IF IT WERE NOT FOR THE SOLDIERS who came back to that kindergarten battlefield, by now I would be history. After being responsible for starting the first civil war in the post-war era in Afghanistan. But the incident was good enough to give us time to leave that area. I lost my GPS, that vanished in some boy's hand during the discussion, to be used as his game until the batteries run out or he finds someone to exchange it for food. But I kept my discs with digital photographs, and could not avoid laughing how I did this. Even now it is hard to me to believe that, as it is hard to you to believe in anything I am writing here. Sometimes I think this has been a dream or you would take me as a kind of Forrest Gump. Anyway, his mamma was right when she said that life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get.
Yes, I know you have many questions about this and that. Let me explain few things to you while we get back to Jalalabad. From there we have to travel to Kabul and then to Islamabad, where I made my little headquarter in a hotel room. The trip will be long and there will be not many things worth to describe along the way. Just ruins, corpses laying by the side of the road and corpses walking by the side of the road. So, while we travel we can talk and time will go by faster.
You might be asking if I know any html to build a page or publish this story, don't you? Ok, I know part of it. FrontPage knows the rest. And if my page is cool, it is because I am using the same html code from my original page at www.tora-bora.blogspot.com, where I would like to be, but I can't. After I published my first words there, their servers were hacked and my password does not work anymore. It would be easier to publish this thing there, in their automatic publishing blogger, without having to create a new page every time.
Any other question? Oh, yes, how can I, being a journalist, bury my led, instead of writing in the inverted pyramid style and giving right in the first paragraph the whole story? I have to confess I am also a writer, with one book published, a second one being revised by the publishers and a third one with its last pages just coming out from my brain. In this case, I can't give all the information right away, because I don't have all the information. I am still working on the manuscripts, but from what I saw I can assure you that it is a life-changing and life-challenging text.
Perhaps you would like to ask how come a journalist doesn't want to publish a huge scoop because it will ruin his reputation, right? Be sure that the best stories are still unpublished by the newspapers, because they too are companies who have interests in selling ads and want to please their shareholders. This is not the case, but just to tell you that we all have interests in this or that and many times we do what is against the common sense to preserve our interests.
Or do you believe in everything you read? Know what? We've been so used to believe in the power and wisdom of newspapers, radio, TV etc., that Internet came to teach us a little discernment. Or do you believe in everything you find on the Web? You are better start filtering it as you should when you read the news or watch TV. As a writer, I know the power of the word and I can publish a lie that sounds like true and a truth that sounds like a hoax. Any one can do that. So, lets put our little neurons to work before we drink of any water that is being offered to us.
I am glad there are no more questions, because I've already arrived in my hotel room and the first thing I want to do is to take a good shower. A shower seems to take away the dust and the guilty, doesn't it? But in my case it seemed inefficient to take away the memories from the battle field. So I stretched my broken body on my bed while Louis Armstrong's was singing in my notebook a MP3 version of 'What a Wonderful World'. Yes, he was the first one to sing the virtues of the WWW. Listening and arguing!
Hey, mister! Back there I could see trees of green and red roses too, but those were more easy to find on cemeteries. Where they don't bloom for me and you. Sure there were the skies of blue and clouds of white, but where is the rain? The bright blessed day and the dark sacred night were just a succession of bombing and fear. With no colors of the rainbow so pretty in the sky. Sure, I saw friends shaking hands, saying how do you do, but none of them was saying 'I love you'. Perhaps just asking each other where they could find a VCR to buy. If they had money. Yes, I could hear babies crying, but I don't believe many mothers will watch them grow. They have seen too much, more than I'll never know. And I think to myself, what a [not so] wonderful world!
I was entertaining a thought that the answer for a wonderful world could be in the manuscripts, when Louis Armstrong stopped singing and the dark room was inundated by the most beautiful and blue light I'd ever seen. Was that what the English language describes as feeling blue? No. The Windows in my notebook decided to crash and bring out that blue screen, painting blue the darkness of my room and of my thoughts. So I decided to close my eyes and sleep. In the morrow I would think about the picture I took from the soldier's letter. It was too late to deliver it anyway.
