Sharon stood and gave an introduction while the projector blinked a big red NO SIGNAL on the screen. I watched an intern jiggle the connection wires. After a second reset the slide show appeared—“Children in Combat” in 3-D Word Art autofocusing overhead.
“Presenting first is Ana Juri?,” Sharon said. “Ana is a survivor from the Yugoslavian Civil War.” The slide exhibited before-and-after maps of Yugoslavia and its subsequent color-coded divisions. “At age ten, she was also involved in rebel combat missions against Serb paramilitary forces.” A quiet murmur floated across the tables at this. “I’ll let her introduce herself more fully though,” Sharon said, which I took as my cue to stand.
Unsure applause rippled through the room, and I walked to the spot where Sharon had been standing. The auditorium felt much bigger from the front. I pulled the folded index cards from my pocket, but the bullet points now seemed useless. I coughed, and it echoed across the chamber. A memory of my father resurfaced. I had been nervous about performing a solo part in my third-grade Christmas concert. Just sing loud, he had said. If you’re loud, everyone will believe you got it exactly right.
“I’m Ana,” I said. “I’m twenty and in my third year at NYU, studying literature.” There was a time when I would have been afraid of this room, of the dignitaries and their stiff, suited language, but now I felt more weary than scared. I’d grown out of fear like my childhood clothes, and after the initial adrenaline subsided my voice settled.
“There’s no such thing as a child soldier in Croatia,” I declared as the next slide flashed—two teenage girls sporting camouflage and scuff-marked assault rifles. “There is only a child with a gun.” It was a semantic argument, and bullshit at that, and just like in the lecture halls at university they were eating it up.
The girls in the picture were strangers, but they could have just as easily been me. Caught in that void between childhood and puberty, skin still smooth but limbs gawky from growth spurts. Each held a Kalashnikov across her chest. The taller girl had her other arm over the shorter one’s shoulder; they might have been sisters. Both gave half smiles to the camera, as if they remembered from another time that one was supposed to smile in photographs.
Who had taken these pictures, I wondered as I continued on with the speech, recounting our journey home, my parents’ murder, the village I’d gone to after. Certainly not the locals, who wouldn’t find the image notable enough to warrant a photograph. Too early in the war for trauma tourists, who appeared only after the danger was gone. Must have been journalists, a breed of people I still couldn’t understand. Outsiders who claimed the moral high ground, then stood back and snapped photos during encounters with bloodied children.
“Combat was not an option,” I said. “It was just a thing we did to live. A part of home.”
The slides made the girls look foreign—animals captured on safari—but we were far less exotic than that. When I thought of my own weapon I remembered not its existential power but its weight, heavy against my slight frame. The way its strap rubbed a raw spot on my shoulder. The almost ticklish sensation of my stomach absorbing the pulsating mechanical rhythm as I shot from the hip.
We were not like the children of Sierra Leone who, a continent away, were fighting their own battles that same year; we weren’t kidnapped and spoon-fed narcotics until we were numbed enough to kill, though now that it was over I sometimes wished for the excuse. We took no orders, sniped at the JNA from blown-out windows of our own accord, then in the next moment played cards and had footraces. And though I had learned to expel weapons from my everyday thoughts, speaking of them now I felt something I wasn’t expecting—longing. As jarring as the guns were to the pale crowd before me, for many of us they were synonymous with youth, coated in the same lacquer of nostalgia that glosses anyone’s childhood. But I knew no matter how I twisted my words I could never explain that I felt more at ease among those rifles than I did in their New York City skyscraper.