Child soldiers have been getting quite a bit of press lately.  They are in vogue in Sudan.  This is an especially distasteful practice wherein orphans are used as cannon fodder and bait to be soldiers in wars which they cannot understand.  When it hit the press recently I remember thinking that it sounded familiar to me but I couldn’t put my finger on it.  An e-mail from an old friend was a poignant reminder.  The friend was our best man and has remained in our circle.  He sent us an article which was a memoir of the death of his cousin at the hands of child soldiers in Sierra Leone in 1999.  Ahhhh … before it became vogue to report on them.  That’s how I know.

It’s strange to look at this photo.  To see the line of our friend’s jaw and a shared arched brow and glint in his eye, but yet … overall … a stranger’s face.  A stranger who is dead now.  His mother and father in perpetual mourning.  Murdered at the hands of children the age of LightBoy.

What have we come to?