Fifteen years old soldiers
Chapter 13. About how cigars and how they explode
Capurganá, El Chocó, Colombia
By the way, what’s a diatribe?”
“It’s like the priest’s sermon when you go to church, but the other way around!” And with that last reply, we both started to laugh.
However, there was no lack of occasions when the anti-aircraft defenses knocked him out of the sky. Still, he would invariably find some way to get far enough from them and crash land on all sorts of terrain and situations.
There was this one time that he broke one of his ribs and hurt his right arm, quite badly at that, during one of his many improvised emergency landings, under the circumstances at hand, right in the middle of a cotton field. Because of his wounds, they gave him time off from his flying duties so that he could recover.
At that time, I went with two of my brothers and one of my sisters to stay at our family’s house. It was on the beach of Poneloya, only fifteen kilometers from Leon. There was a rocky outcrop on the coastline with a wrought-iron cross. There we would sit and wait for the sunset to set the sky on fire with its red and orange hues, all the while, enjoying the cool breeze coming in from the sea.
“We learned how to do the maintenance for different kinds of rifles, this week, Grandpa. We took them apart, lubricated them with oil, and checked them to make sure they were good.”
Grandfather listened to me thoughtfully and quietly without any comments, so I continued explaining.
“Two or three years from now, we will all be in the front line and fighting. We have to be ready by then. You wanna know something, Grandfather? They have started recruiting fifteen-year-old kids now, and I’m already thirteen now. Grandpa, tell me how you manage to fly out on your missions without feeling scared because sometimes I just can’t sleep at night feeling so afraid of being sent to the front.
In the land of volcanoes’ Chapters Purchase the book