Introduction“At age fifteen, I was more comfortable with an AK-47 or machete than with a pencil,” Charles remembers as he shifts on a three-legged stool in his concrete home in Bujumbura, Burundi. Child soldiering for eight years is hard on the body; he can’t sit for long periods, so we move our interview to the forest to walk and talk in privacy. I am prepared to hear the stories of escaping lifethreatening mobs and isolation. I am not expecting to experience it myself.
Before beginning my PhD work in Burundi, I had studied multiple worlds of healing throughout my medical training, residency, and fellowship. While my master’s degree in public health policy gave conceptual models, it was Zulu healers in South Africa who showed me that knowledge lives in relationships. In post-earthquake Haiti, I saw the strength with which people managed to rebuild.
Through it all, I was struck by the resilience of those who had lost everything. Amid ruins and grief, people somehow pushed through the devastation and quietly rebuilt. It wasn’t just endurance—there was something about the human capacity to reimagine, carry hope, and find calm. I wanted to understand how, after the ground shifts and the world fractures, people still find a way not just to stand but to feel alive.
It doesn’t take a scientist to know that being a child soldier leaves deep scars—depression, anxiety, the weight of trauma that lingers long after the war ends. But I wanted to understand more than just the aftermath. I wanted to see how those whose childhoods had been stolen—some taken as young as ten—made sense of their own histories.
In Sierra Leone and Liberia, I met men and women who as children had been forced to fight, steal, and survive in ways no child should. Many struggled with disconnected relationships, restless nights, and memories that wouldn’t let go. Most people turn off the radio or TV when they hear stories of extreme trauma—they don’t know what to do with the helplessness, and the pain is too close to bear, so they turn away.
I did the opposite. I wanted to hear the stories—not through the lens of pathology but through the survivors’ own words. So I pursued a PhD at the University of Amsterdam and used an ethnographic approach to study intergenerational stress among former child soldiers in Burundi. What does survival look like, not just in the moment but across time and generations? I wanted to understand their past as well as the future they were shaping.
Known for its coffee plantations and lounging hippos by the beach, Burundi is the size of Maryland, bordered by Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In 1993, the assassination of the country’s first democratically elected Hutu president triggered a civil war, a brutal conflict between Hutus and Tutsis. Intensified by the spillover from neighboring Rwanda’s genocide, the war claimed the lives of over three hundred thousand people and displaced more than one million. Though a formal peace treaty was signed in 2001, many small factions simmered. Lasting over a decade, the war continued on with the help of a secret weapon: children.
Around the world, there are an estimated 250,000 children conscripted into the armed forces. While many envision a child soldier as a drugged boy with red eyes slinging an AK-47 over his shoulder, 40 percent of child soldiers are unarmed girls and boys. In addition to working as fighters, these children are used as porters, sex slaves, messengers, and cooks. Why are so many children exploited into soldiering?
In countries with predominantly young populations, armed groups have a steady supply of potential soldiers. Children, still in the early stages of cognitive and moral development, often struggle to grasp the full weight of their actions. Highly impressionable, they are vulnerable to coercion and are often manipulated through fear, false promises, or forced drug use. Their neuroplasticity makes them fast learners, easy to train for the most dangerous assignments. Teens are idealistic with a strong sense of social justice—when an uncle or parent is murdered, revenge pulls them into an armed group; it’s similar to the social calling of gangs around the world.
This was the case for Charles. At ten years old, he fled his village with his parents and uncle after Burundi’s first elected president was killed. “I stayed with strangers, sometimes passing the night in banana trees with nowhere else to go,” he tells me as his eyes gaze past his toddler, who is waddling over sticks beneath her feet.
With the end of war, these former child soldiers were expected to be civilians. Now they were having children of their own. How did they fare as parents? What strengths and struggles, if any, were passed on to the next generation? Did they ever find stability? These were questions I had come across the globe to study, not only for what the answers might tell us about these woeful legacies of war but also for what they might tell us about how all people—those who have experienced the worst humanity has to offer as well as those who suffer more “everyday” hurts—can reclaim their lives.
Copyright © 2026 by Suzan Song, MD, PhD. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
