COLUMN ONE : War, Woe Lay Waste to Liberia : Perhaps 150,000 have died in five years of a factional free-for-all so chaotic that much of the bloodshed is carried out by children who have no idea why they are fighting.

The fighters are too weak to win, too strong to be defeated, too maniacal to fathom. So Liberia awakes and greets another day of absurdity: The hope of peace seems as elusive as the war is exhausting in this wrecked nation, America’s beachhead in Africa.

At “Zero Guard Post”--named because to kill is to “zero someone”--on the path from Monrovia to Tubmanburg, boys wait. In T-shirts and ragged beachwear, with Bart Simpson haircuts and watery, drugged eyes, they wag rifles and rocket launchers in the faces of all who venture here and size them up as prey.

They should be in junior high school. Instead, they swagger, scream and call themselves “General” and “Colonel” as they fire in the air and demand money, food and cigarettes--if not your life.

Not far away in the soggy tropical swelter, sullen men--smelling of sweat and stale moonshine--sell containers with a cupful of water at 4 cents a plastic bag. On a good day, they can earn enough to buy two coconuts or refill a flagon of gin.

Hardly more than beggars, they should be back at good jobs in rubber plantations or diamond mines, because Liberia is one of the most blessedly endowed countries of all Africa.

But here in the capital, the hillside Masonic Temple--once the grandest building in the country--rots. Its soaring, Jeffersonian pillars support a dirty shell, scorched from mortar rounds and the fires of refugees’ cook stoves. Chickens and skinny dogs wander the hollow temple with the 100 or so children who call the place school. Using a piece of cooking charcoal, someone wrote the nation’s lament on a temple wall: “Nobody in this world can solve the Liberian crisis.”

Indeed, more than half of all Liberians have been driven from their homes. Perhaps 150,000 have been killed; 80% of the people eat only what relief agencies can provide; their castoff T-shirts come from America’s rag bins. The only buffer against chaos is a peacekeeping force from Nigeria and other African countries--weary soldiers who themselves have taken to war profiteering in the few cities they control.

Thus, Liberia, the country where America’s roots grow deepest in Africa, sits weakened and slumped, awaiting its fate.

Last week, the impatient neighboring countries of West Africa once again forced Liberia’s thugs, goons and warlords--and perhaps among them a statesman or two, who knows?--to the peace table. A cease-fire is holding, more or less, here and there.

“Today, we have no peace and we have no war. We can only hope we have a future,” says Anna Bsaibes, a young mother.

The best that could be hoped for was establishment of a shaky council on which each of the principal “armies” is given a seat along with a civilian representative--an improbable form of reconstructing a nation. But surely better than the alternative.

A dozen peace attempts and 17 cease-fires have vanished behind clouds of gunpowder.

For five destructive years, this has been one of the most senseless of all this continent’s dirty little wars. What started as a revolution against a military dictator has become a bloody alphabet soup of factional madness.

Here, in the rain forests and swamps, on sandy beaches and once-charming city streets with a flavor of America’s South, are all the elements of everything that troubles Africa: tribalism, religious rivalry, malignant ambition, greed and heroes who squandered their country’s trust. It’s all spiced with black magic, perpetuated by children carrying AK-47s and handfuls of amphetamines, and a degree of treachery that defies reason.

All, of course, in the name of democracy.

There is the NPLF, LPC, LDF and ULIMO, both the K and J factions. The peacekeepers are called ECOMOG. Throw all the letters together, and they spell . . . little more than MESS.

“Everyone wants to be president of Liberia. They want to live in the palace, have the car and driver and gasoline allotment. That’s what this is all about,” says Liberian journalist James Dorbor Sr.

Liberia was settled by 16,400 former slaves from America and became a republic in 1847. Its red-white-and-blue flag has the stripes of the U. S. A. and a single star. For 133 years, these slaves and their descendants, Americo-Liberians as they are called, nurtured a ruling elite through a political party they called the True Whigs. They held lavish receptions at the Masonic Temple and dressed in white to attend Sunday services at Baptist churches in suburbs with names like Virginia and Buchanan.

Then, in 1980, army Master Sgt. Samuel K. Doe led a military coup, assassinated President William R. Tolbert Jr. and seized the country. A decade later, ethnic and political insurrection against Doe raged across the countryside into Monrovia. A U.S. naval force evacuated Westerners. Doe was assassinated after a battle that destroyed much of the city, and grainy videotapes of his torture can be bought in the black markets here.

Liberia has not known peace since.

