The Unofficial Hunger Games Companion (30 page)

In the nineteenth century in North America, Native American Cheyenne boys went to war for their tribes at approximately the age of fourteen. But when you consider the atrocities against the Cheyennes—for example, Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and his troops in 1868 killed more than a hundred Cheyenne women and children during the Battle of Washita River—it’s not a stretch to understand why warrior-trained Cheyenne boys would fight back. In 1875, the Cheyennes along with the Sioux and the Lakota killed Custer and many of his soldiers in the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

In the Sudan, Dinka boys received military spears between the ages of sixteen and eighteen.
¹
Fighting has been a constant for the Dinka tribe, and a decade ago, reports estimated that warfare had displaced 4 million people in Sudan and forced another half a million to emigrate to neighboring countries.
²

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the Amazon, girls were inducted into warfare at the age of nine. In fact, the Amazon Dahomeys were an
all-female
group of warriors some 4,000–6,000 strong. Known as the Mino, or Our Mothers, the girls received rigorous training and a robust supply of weapons, including guns, rifles, knives, and clubs. A common means of death by a Mino was decapitation. Many girls enrolled in the Mino by choice, though others were forced into service by their husbands or fathers.

Western societies have also sent their children to war for centuries. In the middle ages, the British military included a lot of boys, and by the late nineteenth century, British institutions systematically recruited them. In 1803, the Duke of York founded the Royal Military Asylum to train boys as soldiers who might be able to lead others in battle. In 1765, Britain created the Royal Hibernium Military School from an orphanage to train twelve-year-old boys to serve as rank-and-file soldiers. In fact, these young Hibernium boys fought for the British during the American Revolution.

In the United States during the Civil War, boys routinely fought and died. Conservative estimates place the number of young boys battling for both the Union and Confederacy at approximately 250,000–420,000.
³
Parents inducted them into service, as did schools. Many of them volunteered. Avery Brown enrolled in the military at the age of eight, lying on the recruitment paper that he was twelve, old enough to serve! Joseph John Clem enrolled at the age of ten, and his weapons of choice were a musket and a gun. Often called the “boys’ war,” the boy soldiers in the Civil War accounted for as much as 20 percent of all recruits.
⁴

Rather than consider it a crime that the boys served in war, the public at large considered their deaths noble; they were admired and respected.

Only in modern times do we see the rising abhorrence by the public of sending children to war. This is, in large part, a reason why The Hunger Games trilogy strikes such a chord with readers. The modern reader thinks,
How can they send these boy and girls into battle? This is inhumane and against everything that’s right!
But in reality, we’ve been doing it forever.

During the industrial revolution, it became more common to think of children as innocent youth who must be educated and protected, isolated from adults, and allowed to enjoy their childhoods for as long as possible. Formal schooling took hold and started replacing apprenticeship as the primary tool of education. Of course, many kids never made it through the formal education process. Many were orphans, many were poor. They were needed in coal mines, on farms, in factories, so they became warriors of another fashion: fighting the industrial revolution rather than a bloodbath war.

And along with the formal education came military disciplinary structure. To this day, military training is considered virtuous, and parents send their sons into the military to teach them discipline and morals and to provide structure to their lives. During the industrial revolution, uniforms and regimentation seeped into the schools, and off the children went to become officers and soldiers.

During World War I, the practice of enlisting boys continued. There were age restrictions, but still, it wasn’t all that uncommon to find young boys fighting alongside men on the front lines.

In modern times, throughout the world, some people still view warrior children as honorable and moral, to be admired and respected.

Killer kids are on the rise because the techniques of global warfare are changing. In 1996, Graça Machel wrote a landmark publication,
Impact of Armed Conflict on Children
,
⁵
for the United Nations about this problem. The widow of Samora Machel, leader of the Mozambique guerrilla war against Portugal and first president of Mozambique, Graça Machel served as a guerrilla fighter in Tanzania and also fought against Portugal. She also served as minister of education for Mozambique and is famous worldwide as the wife of Nelson Mandela. In her report, she states that modern warfare has abandoned all standards of conduct due to the fact that globalization and revolution have decimated traditional societies. The breakdown in what was once normal societal structures has been exacerbated by governmental collapses, internal feuding, financial inequities, and the dissolution of services that are essential to life; among other factors. As everything normal collapses around people, civilians become warriors, and violence escalates. According to Machel, the horrors of modern combat that are now taken as givens include ethnic cleansing, genocide, and the use of children in military combat.

As mentioned above, many children are forced into battle, such as in The Hunger Games trilogy. If they don’t fight, they and/or their families are tortured and sometimes killed. To alienate new recruits, adults force the children to kill family members, neighbors, and friends. According to Amnesty International:

The figures are staggering. According to Peter W. Singer of the Brookings Institution,
before the war in Iraq
:

The United Nations wrote in 2000 that more than fifty countries were actively recruiting children into military service that year, and further, that the youngest known soldiers were only seven years old. Possibly even more grim, in the 1990s according to the United Nations,
2 million children were killed in armed combat; 4 to 5 million were disabled; 12 million were left homeless; and a staggering 10 million were
“
psychologically traumatized
.”
⁸

Unfortunately, the use of killer kids isn’t confined to fictional worlds. What brings it close and up front in the world of The Hunger Games is that we feel the atrocities in a very personal way—from the viewpoint of Katniss. We may be shocked by the real-world statistics, but the impact hits home when we read Katniss’s story.

