Tales of the old country, part 1

I must have been eight years old when I sallied forth with my friends onto the old military base.

I should back up a bit. You need to understand that this was eastern Europe in the early 1990s. There was a war going on, and though it was not waged where I lived, its mentality seemed to seep into every layer of society. Store attendants were surly and unhelpful, wives and husbands fought until it beat through the thin walls of our old dilapidated refugee house, school teachers were even less tolerant of failure, and even us innocent little kids began to take up the sad facts of grownup stupidity. My brother nad I sometimes played "Serbs and Muslims", a game with all the connotations of "Cowboys and Indians". The neighbourhood kids would form intensely territorial bands. I remember our street was partitioned at a specific house, a border on which we kept intense watch from a pile of bricks that served, of course, as a fort.

On this particular day, the band decided to have a foray onto another block. As luck would have it, we ran into a group very much like ours. After some perfunctory rock-throwing and name-calling, we diseangaged and went through a hole in a fence we had discovered; this left us in the barren grounds of a base of the People's National Army, or something like that. We wnadered for a bit and we decided to leave; as we were about to jump the fence (we had moved quite bit from the hole), we were frozen by the shout of a sentry. This shout paralyzed us. A fully armed soldier came up and began to insult us. I can say without shame that we all categorically broke down crying, for you see there was a blue building in the distance that we were all convinced was a gas chamber. We might have been begging for our lives, I don't remember. Eventually the soldier let us go, but not without harsh words we could not repeat to our mothers.

In retrospect, it was probably just a young draftee on a power trip, but at that moment he was the Holy Trinity in the flesh; he held all the options of the rest of my life--or so we had conceived it. I never want another human being to affect me like that again.

Stolen Quote, Equivocated Slightly: "One of the most beautiful things we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of much true art and all science. The person who can no longer pause--even for a little while--to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; their eyes are closed."