Andre: I can see what you are thinking. But we need every man we can get.
Yuri: Even if they're not men?
Andre: A bullet from a 14-year-old is just as effective as one from a 40-year-old. Often more effective.
Yuri: Even if they're not men?
Andre: A bullet from a 14-year-old is just as effective as one from a 40-year-old. Often more effective.
They depend on us to defend them, but either we're forcing them to defend us or they're all alone and forced to defend themselves in the face of imminent danger. Sometimes they have a talent to help them get through the war, which unfortunately may be the reason they were drafted to begin with, but often it's just tough luck. While the notion of innocent childhood dates to the early modern era (thank the Victorians and their contemporaries), even the ancients felt fairly queasy about the idea — and with good reason: warfare screws with kids' heads, and they're rarely good for much else afterwards. Since the use of child soldiers forces the enemy to gun down children in self-defense, it's a very strong contender for the most morally reprehensible war crime in existence. On a somewhat lighter side, there are also many stories, in fiction and real life, concerning boys (and girls) who lied about their ages in order to serve their country in its hour of need — but those are only slightly under age, much more mature psychologically.
This trope is great for an angsty backstory while at the same time excusing Improbable Age with prior experience. A staple of the shows which focus on violence but broadcast to kids, such as the more serious Mecha Shows. It's a good way to avoid Children Are Innocent, particularly if a kid creepily sees it as a game, but sometimes the loss of innocence is played for as much drama as can be.
In fiction, this also has the convenience of explaining why Persons of Mass Destruction are obeying their weaker bosses and not running things, or at least not demanding wages and better job conditions. It simply doesn't occur to them; and even if they do rebel, they don't know how to do it properly.
This trope blends imperceptibly with New Meat. Since even legal adults can be teenagers, old soldiers in particular may regard them as no more than children.
This trope is Truth in Television; many armies in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa have underaged troops, and some Western nations begin recruiting soldiers at the age of 16 (these recruits are generally prohibited from being deployed to combat zones, although incidents where they have been deployed there have occurred). Researchers have shown that even if these underage soldiers are not deployed to combat zones, they suffer from a higher risk of attempted suicide or mental issues.
Child soldiers in fiction can be divided into two types: those who fight and kill humans, and those who don't either because they fight a nonhuman entity (Strike Witches, Stellvia of the Universe) or avoid lethal means (Lyrical Nanoha). The former usually carry a heavy trauma, while the latter tend to avoid it. An even more significant dividing factor tends to be how often and how horribly they and their comrades are depicted as dying themselves.
Some Super Soldiers probably started out early enough to be counted as this. The Tyke-Bomb (of all varieties) is what happens when this trope backfires.
Compare Little Miss Badass, Creepy Child, Cute Bruiser, Enfante Terrible, Kid Samurai, New Meat, Young Gun, Recruit Teenagers with Attitude, and Teens Are Monsters. The Shell-Shocked Veteran may actually be a high-school senior. If you find yourself deploying child soldiers in your war, you may have been reduced to Lowered Recruiting Standards. Can be the backstory of a Lethal Kid Hero.
Contrast Falling into the Cockpit, which usually implies no former military experience. See Plucky Middie for the naval version. See also Raised by Orcs for cultures that use their enemies' children this way.
If only children get to be soldiers, then you have a Competence Zone on your hands. If it's because they're the only ones left, then you have a Teenage Wasteland on your hands.
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Examples of Precociously Talented Type:
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Advertising
- One of the shorts
made by Fil-Cartoons for UNICEF's Cartoons on Children's Rights has the kids being forced to partake in an ongoing war. The name of the short is also the name of this trope.
Arts
- Liberty Leading the People: A young boy dual-wielding pistols is part of The French Revolution.
Mythology & Religion
- Classical Mythology:
- Achilles was trained as a soldier from childhood, and started going to war as a youth. By his teens, he was famous enough for his skills that he was sought for during the start of the Trojan War. A lot of Achilles' actions from The Iliad are more understandable if you know that he has been at war since before he even became an adult.
- Heracles was also trained to fight from childhood. Exaggerated with the fact that he committed his first kill as a baby.
- Celtic Mythology: Cuchulain achieved many martial feats while still in his youth, when he still went by birth name, Setana.
Podcasts
- The Drunk and The Ugly: In Mrs. Friedas, the cherub project genetically engineered Nele and his siblings to be super-powered soldiers.
- Welcome to Night Vale has 13-year-old Tamika Flynn, leading a child militia against Strex Corp. She's already a veteran at this, having taking down the librarians at twelve.
Tamika: We do not look around. We do not look inside. We do not sleep. Our god is not a smiling god, and we are ready for this war.
Tabletop Games
- BattleTech:
- Major character from the Clan Wars Shin Yodama was planting mines in the earlier war of 3039 at the tender age of 14.
- Cassiopeia Suthorn was pressed into a Liao penal battalion at age 16. House Liao being what it is, this is apparently commonplace, equal parts desperation and pragmatism. The difference is that Cassie proves to be profoundly gifted in the art of attacking and destroying Battlemechs on foot and goes on to score her first 'Mech kill at the same age most people learn to drive.
- It's often not called attention to, but the Clans hold their trainees first Trial of Position (to see whether they become warriors or not) at the age of 16-18 (depending on the Clan). Depending on their performance they may rank up straight to Star Captain and be put in charge of their own force.
- The premise of Bliss Stage is that the only people left who can fight the Alien Invasion are teenagers.
- In the d20 Modern Sourcebook D20 Apocalypse, kids as young as 12 can be adventurers (explorers, scavengers, and other people who constantly brave the post apocalypse world). While they are not soldiers, given how hostile the post apocalypse world is, they might as well be. And the minimum age for law enforcement (vigilante, town militia...) is 15. Justified by the post apocalyptic setting, where people have to learn fast or die at the hand of raiders/mutated monsters/other.
- This crops up in Psionics: The Next Stage in Human Evolution. Psionic powers often manifest in adolescence and young adulthood, but can occur in childhood. Just because you’re 7, it doesn’t mean you’re too young to join, be press-ganged, or sold into a conspiracy.
- Warhammer:
- Dark Elves begin training the moment they are strong enough to pick up a sword or spear.
