Child Soldiers In Ender's Game

“We saw a young man who did not fast for Ramadan, so they crucified him for three days, and we saw woman being stoned because she committed adultery,” (Berlinger 5) explained Mohammad, a thirteen year old former ISIS child soldier, after being traumatized from his life experience. Within Orson Scott Card’s science fiction novel, Ender’s Game, the protagonist of the story, Ender Wiggin, is born with authorized permission, in result of his precociousness, in order to save the human race from their enemies, the buggers. Ender symbolizes the child soldiers in the real world through his experiences within the training as a soldier in Battle School and Command School and can relate to Mohammad’s trauma. Despite Card including many similarities

In Ender’s Game, Card includes that if Ender fails to defeat the enemies, then “there might not be a home”(292) he can return to for recovery. He isn’t able to realize that his loved ones will accept his true self--violent, declining, and a Third. In order to create hatred against him, he becomes reclusive and separates himself in order to prevent any harm from being done. He believes that his doing caused him to become defiant of his true nature; however, the fault should be placed on the hegemony, which had an influence on his by placing him in the Battle School and Command School. This feeling is able to tie in with a similar feeling child soldiers also feel in the present real world. Joshua Berlinger, an associate producer, writer, and Newsdesk editor at CNN, shares Ishmael Beah’s experience and thoughts about returning home: “People stop trusting each other, and every stranger became an enemy. Even people who knew you became extremely careful about how they related to you or spoke to you,” (8). From the practice of training and fighting as a child soldier, it creates contention