One time I heard something and I was like “wow, that’s crazy,”  and I still have to think about it pretty often. I was at West Point for their summer program and you could choose classes to attend over the week. I wanted to take physics, mechanical engineering, and electrical engineering, but instead they gave me mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and English. It turned out alright in the end because they let me hold a rocket launcher, so I’ll call it even. 

I thought that we were going to talk about a poem or something in that English class, and I was really not looking forward to it. But, it turned out that it was more about ethics than literature or grammar, so English was a bit of a misnomer. We had to answer and ask a lot of questions to each other about stuff like why we wanted to go to West Point and why we wanted to serve. Between you and I, some of them had horrible reasons, not limited to “because it’s free,” and “my dad made me come here.” After that, we went to lunch, which was decent, and when we came back the teacher changed the topic to more about the ethics of war. 

We watched an interview from a German World War I vet talking about dehumanizing the French, and a documentary about a Navy SEAL who beat war crime charges, but it totally looks like he did it. After that, he posed a very interesting dilemma. He made two true statements, followed by an assertion: The use of child soldiers is morally evil. Summer Leaders Experience is meant to convince people under the age of 18 to join the US Army. Summer Leaders Experience is morally evil. We talked about it for a while and I was like, “word,” because those are true, which means the third one is true. Maybe? Eventually the teacher was like, “now, we know that this assertion isn’t actually true.” But like, do we? I don’t think that Summer Leaders Experience is evil, and I understand that there’s a lot of nuance, but those two situations seem very comparable. Even now, I struggle to see a huge, kind of absolute difference. 

I know there are obviously differences between US Army recruiting and actual child soldiers fighting in third world conflicts, but it seems very similar. Also, of course young people are going to be used to fight wars. That’s just how war’s been done for hundreds of thousands of years. I don’t think it’s bad that the Army is targeting high school graduating classes because that’s like who you want to do your fighting. I’ve heard a lot about teenagers also being really easy to shape like that’s a bad thing, but I think that’s probably pretty important for a soldier. Obviously it’s going to be easier to condition an 18 year old to kill than a 30 year old. 

The best reasoning I can think of for it being okay is the amount of preparation that West Point and the Army in general put into their soldiers. Yeah, they want impressionable and physically prime soldiers, but they don’t just send them out there. West Point is a four year college where you take regular college classes, but also classes in military science. During the summer they spend large amounts of money training you and making sure you know how to not die. The US Army also gives enlisted soldiers training that’s probably more intensive than your average child soldier. They’re trained to do their jobs, and if they do have a combat role they get a lot of specialized training. My impression is that the average child soldier's deal is, “hey 12 year old, take this rifle and kill people for me or I’ll kill you.”

That’s also a pretty big difference, but not really when you think about it. The US Army is a volunteer force. So even though they are recruiting people when they’re under 18, those people all chose to be there. But then that gets muddied because it’s stupid that a 17 year old can’t drink or smoke or vote, but then it’s like, “oh you want to die in a foreign war, well hell yeah young man!” This is also further complicated by the fact that sometimes the US Army isn’t an all volunteer force because of conscription. So we can get to a point where we’re yanking high schoolers out of class and into World Wars and Vietnam but that’s still totally more moral and not at all comparable to child soldiers? I don’t entirely get it. 

I’m not troubled by it, because I don’t think the US Army wanting to be selective about their officer corps is evil, so it didn’t worry me, but I’m upset about it in the way that you might be upset about a crossword puzzle that you don’t understand. I don’t know, I don’t think the Army recruiting teens is bad but that was a really interesting parallel.