43-sq.-mi. stretch of ghetto with a population of 500,000. Though the murder rate does not approach the carnage of Beirut or El Salvador on a per capita basis, it is higher than that of Belfast or Burma. The U.S. Army has begun sending doctors to train in the emergency room of Martin Luther King Jr. General Hospital in Watts, because there they can get 24-hour-a-day experience treating the kind of gunshot wounds normally seen only in battle...
Cops, gang members, shopkeepers and social workers in South Central Los Angeles all describe their community as a "war zone." But from afar, their battle wounds seem self-inflicted. In Third World war zones, combatants have no real alternative to war. For the child soldier in Burma or Afghanistan, there are no Big Brothers or child psychologists laboring to keep them out of harm's way. American inner-city kids, like those of Belfast, do have alternatives to gang shootings and street riots. Those opportunities may seem faint, but society does provide American and Northern Irish children with a semblance...
Ehtablay, the Karen rebel, and Ducc, the Los Angeles gang member, have nothing in common except their age, and the intoxication and empowerment that came when they first fired a gun. Young boys, be they in Burma or Afghanistan or Northern Ireland or Los Angeles, are drawn to the violence; even the fear, when it distills into adrenaline, carries illicit pleasure. What sets Los Angeles apart from Afghanistan, Burma and Northern Ireland is that gang warfare, with its spoils of drug money, gratifies greed. Money in South Central is the gang warrior's jihad -- a fitting retribution for a materialistic...
...battle zones around the globe, kids as young as eight are fighting enemies they do not know, for causes they barely understand. A journey to four places -- Afghanistan, Northern Ireland, Burma and Los Angeles (yes, Los Angeles) -- reveals how quickly a child learns to kill...