Given the delicacy and the emotional impact of the object in question it is difficult even to define it as a genre, risking to catalog it superficially and perhaps, even with mere rhetoric.
In 266 pages, Micalessin tells stories of people, friends, families, loves and affections marked by a choice that in the current years may seem anachronistic: to keep faith, to the end, to an oath taken and embrace all that it entails.
The two prefaces, by General Vincenzo Camporini - Chief of Defense Staff from February 2008 to January 2011 - and by Lieutenant Colonel Paratrooper Gianfranco Paglia, Gold Medal for Military Valor, open to the reader a window overlooking Afghanistan, and motivate , without hesitation, the decisive, balanced and almost mystical spirit of those who choose to wear the stars.
Regardless of any political judgment, the picture of a tormented, sad, found ungovernable but controlled by fundamentalism is outlined. An insidious operational theater in which our Armed Forces have sought and obtained a relationship of trust with the local populations in order to never be perceived as negative invasion entities.
Subsequently, from chapter to chapter, those names and surnames read carelessly in the newspapers finally mean something, obviously during a busy working day, and of which one forgets once the following news has been learned about the rise in petrol prices or the euro crisis .
The author teaches us that behind those names there are not only "dead soldiers in Afghanistan", but there were boys and men, each with their own dreams, expectations and plans, with the only variant of being absolutely never and then never put before the sense of duty freely exercised.
With Afghanistan one way, the myths of false pacifism are debunked and the values and ideals that animate a young man who chooses military life are understood. For the first time this can be understood not by the politician on duty, but by a 24-year-old Alpine from Thiene, a major corporal Matteo Miotto, of which the author reports a letter written by himself.
Micalessin informs that Matteo wrote that letter to "... transfer ideals that no longer exist to the children ...", he makes known of the relationship he had with his grandfather, also Alpino, and how his father tried to dissuade him from that dangerous career prospect.
Framed the character, he informs that no one has changed a line of the letter:
"I want to thank you on my behalf, but above all on behalf of all of us in the military, who wants to listen to us and not worthy of his thought only on sad occasions like when the Italian flag wraps four dead Alpine men doing their duty.
There are days when identities and values seem to be outdated, suffocated by a reality that denies us time to think about what we are, where we come from, what we belong to ...
These people of unfortunate lands, where corruption dominates, where not only the rulers but also the clan leaders rule, these people have been able to preserve their roots after the best armies, the largest armies have marched on their houses: vain. The essence of the Afghan people is alive, their traditions are repeated unchanged, we can consider them wrong, archaic, but for thousands of years they have remained unchanged. People who are born, live and die for the sake of their own roots, of their own land and are nourished by it. Then you can understand that this strange people with sometimes even extravagant customs has something to teach us too.
As every day we leave for a patrol. Approaching our vehicles Lynx, before going out, low looks, some superstitious ritual gesture, signs of the cross ... In the middle of the armored car, inside, not a word. Only the radio that updates us on possible insurgents sighted, on possible areas for ambushes, nothing else in the air ... Aware that the Afghan soil is strewn with handmade bombs ready to explode at the passage of the six tons of our Lynx.
We are the first half of the column, every meter could be the last, but don't think about it. The head is too busy to see something anomalous in the ground, we are finally at the village gates ... We are welcomed by children who from ten become twenty, thirty, we are surrounded, they bring a hand to their mouth by now we know what they want: they are hungry ...
You look at them: they are barefoot, wearing some rag that the eye has already dressed more than some brother or sister ... Of their fathers and their mothers not even the shadow, the village, our village, is a coming and going of children who have all the air of not being there to play ...
They are not there at random, they are four, five years old, the greatest maximum ten and with them a bunch of weeds. Then look carefully, under the weeds there is a donkey, overloaded, brings with it the harvest, they are working ... and the elder brothers, is meant no more than fourteen, with a flock that leaves even our Sardinian alpine troops, people who goats and sheep knows something about it ...
Behind the windows of the mud and hay huts, an adult looks at us, you would give him sixty seventy years from his beard, then discover that he has a maximum of thirty ... Of the women, not even a shadow, those few who are late returning to our village wearing burqas integral: there will be forty degrees in the shade ...
What little we have with us we leave it here. Everyone before going out on a patrol knows that he has to fill his pockets and the water well with food and supplies: they will certainly not serve us ... Let them then say that we Alpine have changed ...
I remember when my grandfather talked to me about the war: "bad thing bocia, lucky you that you will never see it ..." And here I am, in the valley of Gulistan, central Afghanistan, in my head that strange hat with pen that for us Alpine is sacred . If I could listen to you, I would say "seen, grandfather, that you got bored ..."
Reading Afghanistan one way, in addition to tears, calls Memory and Respect. Far from devious political games, he talks about objectivity, he informs.
It is not boring and hits the target: (re) giving a face to (extra) ordinary heroes.
Alberto J. Fallani
