Eight years old. What a great time. I would LOVE to be 8 years old again. Let me go back into the old files of my memory and see what I was doing at the age of 8. I was learning to ride my bike. That was traumatic. I was learning how to swim. I was learning to play the piano, and then traveling back home to dress for my T-ball game. Now that was the life.

No 15-page essays, or projects, or three-hour-long SGA meetings. I have no idea what my T-ball team’s record was because winning and losing didn’t matter, once we got our free Cokes and got patted on the backs by our parents. I might have known that the president was Ronald Reagan, but I didn’t care that he was senile. Life was very good and, most of all, very innocent.

Loung Ung didn’t quite have such happy memories of being 8. Ung, now 30, told her story of growing up in war-torn Cambodia to about 80 students last night. She talked about what it was like to be 8. That year before, her father had been taken by soldiers to “get an oxcart out of the mud.” But her father knew that he was being taken to be executed. His offense? He was an intellectual. The Khmer Rouge communist regime decided that the best way to defend against the revolt was to destroy all those who might be smart enough to talk in opposition. Lawyers, doctors, teachers, students, politicians, people with glasses: all these people were seen as adversaries, and all were annihilated.

That same year Ung’s mother took her by the shoulders and pushed her out the door, telling her that she didn’t want her around anymore. In all actuality, her mom realized that, as Ung said, “If they stayed together, they would die together.” She and her siblings went to an orphanage camp, changed their names, said their parents were dead, and took on new lives. The soldiers recognized her fighting spirit, took her out of the orphanage camp, and started training her as a soldier. Again, she was 8.

They brainwashed her and channeled all of her anger and rage into military training, and they made her a killing machine. For the next 20 years she battled the severe psychological damage inflicted at the hands of the communist regimes. Ung told stories of how she still has to fight the paranoia that everyone around her was out to kill her. She learned to dodge bullets while we were playing war games with water guns. While dying in our games meant falling down, and then getting back up to play again, she was having her friend’s head blown all over her.

In her training camp, the government daily taught them war dances and played songs about “eating the livers of the enemy.” By the age of 9 she had witnessed an execution at such a close proximity that the blood splattered on to her arm. By the next year, she had been shot at. Peers of hers had often been sent to the front lines. Many were used as “de-miners.” To rid an area of mines the Cambodian government sent children into the fields to blow up as many mines as possible. Ten years old, and being sacrificed to a mine field. I think I can speak for all of us when I say, that is not typical.

And now we can all sympathize with her about the Third Indo-China War, which we call the Vietnam conflict. We can praise the United States for rescuing her, and bringing her as a refugee to Vermont. Then we can move on with our lives and think about how “finals are just killing us.” Whoa, stop. We’ve got just a bit more to do. These rapings of children’s childhoods did not end with the end of the Pol Pot’s regime.

The following is a list of places mentioned last night: Cambodia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Uganda, Guatemala, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, the Philippines, Botswana and Columbia. That last one is interesting, because the aid package Congress just voted to send Columbia will be used to kidnap and train child soldiers just like Ung. There are currently 300,000 of these kids-turned-monsters. Their rage comes from a government that does not just kill, but torturously mutilates their parents before their very eyes. They watch their brothers and sisters get smashed against walls. From there, they are given guns and told to go out and kill. Their targets are often unionists, peace and aid workers, or those supporting free governments. As Loung pointed out, wars in the 1800s had casualties that were 90 percent soldiers. In the 1900s, 90 percent of war’s casualties have become civilians. These children are not being sent to fight big bad invasion armies, they are being used for reigns of terror against their own neighbors and friends.

I did not know it. Most of those in the auditorium did not know it. In fact, it is an issue to which the United States people have been largely blind to.

That is why peace organizations across our nation have begun aggressive campaigns to educate people about this horrifying yet extensive plague upon the world’s youth.

If you want to force our leaders to influence world leaders to stop this problem stop by the table in the quad this afternoon. You can also contact Eric Sears or Jen Wylie with Amnesty International to learn what people here at SLU are doing to bring attention to the plight of children like Loung Ung.

We had our childhoods. We are now responsible for giving other children theirs.