Author: David Smith

I remember the most shocking fact about his stories was his calm demeanour while he told them. His soft-spoken voice contrasted with the atrocities he described, such as the murder of his uncle. The man’s matter-of-fact descriptions of the dynamics of the conflict seemed both horrific and endlessly complex. But the reality that much of the fighting was carried out by children — and one of them was now standing before me as an adult — was what really got inside my head. I remember driving away at the end of pre-deployment training wondering if I would speak as calmly as that man after witnessing the world he came from.