Legacy of war lingers as child soldiers grow up

GBNEWS24 DESK//

Back when he was a boy, when he and his twin, Luther, commanded God’s Army, Johnny was renowned for seeing what others could not see.

His soldiers, men hardened from one of the world’s most enduring civil wars, believed that Johnny and Luther Htoo could magically shield them from bullets — child talismans for an oppressed people, the ethnic Karen of Myanmar.

Johnny’s cousin hushed the others in the shack on Thailand’s border with Myanmar. They waited for his words. Johnny, now 32, closed his eyes and eased into sleep.

“Drunk,” whispered Hser Ler El, one of Johnny’s friends and followers. “Always drunk.”

Hundreds of miles away, in the forests of eastern Myanmar, the light from a cheap cellphone shone on Luther Htoo’s bare chest, where a tattoo of the flag of the Karen people covered his heart. Below it was a pucker of scarred skin.

Luther pointed to his eye socket, his knee, his thigh. There were at least 10 bullet wounds on his body, he said.

He lapsed into silence. His eyes were glazed.

“Drunk,” said his girlfriend’s mother, Naw Htay Myint. “He’s always drunk.”

Just before the turn of the century, Luther and Johnny Htoo, then not even 10 years old, took command of a Karen militia hundreds strong that aimed to protect the ethnic group from incursions by the Myanmar army.

The boys were barely taller than their rifles. But their followers, descendants of Baptists converted by US missionaries, worshipped the twins. Each, they said, could use prayer to conjure up a battalion of invisible soldiers sent by God.

The Htoo boys generated worldwide attention when their crusade ended in a storm of bullets. At least 100 of God’s Army’s fighters, some children, were killed in years of battle. Many more lost limbs, livelihoods and their grip on reality.

Two decades later, the Htoo twins’ mystique endures. The boys, now men, are the last connection to a lost home for their followers, who have dispersed across the world, from refugee camps in Thailand to exile communities in places like New Zealand and North Carolina.

The displaced soldiers are part of a global diaspora of refugees that is now the largest in history. At least 100 million people around the world have had to flee their homes over the past decade.

In Myanmar, more than 1 million ethnic minorities, mostly Rohingya Muslims, have been uprooted by conflict since 2016. As Myanmar’s borderlands remain at war, United Nations investigators have accused the nation’s army of acting with genocidal intent against its own people.

After years in exile, Johnny and Luther’s fighters — and even Johnny and Luther — have watched their physical scars heal. Some of their children are now Americans, Swedes and New Zealanders, pledging allegiance to other flags.