Animorphs.
Cool friends fighting aliens...more accurately, the pariah of a fascist civilization, minutes before being eaten alive in front of said "ccol friends" persuades and then bioengineers human child soldiers to facilitate an end to an ill-conceived and failing war now reduced to unilaterally exterminating a parasitic, physically disabled species, itself undergoing a violent civil rights movement on their own planet based on their self-recognized flaws, struggling to realize its place in a universe where godlike beings exist and decide not to offer remedy(rules of the god game) and spectate while the parasites overwhelm all vulnerable species in the known universe.
The child soldiers agree to resist the parasites, but at least a minority of them believe genocide is the wrong answer. After being physically and emotionally tortured, shot, repeatedly disemboweled and having their limbs hacked or bitten off by hosts of the parasitic species, however, all of the child soldiers begin taking violent, morally devastating actions that end their lives as they know them.
Use spoiler tags as necessary! There are always new readers discovering this series.
spoiler
Like this!
these are Mortons, from the Andalite Chronicles
ohhh thank you.
I haven't reread all the big Compendiums yet.
do you know who the alien is that sucks the yeerk out of the host's brain?
they threaten a visser with one?
it's been a long time for me too lol, took some googling to find the name "mortron". i remember the alien you're talking about but i don't remember what it's called or which book.
It was worth the effort, thank you.
Mortron, goofy enough name to fit those googly eyes.
Vanarx! Found it by reading the entire species list on Seerowpedia
"V". took a while.