Let’s look at a few real-world examples of child soldiers. First, there’s the war in Iraq, where children are regularly recruited into military service. Saddam Hussein’s government enlisted and trained thousands of children as young as ten years old. According to Singer:

Remind you of anything, say, the Capitol and its leaders in The Hunger Games? It’s common practice for totalitarian regimes to keep civilians under control by maintaining an environment of constant threat of war. Sure, the Dark Days were seventy-five years ago and well into the past, but to maintain its grip on the population, the government saturates its propaganda with the idea that war could erupt again at any time. In addition, they prohibit districts from communicating with each other. They pit children against each other in the Hunger Games to maintain even tighter control over the people.

But Iraq is just one of hundreds of examples of child soldiers. Another obvious example is the Darfur civil war in Sudan.

According to
The Guardian
in 2008, “Thousands of child refugees from Darfur, some as young as nine, are being abducted and sold to warring militias as child soldiers.”
¹⁰
Further, the report says that “the UN estimated last year that between 7,000 and 10,000 child soldiers had been forcibly recruited in Chad, where more than 250,000 refugees from Darfur are in camps.”
¹¹
As of February 2010, 2.7 million people were homeless due to the war,
¹²
which began in 2003 when the Sudan Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement attacked the Sudanese government for oppressing black Africans in favor of Arabs.

And there’s Rwanda, where unspeakable acts of mass murder were inflicted on the Tutsis by the Hutus. Estimates place the number of murdered civilians—during a one-hundred-day period of attempted genocide—at 800,000. When Hutu Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana was killed after his airplane was shot down, violence spread and escalated throughout Rwanda. Within hours, the Hutus sent killers all over the country to slaughter all Tutsis and any Hutu who didn’t conform to the military mindset.

Were child soldiers involved? Of course. A United Nations study concluded that “Rwanda’s army and government helped recruit fighters, including children, to support the Democratic Republic of Congo’s rebel leader Laurent Nkunda . . .”
¹³

In Sierra Leone, 10,000 children fought during a civil war that lasted ten years. In this case, the Revolutionary United Front was determined to decimate the civilian population so they created havoc and then took over the diamond fields. The government attacked its own people. Most of the civilians were murdered with machetes and knives.

But as mentioned above, despite the grim reality of the situation, children aren’t
always
forced into battle. Quite often, they volunteer for service out of duty to their families, communities, and governments. They believe in the cause.

Consider the Basij, a volunteer army founded by the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1975. People, including children and women, join the Basij for benefits and out of loyalty. The Student Basij is comprised of children who are in middle school and high school. They feel that they are holy martyrs, and during the Iran–Iraq War, tens of thousands of the Basij sacrificed their lives on the battlefield for the cause. Children and teenagers formed a battlefront line that moved constantly toward the enemy forces. As bullets, canons, and land mines mowed them down, more children and teenagers moved forward in additional suicidal lines. According to some reports, the Ayatollah Khomeini once said that “a country with twenty million youths must have twenty million riflemen or a military with twenty million soldiers; such a country will never be destroyed.”
¹⁴
And after the election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005, the government used the Basij to suppress possible rebellion. The same thing was done during the elections in 2009. In December 2009, thousands of middle and high school children fought to suppress student demonstrations—
yes, thousands of child soldiers battled other children on the streets of their own cities
.
¹⁵

How different are the Career Tributes, really, from the Basij and other children dedicated to fighting to the death for spiritual and political reasons? The Careers are volunteers in the Hunger Games, and train “throughout their lives” for the event. According to Katniss, they “project arrogance and brutality” and “head straight for the deadliest-looking weapons” (
The Hunger Games
, 94–95). Just as the Basij fight together, the Careers fight in packs against other tributes in the Games.

Katniss, of course, is not a Career Tribute. She’s forced into the Hunger Games like the Darfur children were forced into battle. She has no choice.

But later, as she hardens to acts of violence and murder, she becomes more of a volunteer. When she accepts the mantle of Mockingjay and leads the rebellion against the evil Capitol, her mindset is more in the mode of the Basij than that of the naïve Katniss we saw in both
The Hunger Games
and
Catching Fire
. By the time she’s in charge of Squad 451, she wants to be on the front lines.

Earlier, during her first Games, she is almost killed by Thresh, but gets out of it by explaining how she sang to Rue as the little girl died (
The Hunger Games
, 288). Poor Thresh is stricken, as most kids would be, with grief over the loss of Rue and also by gratitude to the girl who loved her as a sister. In a tragic error of judgment (for Thresh, certainly not for Katniss), he lets Katniss go out of respect for what she did for Rue. This seems highly unlikely, to be honest, but we can only assume that Thresh holds little value in his own life, that he’s traumatized, and possibly, that he’s not too sharp.