- All Bretonian knights start off as a Knight Errant. Once the young knights have proven their worth in the field of battle, they are knighted and receive a small plot of land to rule. Given to the nature of Bretonnia to that of Medieval Feudal Europe, it is assumable the Knights Errant are actually young boys ages 13 to 17. Needless to say, they die a lot.
- Warhammer 40,000:
- The citizens of the planet Cadia are trained from birth for combat, mainly because their planet is parked right outside a Negative Space Wedgie that leads straight to hell, and frequently spews forth the Legions of Hell. The birth rate and recruitment rate is the same thing. Their soldiers enter combat as part of the youth army, the "Whiteshields," at age 13. They only get promoted to the full army by earning a medal. And they are badass. A common saying is that any Cadian who can't field-strip his own lasgun by the age of ten was born on the wrong planet.
- Catachans' homeworld is basically "if Australia was a jungle" in terms of Everything Trying to Kill You, and three quarters of the children don't even make it to adulthood. Those who do? The Catachan Devils are armies made entirely of Ramboes if they'd been cast in Predator.
- Stormtroopers, Commissars and Sisters of Battle are trained in military orphanages from very early age. While they usually don't see combat until graduation, their training includes shooting at live targets, usually at convicts.
- Space Marines, due to the requirements of their implants, are inducted into the chapter at around the onset of puberty, and the entry requirements make sure they must be well-versed in the act of war before they're even considered. Their transformation into full-fledged Space Marines isn't complete by the time they're seeing battle as part of the chapter's Scout Company. That said, said Scouts are usually in their early thirties by then.
- As in so many other things, Space Wolves are the exception. They take in valorous young men on the brink of death, usually in their twenties (leading the population of their planet Fenris to see their order as a Warrior Heaven in itself, but that is neither here nor there). Although we're never given figures on the success rate, the wisdom of this is uncertain; when Leman Russ was found by the Emperor, his associates all volunteered to become Space Marines, and over half died from implant rejection. On the other hand, few of them were young in any way, and several were downright elderly.
Visual Novels
- Spirits are raised from birth to be soldiers in Aselia the Eternal - The Spirit of Eternity Sword. Birth doesn't appear to start at infancy for them, however.
- Mukuro Ikusaba in Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc ran away from home to join a PMC at the age of 12 and spent the next three years going from battlefield to battlefield without sustaining a single injury, earning her the title of "Ultimate Soldier".
Web Animation
- RWBY:
- Most Huntsmen go through years of combat training beginning in prep schools that feed into the four elite Huntsman Academies. The entrance age for the Academies is 17 years old, although this can be waived for exceptionally talented individuals like Ruby, who is pushed ahead by two years and enters Beacon Academy at the age of 15. The Academies are four-year courses, leading to them graduating into the dangerous career in adulthood. However, after the Big Bad attacks Beacon Academy in Volume 3, the heroes decide to travel Remnant, seeking to learn more about the villains. This puts them into the role of Huntsmen while still children, years before they're meant to graduate. Once they reach Atlas, General Ironwood honours their precociousness by granting them their full Huntsman licenses, despite most of the heroes only being 19 and Ruby 17.
- Oscar is a Farm Boy who thinks he's pretty ordinary until he learns he's The Chosen One at the age of 14. This forces him to travel to Mistral and join up with the heroes to fight the villains. He's forced to learn how to fight on the road, although his prodigious talent and unique circumstances means he develops his skills unnaturally fast. Being two years younger than Ruby means he's the baby of the bunch. As the current host of the reincarnating warrior-wizard Ozma and Salem's eternal nemesis, Oscar has inherited a divine mission to save the world, but his lack of prior training and Oz being so traumatised and exhausted from millennia fighting an Invincible Villain means that the leader of the opposition to Salem is actually Ruby.
- Atlas Academy pressurises its students to join the kingdom's military as Special Operatives once they graduate, creating elite, officer-level super-soldiers. When Salem unleashes her army on Altas in Volume 8 and breaches the defences, a war of attrition begins that forces Ironwood to put the academy students on the front lines of battle. In Volume 2, Ironwood asked Ozpin if he thought his kids could fight a war as a way of criticising him; however, beyond Ironwood's hearing, Ozpin confessed he was hoping the kids would never have to fight a war, while Ironwood drafts the kids to war in Volume 8 without a second thought.
Webcomics
- Karcharoth of 'Cry 'Havoc' was conscripted at the age of six, and has been fighting in one army or another for fifteen years. Understandably he has a rather distorted view of life. He was recruited due to his minor, but growing, psychic powers.
- Benjamin Soderer in Lost Cause joins the Confederate Army at 16-years-old, thinking it will prove his own bravery at such a young age. However, it only proves how unready he is to face the Hells of war.
- Cloud's mother in Sandra and Woo, Ye Thuza Williams, was a child soldier in Burma. As a result, she tends to teach her children how to employ violence as necessary with mixed results.
- In Stand Still, Stay Silent, the army age recruitment standards seem to have greatly dropped:
- First are the Hotakainens, who moved to Keuruu military base and joined the army eleven years before the start of the story. At the time, eldest Onni would have had to be sixteen, his younger sister Tuuri ten and their cousin Lalli eight.
- A flashback involving Lalli confirms he was already scouting a horribly mutated Plague Zombie ridden wilderness at night at thirteen. The flashback relates an incident during which Lalli improperly filling out an anonymous scout report caused another group of soldiers to venture into a dangerous area and four of them to get killed, which the doctor considers a low number given the attack's violence. Looking at the report causes some authority figure to decide that "all scouts younger than fifteen" are getting a lecture on proper report filling. A 15-year-old Tuuri is seen among the desk workers.
- The Cleansers, a Demolitions Expert unit working with high grade explosives, has two fine print elements on their recruitment poster: one telling people they need to be at least thirteen to join, the other saying that joining voids all life insurance. It can be seen here.
- All of the superheros and supervillans in Strong Female Protagonist received their powers at 14 and have been fighting each other or for their government for most of their teenage years. The main character is a retired super-heroine who is struggling to find ways to solve the world's problems without resorting to the violence of her formative years.
- The title character in Terinu was raised by Space Pirate Mavra Chan to be an assassin, starting at the tender age of nine. His best friend Matt was sold by his own father to Chan to serve as a cook's mate on the same ship at the age of eleven. It's a sufficiently Crapsack World that in Matt's case this was distinct improvement over his previous situation.
