Growing up a good citizen is one of the primary tasks of the family and later of the state. The State, in fact, through the scholastic institution is the first to intervene in a robust way on the formation of a young person, educating it to the constitutional principles to respect hierarchies and to know how to live together. To this - long ago - was added the military service that forged the boys to the sacrosanct principle of DUTY towards the State.
Italy has had a strange relationship with its Armed Forces also because of a more or less conspicuous disconnect, with certain political institutions which, far from promoting a patriotic sense far from nationalism, has always rowed against eroding, so irreparable, the importance of common values.
In this last period, we note with pleasure that among the Armed Forces and politics there seems to be one more possibility to build a better relationship and that this happens precisely through the divulgation - free and uncompromising - of objective information, erudite and free of any importance policy. Army - education - school are three elements that in Italy "respectable" seemed irreconcilable, yet someone among our excellences, has immediately denied this axiom: the ninth regiment "Col Moschin".
Last May in Guidonia, just before the Republic Day parade, the 31, a small delegation from the only Army Special Forces department, entered the "Leonardo da Vinci" school to meet elementary school children. A concept on which we have always insisted a lot is the communicative capacity of the Ninth Regiment which, by vocation and necessity, has progressively developed an explicative competence on various areas of both military and civilian.
Today the Special Forces operator is no longer the "break and run" soldier of the seventies / eighties; the role of the soldiers of the Ninth has, in fact, deeply changed evolving not only from the point of view of war, but above all from the "unprecedented" of communicators and mediators in areas of crisis. The impact that the military had on children was positive, it could not be otherwise: we are far from the Homian emphasis of Astianatte who cries in front of his father Ettore because he wears armor.
Today a boy's daily life is invaded by camouflage, shotguns and helmets, even in negative terms (I am referring above all to video games that propagate gratuitous violence): this is precisely why the presence in the flesh of Special Forces operators is functional to make people understand to young people that the military world is diametrically opposed to the virtual world. The goal of the raiders is certainly not to propagate themselves or war, but simply convey an unequivocal message about the difficulties inherent in the "craft of arms" and make it clear that the future always reserves unexpected difficulties: all lies in knowing how to deal with them.
Over the course of his career, an incursor of the Ninth Regiment, learns a myriad of notions and techniques that can be spent anywhere in the civil world at incredible levels; Paolo Nespoli (see article) certainly offers an excellent example of what has been said. In the imagination of each child there is the desire to fly, to soar in the sky like birds and observe the earth from above and those "gentlemen" in camouflage and Amaranth Basque have shown them that this is possible, but only through sacrifice and hard work. In this, an incursor of the Ninth demolishes the brash and mendacious message that can be achieved through shortcuts, facilitations or simply "know how to appear". The raiders are, in fact, the quintessence of being, for themselves and for others and if the message pushes in that direction then we send one in every class, institute or public office that is. It is useful for children, but above all for adults.
(Photo: Army)
