Fintan O'Toole: 'It was around 6 a.m. when our town was attacked by armed men all dressed in black t-shirts and black jeans. They were in hundreds and some of these men speak foreign languages. Then my father called me and said that now that the rebels are here we should try to leave this town and head for another nearby village.
We set off for the next village and we walked approximately six miles, at that time I was only nine years old. Unfortunately for us very close to this village we met a small group of men and they opened fire on us. In this I lost my dad and mom and I was the only one left. What should I do and where must I go? I know nothing and I cried all night alone in this very dense forest.
"I left about 8 p.m. to continue my journey. I walked for about an hour having nothing to eat or drink, then I suddenly saw a stream. I was drinking, then I was surrounded by tall huge men and the one yelled at me 'What are you doing here you small boy, you're a spy? I'm going to kill you now.' With these words I started trembling, then he said 'Are you going to join us or do you choose to die?', then I say whatever you want to do with me I'm willing.
"I was then taken to their main base in that region and I was tied up for one week eating dry cassava and drinking filthy water. One man who was living in my village and was one of them pleaded that they should let me go. And since that day I became a full child soldier. I was injected with cocaine and then given an AK 47 rifle to carry. I started going to front lines killing people, raping and do all sorts of bad things."
This is part of the testimony of Ulric Quee, a captain in the main rebel army in Sierra Leone, where a large Irish contingent is about to undertake a difficult peace-enforcement mission. It is not at all an unusual story in today's world.
Ulric is one of an estimated 300,000 children on active military service in government or rebel armies.
With the development of light automatic weapons that are easy to carry and simple to operate, kids are increasingly useful in armed conflict. They are easy to bully and brainwash and, with the help of drugs, they can be taught to commit appalling atrocities against civilians.
The problem is immense, and we in the lucky West need to know about it. For Irish troops heading off to Sierra Leone, such knowledge is an immediate and urgent necessity. Yet how typical it is of the weird, distracted state of our culture and our addiction to junk history that a real opportunity to bring home this reality is currently being lost in a fog of ineffectual posturing.
The central event in the life of our continent over the last century is the first World War. It is the great catastrophe that shaped all the others, from the Russian revolution to the rise of the Nazis, from the second World War to the disaster of Yugoslavia. And up from that vile swamp of militarism, butchery and imperial idiocy, a small shard of memory has floated into Irish consciousness. The story of John Condon, the 13-year-old Waterford boy who was the youngest solider to die in the war, has come into focus. It is a story of enormous symbolic power, linking as it does the great trauma of modern Europe with the present-day ordeal of countries like Uganda, Burma and Sierra Leone.
And what happens when Waterford City Council decides to erect a monument to John Condon? On the one side, we get silly rhetoric about commemorating those Waterford men who "did their civic duty" . On the other, we get complaints that the proposed sculpture looks "like a terrible British monument". We get a debate in which the story of John Condon is stripped of meaning, either by a reversion to stale guff about the four green fields or by taking refuge in bland formulae about commemorating all those from the city who died in all wars.
Could we not, for once, lay aside the tiresome retreads of clapped-out tirades, and think about John Condon. A five-foot-three, eight-and-a-half stone kid whose mother and sister died of TB and who joined up to get some money for his family. A frightened boy who died at the second battle of Ypres in May 1915 on a day when "a strange greenish mist crept across from the enemy position, to attack the eyes and throat and burn out the lungs".
A child like Ulric Quee and tens of thousands of others today who had been wrenched out of his childhood and forced to see, and perhaps to do, unspeakable things. If we could grow up enough to make a monument to John Condon that would also be a protest against the abuse of child soldiers we might also be growing up enough to deal with the complexity of our own history.