To Be Young and Fight

This is a feature story from Unwinnable Monthly #198. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.

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When I was growing up, my media diet was some mix of videogames I’d read about in magazines, anime by way of Toonami and World War II movies by way of Turner Classic Movies. My school library helped with the first, our very overpriced cable package the second and my dad the third (with some help of that cable package). Much of what I watched and played circled the same themes of glorious war and revolution, fighting for the cause, saving the world. A lot of time, war was bad, necessary even. Gundam Wing wasn’t shy about it being super messed up to use kids to fight the space war. Most Final Fantasy games didn’t shy away from throwing adolescents into a meat grinder either. But America did. Those war movies, despite the clear need and glory of the war, all showed men sometimes double the age of their real-life counterparts. Why not tell us that kids fight our wars?

Squall Leonhart is 17 years old when he makes the beach landing as part of the Siege of Dollet. He’s been training to be a soldier most of his life. This, however, is his first big taste of real war with real bullets and real consequences. In our world, with a little help from your parents, you could have been one of the thousands killed on the beaches of Normandy. Spielberg showed us that beach assault was nasty. But he also showed us Tom Hanks ten years older than the average captain in the war. Even baby-faced Matt Damon was three years older than “real” private Ryan. Sure, Spielberg was constrained by who was available and who he wanted but the age gap remains.

This has always been the trend. If you never looked it up, you’d get the impression most of the Americans fighting in the last big, great war were all in their 40s. Well, except the ones in their 30s. Meanwhile, Zack Fair is 16 at the onset of Crisis Core. Zidane is 16. Tidus is 17. Cloud and Lightning might be the only two Final Fantasy protagonists without a need for a fake ID to buy a beer in the United States. All of their respective games are not shy about putting them at the center of perhaps the most critical moment in their world’s history. Why so young?

A lot of it is just down to marketing, to be sure. Some of it is that it’s easier to have a special boy/girl who is young. It would be weird to find out they have some epic destiny at age 40. But war is actually a game played by greybeards and fought by those much younger than them. Its warriors are often desperate. Would Squall not have preferred some 9-5 were it not for his Tragic Backstory? Wouldn’t any of them? Given the choice, I don’t think any of them would have wanted to fight, it just became necessary.

For Cloud and Zack, this is much the lie we still tell people about joining the military. That they’ll get some kind of upward mobility. That it’s cool. That they’ll get to see exotic locations. That there is something great and heroic about becoming a SOLDIER. All it will cost is doing a bajllion squats and killing anyone their corporate overlords tell them to. At least Cloud gets to be the big hero by the end of it, even if it does give him depression. Just like a real soldier, it would seem.

To a degree, you’d have to be young in order to choose this. Any older and you’d see the problem with signing up to die. In truth, it’s what happens to Zack and Cecil Harvey. They survive long enough to see the lie. They’re no longer impressionable enough to just go with it. Auron even knows the lie and recruits a band of young, impressionable teens to take one more run at glory. Lucky for him it works out.

That’s one of the fantasies at the heart of any of these adventures, that it will all work out. It might not be easy, but with grit, determination, and friendship a plucky group of 16-22-year-olds can prevail against overwhelming odds. They can beat the corrupt system. They can destroy the despots who ruined the world. They’re not just meat for the grinder. Maybe that’s why Hollywood never casts realistically young people for the movies: they already went into the grinder.

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David Shimomura is the editor in chief of Unwinnable. Follow him on Instagram and Bluesky.