The Lebanese civil war between 1975-1990 saw a significant number of children under 18 participate in battle. The context of the wars was far different, however, than combat zones such as Charles Taylor's Liberia, where Lebanon's landscape meant that its conflicts were highly urbanized. This translated into such practices as children fighting and simultaneously attending school, or returning home to their families after combat. These differences in the geographies and technologies of war ensure that the experiences and dilemmas of child soldiers are vastly different across warzones. This also opens a space from which to speak of the agency of the child in wartime, at a time when much of the literature on children in war tends to only consider the prevalent case of abducted children forced unwillingly into combat. This paper focuses on fieldwork conducted between 2007-2009 with former militia fighters - from a range of political parties, sects and echelons of society - who began armed combat as people under the age of 18, to specifically think about the conditions of and motivations for their participation in armed combat. The paper looks at context to tread between the universal category of the child and implications for policies in local conflicts. I take the battlefield, the militia, and the war as sites of knowledge production and spaces for learning where children are shaped into adults. My aim is to explore different constructions of childhood and how patriarchal traditions can have an impact on children's participation in war, often with the tacit approval of both parents. Here I will reflect on how the meaning of child and childhood are infused with political violence, making the child in Lebanon never outside of politics. I will focus on the implications this has for NGO interventions in times of crisis where I challenge key assumptions on childhood, and write against ideas that children can be simply depoliticized in times of conflict. In order to understand war, its aftermath, and the militia boys and girls that become men and women, I argue that we must be critically engaged in understanding the transformations by and on children in warzones.