They left a trail of ruined lives, fatherless children and women whose confidence and trust have been wrecked beyond repair.
Families were carers, you had fatherless families, you had degrees of domestic violence associated with post traumatic stress, you had the pro-conscriptionists and the anti-conscriptionists still deeply embittered and polarised – the shirkers versus those who served.
That would have been enough for a boy who was born dirt-poor, fatherless from the age of two, who learned to hoe the family's small potato field almost before he could walk.
It is the name of his six-year-old daughter.The gang's letters, he says, represent los homeboys, who were there for him when he was a fatherless youngster after the end of the civil war in 1992, and then moulded him into the violent criminal he became.
She points out that the oft-repeated examples of fatherless woe confound the impact of being raised by a single parent.
These women then have to raise their fatherless children and struggle to make ends meet, sometimes by going abroad themselves.Tajikistan has also for years had fraught relations with its larger neighbour, Uzbekistan.
Research in humans has shown that girls growing up with stepfathers mature even more quickly than fatherless girls and that stepbrothers have a measurable effect too.
What a pity, thinks the student, that the professor, risen from a fatherless childhood in New York's Hell's Kitchen to become a seemingly permanent star of the Senate, should be intent on retiring in 2000.
On March 4th it emerged in parliament that she had donated ¥250,000 ($3,000) over five years to the political funds of Seiji Maehara, whom she befriended when he was a fatherless teenager and who rose to become foreign minister.
Mr Wright was clearly a father-figure to a fatherless man who was confused about his identity.
Witness his far-sighted study of 1965, "The Negro Family", in which he emphasised the connection between fatherless families and increased welfare rolls.
