Nothin's Worth Killing Someone

All wars, it is said, are fought for the benefit of future generations. This is a story of how those generations are responding. The responses vary, as you would expect. The five war zones represented here are quite different from one another, and the children in each place have their differences as well. Nor do those within a single war zone necessarily react in the same ways to the terrors around them. What all these children do have in common is a fierce will to survive--a will that sometimes takes the form of revenge, and at other times, of an abiding serenity. But no matter how they assert themselves, there is an essential good-heartedness in almost all these children, a generosity of nature that transcends and diminishes anything they have suffered.

The question one asks is: When do these qualities disappear? Assume that the children of our modern wars are like those of any time. Why then does the institution of war continue to do so well? Here are some 30 children from five warring nations, most of them eager to make and keep the peace. If their nations were handed over to them right now, it would be pleasing to think that peace would follow. Of course, nothing will be handed over to them until they are ready, and by that time they will be grown up like us, and changed like us, who supposedly fight for their benefit. For the moment their power is purely potential. So they go about their business--riding bikes, playing ball, dreaming, doing what they are told, and watching with great care all that is being done for them.

BELFAST

Nothin's Worth Killing Someone

Our fathers and ourselves sowed dragon's teeth. Our children know and suffer the armed men. --Stephen Vincent Benet

If you want the full account of Frank Rowe's murder, it will not be provided by Paul. Paul is 13 now, was seven at the time, yet he can still only get so far into the story--to the point where "Daddy, he ran to the back, to the next house"--before he starts crying. He has a woman's face, still dimpled, along with the absolutely blue eyes of most Belfast children, and brown hair parted carelessly down the middle: the sort of face the old masters sought. His school tie hangs cockeyed; it was knotted in a hurry.

"What do you feel about your father's death now?"

His friend Joseph answers for him. Joseph, also 13, has a small, tight head, a high, clear voice, and his ambition is to grow up and join the Provos. "Revenge. That's what you want. Isn't it, Paul?" Paul says nothing.

"I'd want revenge," says Joseph, looking again to Paul.

Paul eventually nods; then says faintly: "Aye. Revenge." As if to make his case forever, Joseph thrusts his face toward the American stranger. "You. You'd take revenge too, wouldn't you, Mister?"

The two boys sit in low plastic chairs beside each other in a classroom of the Stella Maris Secondary School, a brick-and-stucco series of afterthoughts that could pass for a warehouse. Stella Maris is in an unusual position because it is a Roman Catholic school located in a Protestant area, and it holds a special place in modern Belfast history because Bobby Sands is an alumnus. Yet the Stella Maris students make no big thing of their connection to the hunger striker. A couple of boys were once caught playing a game called Bobby Sands, but that's about the extent of it. Ask Stephen and Malachy, both 15, what they think of Sands' decision, and they answer simultaneously, "Brave." "Foolish."

Joseph would undoubtedly say "Brave," and he would probably urge the same answer on Paul. But alone, away from Joseph, Paul is more himself.

"That business about revenge. Is that really what you want?" The boy looks helpless. "No. It doesn't matter who done it. Nothin's worth killing someone."

According to most accounts, Paul is a very odd, timid exception in a city that has become famous for its violent children. In fact, the reverse is true. There are plenty of violent children in Belfast, to be sure: kids who kill time stealing cars for joyrides or lobbing petrol bombs at the army. But they are a small knot of a minority. Most Belfast children are like Paul. They have not all suffered so directly from the Troubles, but their response to the Troubles is similar. They carry no hatred in their hearts, they show a will to survive, and they are exceptionally gentle with grownups and with one another. This seems especially remarkable when one considers the dark, moaning city of their home--the once clanging port that made great ships and sailed them down the Belfast Lough for the world to see. It is now shut tight like a corpse's mouth, its brown terrace houses strung out like teeth full of cavities, gaps and wires.