- Unsounded: the Platinum caste of Alderode has an exceptionally strong connection to the Background Magic Field and only live to age 30 or so, so preteen Child Mage divisions are common in the Aldish army. Official dogma is that they're exceptionally holy and are on their final Reincarnation before rejoining the Gods; the nastier unspoken attitude is that they're more expendable than the longer-lived castes.
Web Originals
- Sirene from Open Blue is a highly militarised country that drafts children as young as 12 for a four-year service, with the exception of children qualified for technical schooling instead. Not even royals are exempt.
- Pirates SMP:
- It's stated that pirates have to be aged 15 and up to be able to join a faction. While most of the cast are ostensibly adults by the time the series takes place — the youngest with a confirmed age being Kuervo at age 19, a handful of characters (usually legacy pirates themselves) either joined up very close to (if not outright at) the lower limit or were straight-up raised into piracy and trained from a young age.
- Even then, Kuervo himself plays the example straighter than usual, being an established soldier in the Nayan Armada at age 16 years before the events of the SMP, and is shown to be a very good shot with a handgun. He ends up deserting after being caught committing mass Tyrannicide and sent on the run, culminating into his arrival on the Faction Isles.
- The youngest Protectors of the Plot Continuum are about 13 years old when they start in the field. The youngest agent ever, Ella Darcy, was ten when she joined, but she wasn't a field agent.
Western Animation
- Played for Laughs in American Dad! when Stan gives Steve an AK-47 for Christmas despite promising Francine he wouldn't (he got around it by wishing Steve a "Merry Wednesday" instead). Steve is uncertain at first, then states that if "coked out child soldiers in the Congo can do it", he can, too. Unfortunately, it leads to him accidentally killing Santa, who comes back to life and swears a blood oath against the Smiths, forcing them to spend Christmas Eve fighting for their lives. Despite having sworn off guns after shooting Santa, he picks it back up during Santa's attack, and immediately turns out to be almost as good as his CIA agent father.
- The plot of Avatar: The Last Airbender? A group of kids and teenagers take down the Fire Nation army. Many of the main antagonists (though not the Big Bad) are also teenagers, who are part of Fire Nation's army. At least the good guys didn't draft the gang, and them having to fight the Fire Nation was more about the circumstances.
- In Ben 10: Omniverse, the Amalgam Kids that first showed up in Alien Force are revealed to be products of experimentation by a rogue branch of Plumbers called The Rooters, and were created for the purpose of destroying Ben, then inflicted with Laser-Guided Amnesia when their attempt to take him out failed.
- Codename: Kids Next Door: the KND are a global organisation with, amongst other things: a moonbase, orbital cannons, spaceships, military vehicles, Humongous Mecha, lasers, a giant flying convention center and huge "hidden" bases that recruit kids at around 5- to 7-years-old, train them and kick them out when they're thirteen, wiping their memory just in case they go rogue. They are an army of child soldiers. The only reason this isn't presented as horrifying at all is because they are every bit as childish as non-members (if not more). Executing a huge, global operation to fill in the Grand Canyon as a giant cereal bowl, anyone?
- Dutch's younger brother Dar in Motorcity, who works for Kane Co. He looks up to and respects Abraham Kane. He pretty goes through the same experience Mike did in "Vendetta".
- Alien broccoli have invaded Townsville, so The Powerpuff Girls, led by Blossom, install an army of children to fight the alien menace — by eating them (episode "Beat Your Greens").
- Phineas and Ferb: Star Wars parodies the Star Wars examples by having a teenaged Stormtrooper leading a troop of two pre-teens (Candice, Buford and Bajit, although they're not actually put into combat, instead being ordered to buy Darth Vader new socks), and a squadron of pre-teen rebel pilots (the Firestar Girls). Lampshaded by Gretchen:
Gretchen: And to be perfectly honest, Isabella, we're kids. We are actual children and they're letting us fly fighters. That's how hopeless this situation actually is.
- The Daughters of Aku from Samurai Jack absolutely qualify, having been trained from toddlerhood to be extremely capable fighters and ruthless assassins. At the age of 17 to 18, approximately, they are definitely very precocious, and the nature of their training puts them squarely in the middle of "just plain tragic" as well. Being the literal Daughters of Aku does much to explain their precociousness.
- Star Wars Rebels has Ezra Bridger, who joins the crew at age fourteen, and Sabine Wren, who is already with the crew at sixteen. Ezra's Force-Sensitive and thus a target for Inquisitors, and since he was raised on the streets since age seven he's already used to violence. Sabine is a Child Prodigy who fled from an Imperial weapons program as well as Mandalorian who was working as a bounty hunter even before the crew picked her up.
- Star Wars: The Clone Wars:
- Jedi Padawans such as Ahsoka Tano could very much be considered this. Ahsoka is only fourteen at the beginning of the series and yet leads troops into battle and gets into the thick of the fighting herself. Their talent with the Force and training from childhood makes even the Padawans very deadly warriors. However, Ahsoka is an outlier as she was a Teen Genius while the majority of Padawans enter the field in their late teens or early adulthood.
- When Kamino comes under attack, the clone cadets take up arms to defend their home. Thanks to their accelerated growth, they're about half as young as they look. (This also means the mature clone soldiers are actually only about 10-years-old.)
- Episode 8 of Sym-Bionic Titan had The Academy on Galaluna, a military training facility which starts training future soldiers as children. To be fair, however, it is partially Truth In Television: most of them are teenagers, and military schools do exist for such ages. However, they also showed a row of children who looked even shorter, and, presumably, younger than Lance and Arthur — who were already small and really young-looking to begin with.
- Similar to above, the Teen Titans (2003). In the comics most of them eventually grow up quickly enough to avert this for most people, but the main gang in the cartoons doesn't. They almost die on several occasions, have no adult supervision, and the youngest is between the ages of fourteen and sixteen. Notably, during the penultimate episode's Grand Finale battle, dozens of other young supers join the Titans in their fight, including the three superpowered toddlers whom Raven had previously babysat. Mas y Menos, twin supers who appeared in several episodes, were about 11.
- In the original ThunderCats, the Thunderkittens are apparently about twelve, or their species' equivalent, but they go into combat just as much as the adults. Lion-O is a borderline case, since he begins the series physically adult, but mentally a child.
- Transformers: Occasionally implied in the metaseries with the younger-minded characters.
- Transformers: Animated:
- Done outright with Sari especially after she turns out to be a Robot Girl and is pushed into the front lines in Season 3.
