For boys, learning comes on battlefield

Hamidullah can expertly fire a rifle, fearlessly attack an enemy trench and deftly bayonet an enemy Taliban fighter.

But the slump-shouldered, freckle-faced 15-year-old, a soldier for the last year in the ragtag army of the Northern Alliance, the foes of Afghanistan’s militant Islamic leaders, cannot read or write. If he must identify himself, he uses his thumb and an inkpad.

He is a soldier in a fighting force of men and boys, many of whom have never spent a day in school. They can’t read directions for the weapons they use. They cannot study the battlefield strategies their commanders lay out for them. They cannot read a map.

Memorizing battle orders is an almost impossible challenge for some boy soldiers who have never sat through classes or learned how to learn. The years of mayhem in Afghanistan robbed them of the barest essentials of an education.

“Some things they just can’t understand. They can’t understand the tactics, the system of fighting,” explained Norallah, 42, a veteran of Afghanistan’s decades of war and civil conflicts. He is an officer in charge of training here at the military base for Commander Hassan, the head of one of many private militias that are part of the Northern Alliance.

A farmer when he is not fighting, Norallah is gentle with his young soldiers, smiling at them as they try to figure out how to put their rifles back together after cleaning them and what exactly they are supposed to do on the marching field.

Because so many of the Northern Alliance soldiers are unschooled, it is not uncommon to see them repeatedly going over basic marching orders and being instructed how to care for their weapons.

In a country where war is not a stranger -- where Afghans fought the Soviets for more than 10 years, and then have fought among themselves for the last 10 years -- most of the boy soldiers know something about weapons from fathers or relatives, many of whom were killed in the years of fighting.

As Norallah also explains, the boy soldiers know quite well what is at stake in the long war between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban, so he rarely has to talk with them about facing death. Indeed, the idea of such a discussion seems strange to him.

“They know that if the Taliban caught them, they would kill them. So they fight,” he said late one afternoon here, after a full day of exercises.

`Not afraid’

Hamidullah shot a rifle for the first time when he was 10 years old. It belonged to an uncle who was a fighter. The uncle eventually was killed in combat.

Hamidullah fought in his first battle with the Taliban several months ago. He said he was “not afraid.” Why, he asked, should he be afraid?

Growing up in a family where war has always been part of life, he said it seemed natural that he would join the army. Asked whether he had ever owned a toy or something special as a youngster, he seemed dumbfounded. Coaxed by his friends, he searched his mind and came up with something: He once had a pigeon.

Standing near him was Sarakhan, who looked nearly as young. Asked his age, he paused, and then stammered that he was 20, which his fellow soldiers found hard to believe. He, too, had never been inside a schoolhouse, and he said that left him with a sad feeling.

“I would like to write a letter. I would like to read a letter, too. I would also like to sign my name,” he said. But he added that schooling did not seem to make sense as long as there was a war in Afghanistan with the Taliban. “Why should I go to school when there is war here?” he asked.

Sadruadin probably asked himself the same question two decades ago when he became a soldier at age 15. He, too, never went to school, but instead went to war at first with the army of the Party of Islam, a radical Islamic faction, and then with other armies.

Years of fighting

All he has known for 20 years is fighting, and it shows.

He is a short, gaunt man with a worn look and scraggly beard, something that sets him apart from the boy soldiers who mostly do not have to shave. He has been wounded four times over the years--twice by bullets and twice by shrapnel. He was married, but his wife died of an illness, and they had no children. Outside of the army, he said, he has had no life.

And he looked forward, he said somewhat eagerly, to doing what he has all his adult life: fighting again one day soon.

“When I fight, I don’t think about killing, and inshallah [God willing] we will be fighting soon.”