The wires hold. Belfast is rich in wire, coiled and barbed, and in corrugated iron. (You could make your fortune in corrugated iron here.) Great sheets of it are slabbed up in front of government buildings and on the "peace line" that separates the Catholic Falls Road from the Protestant Shankill. In the centers of the streets are "dragon's teeth"--huge squares of stone arranged in uneven rows to prevent fast getaways. Downtown in the "control zone," no car may be parked unattended. Solitary figures sit like dolls behind the wheels to prove there is no bomb. Armored personnel carriers, called "pigs" by the children, poke their snouts around corners and lurch out to create sudden roadblocks. The Andersonstown police station, like a fly draped in a web, is barely visible behind what looks like a baseball backstop. The fence is slanted inward at the top, to fend off any rockets.

"O' course, there's one place where the Prods and Taigs [Catholics] are at peace." The cabbie grins and points to the Protestant and Catholic cemeteries that abut each other. "Yet space is tight even there. The Catholics is spillin' over on the bogland. If you bury people in that, the coffins will pop out of the ground."

To the children of the city the message is clear: Keep behind your lines; stay with your own people. In effect, the war has caged them. They have limited freedom of movement, little freedom of speech and, in some cases, no freedom of childhood itself.

Bernadette Livingstone, for example, cannot leave the house much these days because her mother has commanded most of her attention since Julie's death. Julie was 14, a year younger than Bernadette when she was killed last May by a plastic bullet fired from a British army Saracen. It happened during a protest demonstration involving mostly women.

"One of the hunger strikers had just died--you know? Francis Hughes, I think it was. Yeah, it was. And Julie and her friend had just come out of a shop. And there was the bangin' of the lids [garbage can lids--a signal of mourning and anger]. Suddenly people started running. And the army Saracens came down the road--you know? Six-wheeler Saracens? And Julie dove. But when her friend tried to pick her up, she couldn't move. She was still conscious on the way to the hospital. But she wasn't all there, like, when we left her. Mommy kept ringing the doctors all night to see how she was. The thing they were afraid of was the blood leakin' into her brain."

Bernadette is a fifth-former in the Cross and Passion Secondary School--all girls--in Andersonstown, a hard-line Catholic area. The school is located next to a brewery, and the sidewalk out front bears burn marks where a car was set afire in a riot. Inside, all is composed and pleasant. Nuns shush the light chatter. The girls swish by in their green-and-yellow uniforms; their heels click on the linoleum. On the wall of the room where Bernadette sits is a Pope John Paul II calendar and a poster with the words GOD IS NEARER TO US THAN WE ARE TO OURSELVES. Bernadette holds her hands clasped below her green-and-yellow tie, except when she brushes a wisp of blond hair away from her eyes. The eyes are at once soft and stubborn.

"My mother will never get over it. She had Julie late in life--you know? My father doesn't express his feelings. I think that's worse. He used to do a bit of singin', but he doesn't sing so much any more--you know?"

You don't know, of course, but this is the way most Belfast kids tell stories. Each statement of fact is turned up at the end like a question. It isn't as if they are asking you anything that requires an answer. The statement carries the assumption that you probably already know what they have been telling you. That she and Julie didn't get along--you know? That Julie was the nervous one. That Julie was the youngest--you know? "Now I'm the youngest."

Like Paul, Bernadette seeks no revenge against the other side, not even the army men who ride the Saracens. She points out that they are not much older than herself. She does have Protestant friends, but it's difficult because of the neighborhood she lives in. The Livingstones are residents of Lenadoon, where Julie's death is memorialized by a white cross on a small green. The neighborhood is loud with graffiti: DON'T LET THEM DIE; TOUTS WILL BE SHOT; and in bold white letters across the jerry-built walls, WELCOME TO PROVOLAND. In a sense the Livingstones are a Provo family, since Bernadette's two older brothers, Patrick, 30, and Martin, 24, are serving time in the H block; one of them is up for murder. But Bernadette has her own politics: "I don't support the I.R.A. because I know what death is."

That is true two ways. Bernadette may be the youngest in her family, but Julie's death has imposed a different sort of death on her. Now her mother clings to her like death, and Bernadette must stay home with her mother and talk with her about Julie, for that is all her mother wishes to talk about. Julie used to write her name on books around the house. "Things like that bring it all back." Bernadette sounds less complaining than amazed when she says, "I can hardly get out--you know?" She has cause to be amazed. In a single shot she has been propelled into adulthood, while her mother, in Bernadette's view, has retreated to the past, and, for the time being at least, has locked her daughter in with her.