- The episode "Human Error" (where the main 'bots are shown in analogous human bodies) shows that Bumblebee is the Cybertronian equivalent of roughly her age.
- Omega Supreme might also count, given that he was specifically created to be a superweapon and purposefully made mentally 'slow' so that he wouldn't question orders. Not a child, but close to a child's mind. The Transformers in Animated have an explicit childhood stage. He was a child soldier given mild mental retardation and put into the body of what was effectively a Kaiju, and the actions of his creators made it clear that they knew what this would do to him, and how wrong their actions were.
- Transformers: Prime:
- The prequel novels state outright that Bumblebee was among the final generation of Cybertronians to be born, and while fighting on the front lines is not given any explicit significance for him, the episode "Masters and Students" hints that he's not officially recognized as warrior-class due to being too young, though a later episode would have him admit he was holding off until they fixed Cybertron.
- Smokescreen gives the impression of being about the same age as Bumblebee - he may have also been among the final generation "born" on Cybertron - and his behavior can make him seem even younger at times. Especially telling since he's closest to Jack out of all the human characters.
- The three human kids are very much this. Jack performs the important mission of recharging the Matrix from Vector Sigma, Raf is Mission Control backup to Ratchet (and is one of only two main humans in the series to be actually wounded), and Miko is considered (by herself and Wheeljack) to be a full member of the Wreckers, not to mention having a confirmed kill to her name (Hardshell). At the end of the series, Agent Fowler intends to make them full-fledged members of Unit: E.
June Darby: Consultants! Until you're of age.
- You might not realize it because of his size, voice, and how he acts when he learns to speak and transform, but Predaking is only months old at most at the end of the series. He was grown in a vat by Shockwave and became conscious for the first time in season 3 episode 2 (out of 13), and was immediately sent out to track and kill people. His treatment doesn't change when he's found out to be a person and not an animal, possibly because of Fantastic Racism.
- Darksteel and Skylynx, introduced in the Finale Movie Predacons Rising that takes place after season 3 episode 13, are even younger than Predaking and have been used by Starscream and Shockwave as their minions for who knows how long by the time the movie starts. They apparently haven't fought the Autobots before the movie's events, but Predaking beats them up and forces them to help him fight Unicron's undead army, then they maul Starscream to death (though Starscream had abused all three), and the impression is given that Predaking continues similar activities as their self-proclaimed "king".
- Transformers: EarthSpark: Despite it not being acknowledged as such or being treated as bad, the kids become this in between seasons 1 and 2. The adults are now sending and taking them to Autobot missions to fight the Decepticons and sending them out to patrol areas, even at night. Dot and Alex are inexplicably fine with this despite their earlier opposition to their children being involved in the fighting in any way, and even encourage it and Dot even leaves Robby, Mo, Twitch, and Thrash face the quintessons alone in the season 3 finale. While you could perhaps make excuses about the one-year-old terrans' maturity and development because they aren't human, Robby's and Mo's ages are 14 and 10!'
- The Decepticons also do this to the newborn Aftermath and Spitfire, but at least they're the bad guys.
- Transformers: Animated:
- Three of the Paladins from Voltron: Legendary Defender are teenage pseudo-Military School studentsnote , while a fourth was a peer who got kicked out due to discipline issues. To be fair to the alien princess that shanghaied them into war against a galaxy-spanning evil empire, Allura did not have any real option at the time. Not to mention All There in the Manual confirming that the peer who got kicked out for discipline issues was already 18 at the start of the series.
- Winx Club:
- Red Fountain is a paramilitary school that trains boys to be Badass Normal soldiers on their home planets starting at 16. Military schools for high school age children are Truth In Television, but Red Fountain functions a lot more like an actual military force than like a school — the Specialists undertake various combat missions (not drills or educational exercises) regularly.
- Brandon is this trope twice over, as in addition to being a Red Fountain student he is Prince Sky's squire (implied to be more of a bodyguard than the typical valet definition) and because he and Sky knew one another before starting school, he was at most 15 when he became another 15-year-old's pseudo-bodyguard.
- W.I.T.C.H.:
- Caleb is the leader of the rebellion at 15-years-old.
- W.I.T.C.H. themselves, with Will celebrating her thirteenth birthday in an early episode and Hay Lin being the youngest at twelve (presumably). It probably helps they get Elemental Powers as well as an Older Alter Ego when they transform. Will's boyfriend Matt begins to train as a a warrior in Season 2, though this is his choice and Will is not happy about it. Some of Caleb's troops in Season 1 look even younger than him, but they're still effective in ambushes and combat.
- Young Justice (2010):
- This gets lampshaded when the team is the black ops for the Justice League, where the oldest of them is 16 and the youngest is 13. An exasperated Mr. Twister brings this up after he curb stomps them when Robin protests that they aren't children.
"Objectively, you are. Have you no adult supervision? I find your presence here quite disturbing."
- Later discussed in the episode "Agendas". With the League discovering that Captain Marvel is only ten, they begin debating whether to boot him out of the Justice League. Batman says he knew all along, and it has no impact.
Wonder Woman: I shouldn't be surprised, since you indoctrinated Robin into crime-fighting at the ripe old age of nine.
Batman: Robin needed to help bring the man who murdered his family to justice.
Wonder Woman: So he could turn out like you?
Batman: So that he wouldn't. - By Season 2, the story has started to edge into the "tragic" sub-category, as the child heroes have to confront the death and trauma that comes from their job.
- This gets lampshaded when the team is the black ops for the Justice League, where the oldest of them is 16 and the youngest is 13. An exasperated Mr. Twister brings this up after he curb stomps them when Robin protests that they aren't children.
Real Life
- Ancient Sparta is one of the most infamous examples, with boys as young as 7 entering a formalized and brutal training system known as agoge. Although actual combat duties didn’t start until years later, this arguably produced the toughest soldiers in the Greek world.
- Audie Murphy enlisted in the US Army at the age of 17. By the time he established himself as one of the most decorated soldier of World War 2 he wasn't even old enough to vote.
- Calvin Graham, one of the many underage enlistees who served in World War II and became a bit of a celebrity figure in his time (and underage enlistees were often made to run extra miles and lug extra loads in the Training from Hell). Unfortunately, due to the US government policy he was not able to get veteran benefits. Despite that, his ship, the South Dakota, was one of the most feared ships in the Pacific Front.
