Johnny B. Bad -or- Allen Webb, Why Do You Assign Books That Make My Soul Hurt?

Well, in the first ten pages of Johnny Mad Dog we are introduced to a character who can only achieve orgasm after watching the twitching naked buttocks of women whose eyes he has just rubbed with ground red pepper. And the charming rogue General Giap isn't alone. This book is full of children living adult lives, committing adult atrocities, and being saddled with adult responsibility. In class, I compared the child soldiers in the film Blood Diamond to Lampwick and the others who turn into donkeys in Pinocchio. The characters in Johnny Mad Dog are no different. I may not have offered such a glib analogy if I had already read Johnny Mad Dog; Lampwick never raped a television news anchor.

How can this happen? How do humans to this to others? It is not merely an African phenomenon, of course. During the Battle of Berlin in 1945, children represented a large proportion of the German defense against the Russians. Often, they fought remarkably fiercely; having known no other way of life, their allegiance to the Fuhrer and the Reich was absolute. In our own country, a fifteen year old boy named John Cook won the Medal of Honor for his actions at the Battle of Antietam during the Civil War. War touches everyone in society; its scope can never be restricted to an "appropriate" population.