Appendix

Poems

Battle of Savate

21 May 1980

Fear,

Subdued by the magnitude

Of aggressive events,

Developing level-headed mechanisms

Desperate survival.

Despair,

Sinking into a chasm

Borne of friends suddenly no more,

Becoming an animal’s indifference to killing.

Caught in a void,

Walls of unleashed destruction

Cemented by the roar of vices,

Death … the opening of a window.

Mindless helplessness,

A nothing…

Enveloped in winds of fear,

Values and morals of shifting dunes.

Relief,

Pathetic in its intensity

Familiar faces –

Bastions of trailing lifelines… shreds of hope.

Drained,

Vacuums of the aftermath,

New lights of oppressive realities

… shadows.

28 January 1981

My War

1980

Oppressive subjectiveness

… stretching

Heavy thoughts,

Low and swollen.

Sinister mists.

Obscurity.

Objective reality

Crushing all sweetness of past treasures,

Darkening the hopes and dreams

Of youth.

Slipping,

Grasping at suggestions of truth

In the belief of societies morals,

Values…

Shaken foundations.

Becoming helpless aggression,

Anchored,

For fear of being forgotten,

… despair.

15 March 1981

“The purpose of war is to serve a political end, but the true
nature of war is to serve itself.”

von Clausewitz