- Galusha Pennypacker of Pennsylvania was a 16-year-old sergeant in 1861, a 17-year-old major months later — and twenty when promoted to Brigadier General in 1865 (he was instrumental in the capture of Fort Fisher and was also awarded the Medal of Honor). He was still too young to vote at the time.note
- John Lincoln Clem (born John Joseph Klem) ran away from home to join the Union army at age nine. Both recruiters he saw rejected him for obvious reasons but he tagged along with the 22nd Michigan anyway and made himself useful so the 22nd eventually sort of adopted him as a mascot and drummer boy, with officers chipping in to pay him a soldier's wage of $13 per month. He was allowed to enlist officially two years later. He served at the Battle of Chickamauga, where he is said to have ridden an artillery caisson to the front and wielded a musket trimmed to his size. In the course of a Union retreat, he shot a Confederate colonel who had demanded his surrender (although there is some debate as to the accuracy of this story), and was later promoted to sergeant, making him the youngest non-commissioned officer in the US army. In October 1863, Clem was captured in Georgia by Confederate cavalry while detailed as a train guard. The Confederate soldiers confiscated his uniform which reportedly upset him terribly—including his cap which had three bullet holes in it. He was included in a prisoner exchange a short time later, but the Confederate newspapers used his age and celebrity status to show "what sore straits the Yankees are driven, when they have to send their babes out to fight us." After participating with the Army of the Cumberland in many other battles, serving as a mounted orderly, he was discharged in September 1864. Clem was wounded in combat twice during the war. After his discharge he went back to school, graduated high school in 1870, and re-joined the army the following year. He stayed in the army until he retired at the age of sixty-four.
- The Middle Ages: The training of a knight usually began at the age of seven (7), and it was claimed after twelve, the boy is fit only for a priest. When a young nobleboy turned 14, he was expected to serve his master on the battlefield as a squire. Around age 20, he would serve as a full-fledged man-at-arms. It's noteworthy, though, that while training did begin at seven, the first years were generally spent under the tutelage of the wife of the knight the boy would eventually serve, where the boy was taught things such as proper etiquette and conduct, chess, music and other societal skills. They weren't expected to actually fight in battle until reaching squirehood unless the fight came to them, for the practical reason that most children that age wouldn't have the strength to make a meaningful contribution in the battle line anyway.
- Most feudal systems with a warrior-aristocrat caste, such as Japan's samurai and India's rajputs were raised in a similar manner.
- Several conquering kings (or wannabe conquerors/kings) were merely boys when they led their armies into war. Examples include Alexander the Great of Macedonia, Charles XII of Sweden, Edward, the Black Prince, of England, Olaf the Holy and his younger brother Harald Hardrada, and many others.
- Patrick Finn enlisted in the United States Marine Corps Reserve in 1947 on a 3 year enlistment at 15 years old by fudging his age, although he did not see any combat until he was over 18 since World War II had just concluded. He re-enlisted when his initial enlistment ended due to having worn out his uniform and was unable to pay the $92 fee to have it replaced. Shortly after his re-enlistment, The Korean War broke out and he was deployed there in November 1950 and fought in the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir. By age 19 he was a veteran of one of the most brutal battles of the entire war, and was evacuated to Hawaii for medical treatment and spent the remainder of the war on military police duty there. He tells his story here.
Examples of Just Plain Tragic Type:
Music
- The song "Little Weapon" by Lupe Fiasco is about child soldiers, but also video games.
- Nightwish's "Planet Hell" is about the hellish lives child soldiers live.
- Finnish military march Sotilaspoika (Soldier Boy). The lyrics imply his father was a child soldier too, and when he makes 15 he too will enlist.
- Billy Connolly's "Sergeant, Where's Mine?" has the line "Whit dae ye dae wi' a gun in your hand, when ye're facin' a hundred-odd weans?"
- Eric Panic's "Soldat de Plomb ou d'argent" is about children abducted and conscripted.
Tabletop Games
- The game "Broken Rooms" has a world called 'The Unvisible' which has been invaded by monsters that are invisible — and cause severe psychic trauma — to adults. Only certain adults can see the monsters, so the average age for soldiers is 8-12. Big Science has designed assault weapons with low kickback and painted them in neon colors to appeal to the children, who are trained in combat tactics from the time they can walk.
- The Battlefront Miniatures game Flames of War includes the 12th SS Panzer Division "Hitlerjugend" whose average enlisted soldier was 17 or younger and drawn from the ranks of the Hitler Youth, hence the nickname. The game also depicts child soldiers in the ranks of the Hitler Youth during the Battle of Berlin in 1945, armed (as they were in real life) with Panzerfaust anti-tank rockets.
- The RPG Grey Ranks depicts child soldiers (aged 15-17) during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944.
- Turns up several times in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, particularly in the supporting materials. The defence of Hive Hellsreach during the Second Battle for Armageddon is one of the more poignant examples.
Evacuees will be restricted to those below the age of seven (plus one parent/guardian) and those above the age of ninety. Regrettably, there are not enough places for everyone, so each person eligible for evacuation will be assigned a number. [...] If you are not eligible for evacuation you will be immediately assigned to a hive defence unit — details of where to report will follow this announcement.
Theatre
- Les Misérables features Gavroche, who tags along with the student revolutionaries (who are themselves implied in several songs to be at most in their early 20s) and manages to take 2 bullets while collecting ammunition for the students before he is fatally shot in the head.
- The Wole Soyinka play Travel Club and Boy Soldier is about a military coup in an unspecified third-world nation, and the "Commandant" who's leading the whole thing is, well, the titular boy soldier. He's a teenager when the takeover happens, but he's been in the army for years by that point.
Visual Novels
- Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair: Flashbacks to her childhood show that Peko Pekoyama, the Ultimate Swordswoman, was trained in combat and to be a bodyguard almost since birth, with one picture showing her holding a sword cast as an infant.
- The protagonist of Planetarian is a former child soldier, and has Flashback Nightmares about the experience throughout the game.
Webcomics
- In El Goonish Shive, after a monster attacked Susan in Paris, two Immortals empowered her and Nanase, and instructed how to kill it. Later, in the Hammerchlorians storyline, it was revealed that these Immortals could have very easily gone to an experienced local magic-user instead. Susan... didn't take it well.
