The soldier began to cry and said: ‘It’s
May. 3rd, 2016 12:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/1Thv4n5:
The soldier began to cry and said: ‘It’s not my fault. They give me orders. They forced us to come here and if we don’t obey, they kill us.’ He said: ‘We take orders from a captain, and we do what this captain says. If I go into the army, I’m an enemy of the people anyway, and if I lay down my arms, I’m the army’s enemy. If one side doesn’t kill me, the other will. I don’t know what to do.’ So we told him that if it was difficult for him, from now on he should hide or find something else to do, but that he must stop being evil, like the army. And he told us a lot about how they tortured in the barracks. He said: ‘From the first day I arrived in the barracks, they told me that my parents were stupid,’ –he was an Indian too– ‘that they were stupid because they couldn’t speak and that they’d teach me how people should speak. So they started teaching me Spanish. They gave me a pair of shoes which I found very hard to wear but they beat me into wearing them anyway. They hit me until I got used to them. Then they told me I had to kill the communists from Cuba and Russia. I had to kill them all and then they gave me a gun.’ But we asked him: ‘And who do you kill with this gun? Why are you hunting us? Do they say that if your father or mother are on the other side, you must use this gun to kill them too?’ ‘I use this gun the way they tell me to use it. I’m not to blame for all this, they just grabbed me in the town.’ He cried and we felt sorry for him, because we are all human.
I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman In Guatemala
more on the Guatemalan genocides of 1981-83
The soldier began to cry and said: ‘It’s not my fault. They give me orders. They forced us to come here and if we don’t obey, they kill us.’ He said: ‘We take orders from a captain, and we do what this captain says. If I go into the army, I’m an enemy of the people anyway, and if I lay down my arms, I’m the army’s enemy. If one side doesn’t kill me, the other will. I don’t know what to do.’ So we told him that if it was difficult for him, from now on he should hide or find something else to do, but that he must stop being evil, like the army. And he told us a lot about how they tortured in the barracks. He said: ‘From the first day I arrived in the barracks, they told me that my parents were stupid,’ –he was an Indian too– ‘that they were stupid because they couldn’t speak and that they’d teach me how people should speak. So they started teaching me Spanish. They gave me a pair of shoes which I found very hard to wear but they beat me into wearing them anyway. They hit me until I got used to them. Then they told me I had to kill the communists from Cuba and Russia. I had to kill them all and then they gave me a gun.’ But we asked him: ‘And who do you kill with this gun? Why are you hunting us? Do they say that if your father or mother are on the other side, you must use this gun to kill them too?’ ‘I use this gun the way they tell me to use it. I’m not to blame for all this, they just grabbed me in the town.’ He cried and we felt sorry for him, because we are all human.
I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman In Guatemala
more on the Guatemalan genocides of 1981-83
