Recruitment • Roles And Duties • Treatment and experiences. They are about 13 or 15 years old, wear army uniforms and carry war weapons. By all other measures they are still children, but it is not war games they play. Burmese history is full of stories of different kings at war with each other and the modern period since 1948 -- when the British surrendered their colonial rule -- has been little different. Almost from the day the British lowered the Union Jack, Burma has been home to a continuous civil war described by some observers as one of the most complicated conflicts in the world.