- In Katusha, Girl Soldier of the Great Patriotic War, the title character is a 16-year-old Ukrainian girl in Kiev and has just graduated high school in 1941 when Germany launches Operation Barbarossa. After the Germans roll through Kiev, she ends up joining a band of partisans, along with her classmate Zhenya (also 16), her foster sister Milla (age uncertain), and her younger brother Vadim (age 15). Within a few months, all of them become quite handy with weapons and adept at killing. By 1945, Katusha is serving in the Soviet Army, commanding a T-34 tank.
- Kill Six Billion Demons: Jagganoth served as a child soldier in a "Corpse Legion" of mercenaries during the Universal War. Word of God (and Mottom from an in-universe perspective) is that Jagganoth suffers from PTSD from the experience, and the chapters of the "Tale of Yaun" which are implied to be Jagganoth's earliest experiences in the Corpse Legion are nothing short of horrific.
- Paranatural: It's not given a lot of focus, but Isabel is a twelve year-old spectral who regularly fights monsters on levels equaling or surpassing the adults in her grandfather's dojo. Technically all of the kids count, but Isabel is far and ahead the leader, and has been undergoing Training from Hell since she was at least six. Her dad split from the family in protest over this (but notably didn't actually take Isabel with him...) and her mother is clearly uncomfortable with it but also too busy to really make a fight of it.
- Ruby's World uses this as the base of the conflict; the villains regularly use third world children as material for their cybernetic super-soldiers, and several of the young heroes have this blood-stained technology in their bodies.
- Cloud's mom, Ye Thuza, from Sandra and Woo was a Burmese rebel when she was only 16. While it hasn't been explored in much detail yet, it's certainly demonstrated a touch more seriously than the overall tone of the comic, apart from being half of a punchline in which Ye Thuza remarks she's "always been a rebel" while comparing her life as an American housewife to her years in Burma.
- Sarilho: Mikhail and Nikita were sold into the military as kids.
- Sleepless Domain: The Magical Girls who fight monsters every night are little more than child soldiers, since they have no chance to refuse the powers they get if they have the dream that grants them. Magical girls lose their powers if they reach age 18 and they are the only line of defense, as mundane weapons, including the almost conspicuously absent guns, do not work on the monsters. They do have the right to refuse to go on patrol (as Zoe initially does), but there is a stigma against magical girls who don't pull their own weight, and for some the incentives outweigh the risks (including the risk of death, as what happened to Sylvia, Gwen, and Sally). Undine, who is only 14 years old herself, acknowledges how messed up it is to make teenage girls fight for the city, but says Someone Has to Do It. Tessa (who lost her powers healing Undine) is showing signs of being a Shell-Shocked Veteran. Kokoro (aka Heartful Punch) suggests that the M.G.S.I. covers up certain pieces of information (such as what happens if a magical girl gets pregnant) to deliberately downplay the 'child' part of this trope.
Heartful Punch: Foundationists aren't the only ones who want to pretend we're these perfect warriors. The idea that we're just as flawed as anyone else... I don't think they like that. Because then we don't exist just to fight and die for them.
Web Originals
- Dream SMP: In spite of the Vague Age issues with the characters, if we are going by the ages of the content-creators, three of them have participated in warfare of some sort at age 16-17.
- Purpled fought in the Manburg-Pogtopia War at age 17, though he, specifically, crosses over into Type 1 as well for his combat skill and mercenary work.
- Tommy and Tubbo fought in the L'Manburg War for Independencenote , the Manburg-Pogtopia War, and the Doomsday War afterward, mainly at age 16 (though Tubbo had turned 17 by the Doomsday War).
- The children in The Innocent. Justified, as the war is between children and adults. The children end up winning the war. The reason for the war to happen in the first place is that the children are forced to work by the adults, and the children want to set themselves free from the adults.
- While Welcome to Night Vale's Tamika Flynn is also justifiably listed under the 'ridiculously talented' heading, she and her fellow soldiers also come under 'tragic' in episode 46, "Parade Day", where they rebel against Strexcorp but get exactly no help from the adults, leading to them all being captured.
Western Animation
- Back to the Future: The Animated Series had a story where Doc Brown's son Verne go to The American Civil War and find themselves recruited as a Confederate Army drummer boy. As he is being trained by another boy, Jimmy, he is told that they are positioned in the front lines in the line of fire:
Jules: But we're just kids!
Jimmy: [Bleakly] War makes you go up fast. - Played straight, then parodied in Family Guy, when Peter and his father-in-law Carter visit Africa (due to Carter attempting to retrieve the money he lost in a Nigerian Prince Scam). They come across a village that's being held hostage by a brutal warlord, who says he's going to pressgang all the boy children as child soldiers. Peter is understandably horrified, until the warlord starts using "hamburger" as a punchline after everything he says, like standup comedian Alonzo "Hamburger" Jones, which makes Peter forget the monstrousness of what he's witnessing.
- Justice League: In an alternate timeline where the Nazis won World War II, Batman is the leader of an underground resistance. The majority of his soldiers are noticeably smaller than him and appear to be children or teens, including alternate versions of Tim Drake and Cassandra Cain. Besides Batman himself, the only ones who are definitely adults are Dick Grayson and Barbara Gordon, who are in their early twenties at the oldest and have likely been fighting with him for years.
- Munro is a satirical animated short, based on a story by Jules Feiffer, about a 4-year-old boy who receives a draft notice and gets inducted into the U.S. Army, much to his distress.
- In the Season 5 finale of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, of all shows, the Crystal Empire Bad Future has foals being recruited for the war against Sombra.
- Hunter the Golden Guard from The Owl House is a highly trained soldier raised in a militaristic cult, and serves as The Dragon to Emperor Belos at just 16 years old. Being Belos's nephew, having no other surviving family, and believing that he doesn't have a future outside of the Emperor's Coven due to his lack of magic, Hunter was drafted into scout training at a very young age, isolated from the outside world, and Conditioned to Accept Horror (among other things, he fondly recalls being dropped on the top of a mountain with a bunch of other trainees and seeing who would make it to the bottom alive). This, on top of being subjected to parentification, gaslighting and regular physical and psychological abuse at the hands of Belos, has left Hunter's emotional and social growth horribly stunted. Underneath the veneer of haughtiness, he's a kind, creative, and deeply anxious boy who just wants to be a normal teenager, but never got the chance to be until he got trapped in the human realm in Season 3. Made even worse after the reveal that Hunter is actually the latest in a long line of Grimwalkers, Expendable Clones created specifically to be the Golden Guard and discarded as soon as they show the slightest signs of disloyalty or disobedience.
