(4 of 4)
Inside prison, Henry met one of his nemeses, a 15-year-old Florencia member named Saoul whom he had once shot at in a park. Saoul approached him. "Say, ain't you from Grape Street? Didn't you shoot at me?" he asked. After a moment of silent appraisal, Henry says, "we both just started laughing." They talked. "He's a nice guy, you know, normal," Henry says. "We won't fight each other anymore, but I'll fight his friends."
Henry, good-humored and alert, is not so very different from Akbar, the smart-alecky mujahedin boy who in the battle zone of Afghanistan grew closer to his comrades than to his father. In Henry's insular world, his homies are his only family. It is his enemies who keep changing. Despite designer sneakers and all the food he needs, Henry is far poorer than Akbar. He has no cause, no purpose to his fighting, no dream of redemption in another life.
Cops, gang members, shopkeepers and social workers in South Central Los Angeles all describe their community as a "war zone." But from afar, their battle wounds seem self-inflicted. In Third World war zones, combatants have no real alternative to war. For the child soldier in Burma or Afghanistan, there are no Big Brothers or child psychologists laboring to keep them out of harm's way. American inner-city kids, like those of Belfast, do have alternatives to gang shootings and street riots. Those opportunities may seem faint, but society does provide American and Northern Irish children with a semblance of choice.
Ehtablay, the Karen rebel, and Ducc, the Los Angeles gang member, have nothing in common except their age, and the intoxication and empowerment that came when they first fired a gun. Young boys, be they in Burma or Afghanistan or Northern Ireland or Los Angeles, are drawn to the violence; even the fear, when it distills into adrenaline, carries illicit pleasure. What sets Los Angeles apart from Afghanistan, Burma and Northern Ireland is that gang warfare, with its spoils of drug money, gratifies greed. Money in South Central is the gang warrior's jihad -- a fitting retribution for a materialistic society.
All comparisons end in paradox. The Burmese, the least sophisticated warriors, enmeshed in the longest, most brutal war, yearn for soothing discipline and community structure, while inner-city youth of Los Angeles, at the center of the most advanced society on earth, respond to adversity and deprivation by regressing to a primitive parody of tribes.