For three years, there has been no running water in Monrovia. Electricity is generated for a few days every few months. Civil servants are paid the equivalent of 25 cents a month, and their checks often come late. But they are lucky, because 75% of the city is unemployed, and some are reduced to living in shell craters.

All the while, the onetime rebels disintegrate into smaller, more quarrelsome factions, recruiting from the ranks of village children--boys and girls as young as 8 are brought under arms and left to support themselves by preying on each other and anyone hapless enough to venture into the countryside.

They are subjected to juju rituals by sorcerers who promise them protection against bullets, and they are given “yellow tablets” by their commanders, who promise the amphetamines will make them brave.

So scary are these ragtag bush gangs that the United Nations has withdrawn its military observers from the outlands. Most relief organizations and missionaries have left too. And with them have gone the refugees.

This city of 400,000 now holds perhaps 1.2 million people, all huddled behind the shield of 13,000 soldiers of Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, Sierra Leone and elsewhere.

“This is not a war like other wars. It’s not a war being fought for ideology. It’s about revenge, it’s about children who are promised money or an education to fight,” says Esther L. Guluma of UNICEF.

This also is not a conventional war in its brutality.

“More than half the people fighting today are children,” says Thomas M. Teague, director of the Liberian Children’s Assistance Program and an expert in underage soldiers. “A man has to think about what he does. But a child has nothing to hold him back. . . . They smell blood and they want to kill.”

On a deserted road an hour from Monrovia, past five roadblocks of teen-agers, a Japanese compact car screeches to a halt. Eight men emerge, all but one looking to be no older than 20. A bucktoothed youth in Ray-Ban sunglasses and a shocking yellow dashiki steps forward and introduces himself as regional field commander of the rebel forces, Charles Dent, a. k. a. “Gen. Snake.” And with him are three other generals and sundry colonels. They look like a wayward rock ‘n’ roll band.

“Yes, we have children, and they want to go back to school,” says Sub-Gen. A. C. Garlo, “But a child who has nobody? Definitely he will look at me as his mother and father.”

Powerful drugs and the belief in the invincibility of black magic supplied to teen-agers along with guns and grenades--”that’s a very serious combination,” says Anthony Hubbard, a child rehabilitation counselor in Monrovia.

Witnesses tell of roadblocks where human heads are displayed on sharpened pikes. And the stories grow worse as they make the rounds--like the evisceration of pregnant women to settle drunken bets among young soldiers whether the fetus is male or female. No matter if true, Liberians believe these accounts and many others about their children and fear them accordingly.

In Tubmanburg, a group of young warriors finally had enough. They surrendered over Christmas to Nigerian peacekeepers. Among them was Sam Doke Jr., 19, son of a prominent Liberian politician. The boy started fighting at age 15. And he loved it. The mortars and machine guns, he said, “sounded like reggae music. . . . I had to keep fighting.”

When he was separated from his faction loyal to warlord Charles Taylor, he found himself in the territory held by another warlord, Roosevelt Johnson. So he fought on with Johnson against Taylor.

How could he so easily change sides? “I don’t understand your question,” he replies, as if to say: Haven’t you learned that this war is not about sides or reasons but about fighting?

For some of privilege, the fighting is about money.

At Monrovia’s Free Port, which once boasted that it was home to the largest flagged fleet of merchant ships in the world, a longtime worker guides a furtive tour. On a suburban street, he points to an open warehouse where container trucks are being filled with raw rubber. At another, workers and piles of rubber await the arrival of trucks.

A port official points to more than 50 containers on the docks that he also says are full of raw rubber--1,000 tons of it.

The Firestone and Goodrich plantations were closed down during the war. But now, factional leaders have moved in and are tapping trees. The rubber is transported into Monrovia at the going rate of $300 a ton, the source said, then sold to foreign brokers with the presumed cooperation of corrupt officers of the African peacekeeping force. The story was corroborated by another port official and a reliable non-Liberian source. They added that some Liberian officials also are getting a share of the looted and illegal trade.

Despite the money to be made and the children willing to do battle, the Liberian war may be reaching a watershed. Military experts say it should be evident to all faction leaders that none is strong enough to push on to complete victory. Last month, Monrovians rioted in the streets to protest foot-dragging at the peace talks.

“This is a very critical year for Liberia,” says Kenyan Maj. Gen. Daniel Opande, head of U.N. military observers here. “If 1995 does not augur well for peace in Liberia--if they cannot install an interim government--then perhaps the international community may want to say, ‘Enough is enough.’ If peace does not work this time, it may take a long while.”