- Phineas and Ferb: Star Wars has counterparts of the Phineas and Ferb characters working for both the Rebellion and the Empire. While the implications aren't explored for Candace, Buford and Baljeet as Stormtroopers, it's played straight for the Firestar Girls, the equivalent of the Fireside Girls.
Gretchen: We need you, the odds are stacked against us. The Empire has everything, a Death Star, highly-trained troops, Darth Vader. And we're just a ragtag bunch of undertrained good-intentioned Rebels. And to be perfectly honest, Isabella, we're kids. We are actual children, and they're letting us fly fighters. That's how hopeless the situation actually is.
- The Daughters of Aku from Samurai Jack absolutely qualify; at the age of 17 to 18, approximately, they're sent out to kill the title character, having learned from their mother and her cult literally nothing but athletics, stealth, combat skills, and presumably the worship of Aku. Being Aku's actual daughters also puts them into the "precocious" category.
- She-Ra and the Princesses of Power: The Horde soldiers' training starts when they're preteens, as seen in Adora's and Catra's memories, and the two are teenagers in the first season which started with Adora getting promoted to captain and about to be sent to war with Catra and the rest of the group (Catra got the promotion instead when she defected). On the rebellion's side, Bow and princess Glimmer also start taking part in battles as teenagers, and princess Frosta who fights in battles and rules her kingdom is around ten years old. Adora, Glimmer, and Frosta also fall into the precocious category, as they have magical powers and Adora in particular is extremely powerful and The Chosen One.
- In Star Wars Rebels, the Empire has a training program that recruits teenagers to be trained into new Stormtroopers, and subjected to a harsh training regimen. The dark part however is that the trainers report any recruits who are suspected as force sensitive to the Inquisitors, and whatever happens to them is unknown.
Real Life
- One part of this is due to deep Values Dissonance and evolving morals and ethics clashing with biology. Across history it was quite common to have thresholds for adulthood (be it for sexual consent, taxpaying, labor, or war) to be eye wateringly low by what we stand, and some societies still do (including some we might not think, for instance France is a modern Western Democratic Republic and developed country, but has an age of consent that is 15 and spent much of the modern period at either 13 or 11 (though usually with some caveats)). Moreover, humans spent several thousand years hunting and gathering in the wilderness to survive wild animals, the climate, and each other, so on some levels we were pushed to grow up traumatically fast and be able to fight, die, or mate. And if a society thinks that 14 year old is ready to fight (or even rule) , then it probably can and will make them do that. Attempts to raise the minimal age for "adulthood" have had a fair bit of success, but fight against both attempts to get an advantage by dipping below the right number, and by the minors themselves (as shown by the draft dodging).
- A disturbing number of conflicts in Real Life have drawn children into them. Worse, it still happens, especially with the more renegade military forces of the world. Even by historical standards children who should have been considered far too young for service have throughout history been forced into real combat situations.
- The NGO War Child estimates that there are 250,000 child soldiers in the world today.
- The CIA world factbook's "Manpower fit for military service" starts at age 16. International Law requires that conscription can't start until age 18note .
- For the purposes of how many people killed as "collateral damage" by U.S. drone strikes will be counted as civilian casualties, the U.S. government considers every "military-age male" to be an enemy combatant.note According to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child — which the U.S. signed, but never ratified — this should mean males over the age of 15. But for practical purposes of who to target with the drone strikes in the first place, this is decided by the drone pilots, who seem to think that it means any male in "double digits".
- For the purposes of how many people killed as "collateral damage" by U.S. drone strikes will be counted as civilian casualties, the U.S. government considers every "military-age male" to be an enemy combatant.
- Resistance movements often feature child soldiers, given that the adults fit for military service have for the most part been killed, captured, or otherwise neutralized by the invading army. During the Armenian Genocide the Armenian Boy Scouts as an organization saw signficant combat action (although they were officially utilized in support roles such as hospital staff). Polish scouts and other children fought in all three major battles of Warsaw during WWII.
- Two of the most famous child soldiers are twins Johnny and Luther Htoo, who founded the Karen rebel group "God's Army" in Myanmar when they were nine.
- At least a third of the Union Army in the American Civil War (as many as a million troops) were seventeen or younger. Boys as young as thirteen fought in combat (especially under the Confederacy), as opposed to drummer boys who were technically noncombatants.
- The Virginia Military Institute corps of cadets, some no older than fourteen, fought at the Battle of New Market in 1864. Of 264 present, ten were killed and 42 wounded.
- In the days of black powder and line infantry, drummer boys, many only 11-years-old, some younger, stood in the front rank, armed only with their musical instruments as the men around them fought.
- The 'musics' who survived the battle also doubled as stretcher-bearers, carrying the wounded to the filthy and disease-ridden field hospitals, where amputation and cauterization without anesthesia were often the only treatment available to the wounded. Although not normally a combat role, it was most certainly a traumatic one.
- In those same days there were also powder monkeys, boys of the same age who transported gun powder on ships.
- It is also worth noting that while usually unarmed and in supporting roles, unit musicians and standard bearers were viewed as legal combatants roughly on par with those carrying the guns or steel melee weapons, and during the Hanover-Stuart Wars after the 1745 Rising one particularly unlucky regimental bagpiper for a Jacobite regiment was found guilty of having borne arms against the king for his service and executed for high treason. While this was often to paper over collateral damage from "normal" combat and the execution of Reid an exceptional case against a grown man rather than a child soldier (with the conflict having been a civil war where the defeated British subjects were viewed as traitors, and Reid's case was controversial even at the time with the Hanoverian English jury advocating clemency only to be overruled by an irritated Judge), this makes more sense than one might think due to musicians being vital for a combat unit of the time to maneuver as a unit and to know when to charge or shoot, meaning there is a good argument to be made that the regimental musician played a role in more deaths than most line soldiers.
- It is also worth noting that while usually unarmed and in supporting roles, unit musicians and standard bearers were viewed as legal combatants roughly on par with those carrying the guns or steel melee weapons, and during the Hanover-Stuart Wars after the 1745 Rising one particularly unlucky regimental bagpiper for a Jacobite regiment was found guilty of having borne arms against the king for his service and executed for high treason.