"Do you think of Julie yourself?"

"All the time," says Bernadette. "She's everywhere."

Not all Belfast children have been touched by the violence.

Lynn Lundy of Stella Maris smiles and says firmly, "I haven't seen anything, and I don't want to." Yet death is democratic. Eight-year-old Jonathan lives in a big house on the best side of town, and until recently the closest he came to danger was hearing a big boom one night and having a bad dream about it. The major complaint in his stately neighborhood was the stink from the nearby offal factory. Now the complaint is more topical. A few weeks ago, the Rev. Robert Bradford, M.P, was shot to death in a suburban community center not far from where Jonathan lives. Bradford's daughter Claire, 7, is Jonathan's playmate. When the incident was explained, Claire had difficulty comprehending why her father had to go to heaven to talk to people when there are so many people to talk to down here.

What has happened over the long years is that chaos has become normal, and in its normality lies a basic feature of a child's life in Belfast. Alexander Lyons, a Belfast psychiatrist, points out that in a chaotic world, antisocial behavior is acceptable. That is why he finds so little of what might be termed "emotional disturbance," in the clinical sense, among the Belfast children, since, in a way, the whole place is emotionally disturbed. The kids play war games, but there is nothing unique in that. Indeed, their war games are made more normal by the fact that the grownups play them too.

Of course, true insanity is in the works here as well, but it Of course, true insanity is in the works here as well, but it is relatively isolated. Lyons observes that among the competing terrorist groups, the Protestants seem to draw more genuine psychopaths--like the dread Butcher Gang, one of whose leaders was a real butcher, which raided Catholic areas and mutilated its victims--because the Protestant terrorists tend to operate more randomly. By comparison, the murderous insanity of the I.R.A. seems almost normal because of its putative purpose. In such an atmosphere, Lyons is far more impressed by the resilience of the children than by their fears or rampages. A girl who had three limbs blown off by a bomb managed to hold on to her mind and eventually marry. But Lyons stresses that resilience is a short-term effect. "In the long run [his voice is calm and certain] we are raising a generation of bigots."

If that is so, it is hard to see now.

Bigotry is not something that people generally boast about; still, you catch almost none of it in the conversations of these children. A Catholic girl in Stella Maris expressed the deepest sorrow for the pregnant widow of a murdered Protestant policeman. "His baby will never know him." Protestant children display the same feelings. Keith Fletcher is still stunned by the story of his Catholic friend whose father, like Paul's, was murdered in his own hallway. "They walked in, very polite. The mother didn't know what they wanted. She gave them tea. They drank it. When the father came home, they shot him."

Keith and Heather Douglas are both 18, in their final year at Methodist College, one of the largest secondary schools in Belfast, and a life removed from Stella Maris and the Cross and Passion. For one thing, "Methody," as the students know it, is mainly financed by the state and almost wholly Protestant. For another, it is pretty. The front gate opens on a semicircular drive; neat stone urns are filled with flowers; the archways whisper Church of England; and symmetry is mandatory. Across the road sits the great Queen's University, a mere expectation away.

At a long, dark wood table in the headmaster's office, Keith and Heather sit attentively like Ph.D. candidates, each in a navy blue blazer and a blue-and-white tie. Keith's jacket is decorated with three small badges for leadership and achievement. His face seems a work of pure logic. Heather seems a bit less organized, with her huge tinted glasses and infinite black curls.

"You have to really struggle to find the differences between the children," she says. "You can tell by the schools, of course, and by the names--Seamus vs. Oliver and all that, and Long Kesh instead of the Maze. Then there's the H test. Have you heard of that one? I was playin' with some fellas in the park one day, and suddenly one of them stops me and makes me say the alphabet. So I go A, B, C, till I get to H, which I pronounce aich.

That's all right. It means I'm a Prod. But if I had said hatch, I'd have been a Taig." She laughs mockingly. "Still, most of the time it's not the children who are the bigots. It's the parents." She adds that she feels a lot closer to Catholics in Belfast than she does to Protestants in England: "You see, we have shared an experience here--a life."