- The British Army ended the practice of sending pre-pubescent boys into battle after the slaughter of Isandlwana in 1879 when the boys were not only killed but their bodies desecrated — like those of their elder comrades in arms.
- The Germans recruited young boys as "Flak-Helfer" during the second World War, assistant AA crews, who didn't see much combat and if they did it consisted of shooting at specs in the sky. They alternated between going to school and helping with AA guns until they were 18, at which point they could join the ranks. Being properly trained in etiquette, ranks and all the other boring stuff, they usually made for very fine soldiers during training, had high morale and little reason to object to orders.
- And then there was the Volkssturm...every male who could hold a rifle was drafted. Regardless of age. There was an ironic nickname for the Volkssturm: "Gulash". Because it consisted of old meat and fresh vegetables...
- The last filmed footage of Adolf Hitler show him awarding Iron Crosses to child soldiers in the ruins of Berlin.
- Speaking of Nazis, the 12th Waffen SS division "Hitlerjugend" was formed of teens from the Hitler Youth recruited into the SS directly. They were trained viciously, turning these darker boy scout equivalents into hardened soldiers. They were the only units in 1944 to be described as both "voluntary" and "enthusiastic".
- The Italian Ragazzi del '99 ("Boys of 1899") that fought in World War I: after the devastating defeat at Caporetto, the Italian army restored its numerical superiority by drafting the boys born in 1899, that at the time (1917-1918) were 17-years-old. This is openly acknowledged as a desperation move, and these child soldiers are still honoured by having streets, squares, parks and (allegedly) the 99 Flake ice cream named after them.
- The Ragazzi del '99 and the other Italian soldiers first drafted during World War I are an example of the Italian commander-in-chief Luigi Cadorna trying to correct the inadequate equipment of the Italian Army with a combination of superior numbers and training: the boys were drafted months before their eighteenth birthday, but spent the time between the draft and their eighteenth birthday training in the new trench warfare, reaching the front with superior skills than the new drafts of the Austro-Hungarian Army. After Caporetto, however, every soldier had to be sent to the frontline, resulting in Cadorna ordering to immediately deploy the almost three hundred thousands already trained while the rest of them was drafted. It was Cadorna's last order before being removed, and allowed the Italians to regroup and fight back, their first combat experience being reinforcing the First and Fourth Armies on the Grappa Massif and the northern course of the Piave river to stop the Austro-Hungarian and German offensive.
- Imperial Russia had the cantonists, who were the children of the soldiers; in 1827, Nicholas I decided Jews and other minorities should be subjected to the draft, starting from 12, so as to make them good Russian Orthodoxs; they would be sent in cantonists' batallions, where they would be subjected to brutal training and forced conversion until they were 18, when their 25 years term of service would begin.
- The Soviets also utilized children during the Second World War, with some of them becoming affectionally called "Sons of the Regiment". While they are mostly errand boys, a few children served as reconnaissance. One such soldier, named Sergei Aleshkov, six or eight years of age, was an example: he lost his family during a German anti-partisan raid, and was forced to flee into the forest until Soviet soldiers found him starving and half-dead. The commander of the unit decided to take him in and adopt him as his own son, believing he would be better fed and clothed with his unit. Sergei was even present in the Battle of Stalingrad was wounded by shrapnel; later in the war, he saved the regimental commander and his adoptive father from the rubble. After the war, Aleshkov was sent to a cadet school and became a lawyer later in life.
- In this case it "helped" that the desperate conditions of the war meant there was rarely a clearly better place to put anchorless minors. By midwar the Soviet Union was suffering catastrophic food shortages even deep into the rear with spiking deaths among Gulag inmates, and this would eventually spark the post-war Famine of 1947, meaning that there was often no guarantee the civilian infrastructure would be better able to care for them. Moreover, given who they were fighting against and the Nazi practice of reprisal killings and communal or kinship extermination, they could rarely expect mercy from the enemy if captured.
- Janissaries were drafted from Christian children by the Ottoman Empire. There were exceptions however, since adult war prisoners could be inducted into the corps such as Skanderbeg (who was 18-years-old when he joined them), but children were preferred because their loyalty easily assured than adults (considering that Skanderbeg deserted the Ottomans and became a thorn on their side for years, they might had a point). By the time of their disbandment, they were not even slaves anymore, but a bloated and corrupt institution passed down in a hereditary manner that undermined the empire by killing or deposing any sultan that threatened their status.
- The subject of A Long Way Gone: Memoirs Of A Boy Soldier, by Ishmael Beah. Beah was forced to join a military war at the age of 13, after his village was destroyed during the civil war in Sierra Leone.
- 'Black Jack' Jean Schramme, a mercenary active in the Congo wars of The '60s, believed the best age for a soldier was thirteen to fifteen, because they obeyed orders more readily. Whenever he wanted more 'recruits', he just pulled up his truck at a local school and invited the children for a joyride.
- Tragically the case during the War of the Triple Alliance. Near the end of what had been a Hopeless War for Paraguay, Francisco López (the ruler of Paraguay and something of a Glory Seeker) had children as young as nine dragged into the army, as well as elderly men and wounded soldiers who were in no condition to be fighting. Most of these children were killed during the Battle of Acosta Ñu. As a side note, this is a war where so many of Paraguay's male population died (95% by some estimates) at the end that it resulted in a bona-fide population crisis (it was so bad the Roman Catholic Church lifted its ban on polygamy) and the nation nearly ceased to exist altogether.
- Fairly common on the Iranian (and Iraqi) side during the Iran–Iraq War, where teenagers as young as 14 were enlisted into the Army to partake in human wave attacks. Some critics to the Iranian government suggest that they were given "Plastic Keys"note and sent straight into minefields, but some Iranian veterans and historians discredit this claim to be Iraqi propaganda. Regardless, many young soldiers died within the conflict, with the average age of Iranian soldiers being 23.
- One particular story circulated during the war was the suicide of a 14-year-old Iranian soldier who attempted to repel an Iraqi tank column with a grenade belt — which like many other stories, were used by the government to rally counter-attacks against the invading Iraqis.
You know a conflict's
Gone too far
When there's soldiers too young
To need our half-pound jar
Myanmar Shave
Gone too far
When there's soldiers too young
To need our half-pound jar
Myanmar Shave