It is the closeness of the lives that makes the war intense for the children, like a terrible, endless family fight, but it also confuses their feelings. Each side is carefully taught to be suspicious of the other, yet there is an unspoken affinity between the two sides as well, an affinity that does not exist between the Protestant Northern Irish and the English, or even between the Catholics in the north and south. The connections show up in indirect ways. Teen-age girls in Belfast adore the romantic novels of Joan Lingard, especially Across the Barricades ("when Catholic Kevin and Protestant Sadie are old enough for their hitherto un acknowledged attraction to flower into love"). It is not wishful thinking, exactly; Bernadette admits she would never date a Prod, because "nothing could come of it." But the possibility exists, nonetheless--a fact that infuriates the gunmen at the doors.

What the terrorists do to keep the children in line is to use them in their battles, and the children recognize this. Here, as in Lebanon and elsewhere, children are often deliberately placed at the head of demonstrations, marches and funeral processions. Their mere presence gives moral authority to the cause. A booklet under the prosaic title Rubber & Plastic Bullets Kill & Maim contains pictures and stories of child victims; the more brutal the better. Such devices work especially well in Belfast, where everyone gives the impression of knowing everyone else, where people like Paul and Bernadette achieve a dubious celebrity for having had their lives shot out from under them. ut the stories of those two are not nearly as famous as Elizabeth Crawford's. Elizabeth, 16, like Bernadette, goes to Cross and Passion, but even across town in Stella Maris they know all about the Crawfords. A girl in Stella Maris recalled how beautiful Patrick Crawford was--then blushes to think that she is flirting with the dead. Patrick was 15. He was very tall, wore his hair cut short and resembled a policeman. They say that is how he was shot by mistake. Dead too is Elizabeth's grandfather, who was run down by a car in what appeared to be a sectarian killing. And then there was Elizabeth's mother, killed mistakenly in a crossfire between the I.R.A. and the army.

"There were ten of us at the time--seven brothers, two sisters and myself. I can't really remember much about the happenin'. I was seven. My mother was out doin' the shoppin'. I was sittin' in a neighbor's house, and I seen my older sister being brought inside, and seen that she'd been cryin' and all. That was when we found out that Mother had been shot. And everybody kept tellin' us that she was going to be O.K. Then later the doctor came in and he was tryin' to calm us down, and sayin' that she was dead and gone to heaven and all this here. Just before she died, me daddy had been talkin' to her. He was very upset, he was, though he's fairly settled now. When Mother died, we all found it hard to be close to him. He was always thinkin' of her--that's the way we seen it. I don't mean to criticize him. It's just that we were left aside, like, for a while. That was only a matter of weeks. After that we began to get close again."

Elizabeth sits in the Cross and Passion office where Bernadette was sitting. Her voice is quiet, her smile hesitant. Every feature is gentle--the way the long hair waves; the way the lidded eyes give solace. She may have the face of her mother.

"Did they ever find out who did the shooting?"

"The bullets in her body were from the I.R.A. They've got two fellas in jail for it now. My father works with their fathers in the brewery. He's quite friendly with them, actually. He just has pity for the ones who done it."

The man jailed for the killing of her grandfather was a member of the militant Ulster Volunteer Force.

"And Patrick? How was he killed?"

"It was a Catholic fella. They have him locked up too." All three, then, died in different parts of the violence. "When we were younger we couldn't understand it. We didn't know where to turn or who to blame. We asked the adults, and the adults, they all had different views on it.

"I kept askin': Why is all this happenin' to us?"

"Did it shake your belief in God?"

"Not in God. In man."

She goes on about her life; about cooking and cleaning for her father, about the occasional movie she gets to (Friday the 13th--"a good scare") and the occasional book (Across the Barricades). She suddenly seems invested with an ancient image. She is Ireland, this girl; not Northern Ireland, but the whole strange place, that western chip of Europe stuck out in the Atlantic with no natural resources but its poetic mind and a devouring loneliness. In peacetime that loneliness is desolate but beautiful. In time of war it is merely desolate. Here is Elizabeth at the window watching rain. Or Elizabeth shopping for groceries. Or Elizabeth walking home under that tumultuous blue-black sky. Children love to be alone because alone is where they know themselves, and where they dream. But thanks to the war, Elizabeth is alone in a different way. She is not dreaming of what she will be. She looks about her and knows quite well what she will be--what her life and that of her children will be in that dread city. And like many Belfast children, she wants out. "Do you think that you could marry a Protestant boy?"

"If I find one nice enough. [A graceful laugh.] But if I ever did get married, I'd end up emigratin'. I would not want to live here, bringin' my own children up in the Troubles. 'Cause I was hurt. And I wouldn't want that to happen to them."

It is easy to picture Elizabeth as a parent because she seems a parent already. Like Bernadette, she has been rushed into adulthood. Now she must take care of her father as if she were his parent--he who does not like to talk about the Troubles, or about the past, and who seems to have settled, quite justifiably, for a life of determined peace and quiet. He may never change. A grownup parent sees life in stages, knows fairly well when a child will outgrow or overcome this and that. But how does a child-parent know the same about grownups? In a sense, more patience and understanding are asked of these children than of any real parent.

You wonder, in fact, if they begin to love their parents a little less for the multitude of responsibilities imposed on them. Or, for that matter, if they love them less for the danger they all are in. In primitive worlds the high infant mortality rate is said to have inured parents against caring for their children too much. Does the same obtain in places where there is a high parent mortality rate? Perhaps the children begin to withhold some of their love from their parents as a pre-emptive strike against the assassins. It would be reasonable. It would be reasonable too if they loved them less simply for being grownups, for being partly responsible for the weeping in the streets. Yet they seem to love their parents more, not less. They only love them with greater caution. Everything these children touch may explode or disappear.

"Do you think that one side in the Troubles is more right than the other?"

"No," says Elizabeth, "neither is wrong. But they need somethin' to bring them together. I really don't know where fightin' gets anybody. It's only goin' to bring more dead, more sadness to the families."

She is told the story of Paul and Joseph.

"Don't you want revenge?"

"Against whom?" she says.

Like many Belfast children, Elizabeth enjoys getting out to the countryside as often as possible "for a bit of peace." On Sundays the parents of Belfast can put the city at their backs for a while and drive south to the Mournes, where the hill sheep flock like gulls, or north to the coast of Antrim, to stare across at Scotland. You don't see much of the army in the countryside, except around the Maze; and even that place, 13 miles from town, is partly hidden from view by a pasture and a golf course. Otherwise it is all peace and greenery: swans preening on the lake shores; hedges that make quilts of the fields; grass so rich and various you can tell the county by its milk.

What is beautiful is unreal, and what is real is perilous. Yet even in the heart of the city, people work for diversions. The sparkling new Andersons-town Leisure Center won a prize as the best of its kind in the United Kingdom. Bernadette calls it "gorgeous," and 5,000 youngsters a week steam up its three swimming pools. Elizabeth plays "the badminton" there and discos on skates in the Rollerama. Children's carnivals offer another diversion. The Youth Council of Belfast sets up small amusement parks on the weekends. On a Friday evening in September the Beechmount children's carnival begins on a hill overlooking a playing field high above the city. A constable is shot in the back

that night at about the same time, but no one at the carnival has heard of it yet. This is a time for play--for joyriding in the bumper cars or knocking about in the People Mover. The cool air roars with the Beatles' You're Gonna Lose That Girl. Parents force smiles going down the three-story Superslide, while their kids take the thrill in stride. Down on the field, boys kick a soccer ball in what is left of the light.

"Do you come from New York?" asks Sinead Doherty, 15, who wants to be a beautician and sports a fancy hairdo for a start.

"I do."

"Oh, I wouldn't go there. Murders everywhere."

By 8 the sky is black, and the city pops on in a fluorescent amber. It has a noise, this city, like a train or a wail. Tonight the carnival's noise prevails. The place is packed, the faces glowing orange and red in the wild spinning lights. At the giant revolving swing, a man solemnly takes tickets and the children mount the seats in pairs. Slowly the machine turns; slowly the nickelodeon starts up; and the chains that hold the swings grow taut until they parallel the ground. Suddenly the children are on their sides in the air, whirling above Belfast, impelled from the center by centrifugal force.

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