I do not want to do the military
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and far always believed the day would leave for the military. Military service was for my dodge as easy as asking for a surplus school and request a further extension year after year, and perhaps because I have not ever given this issue the attention it deserved, sheltered and shielded in the distance I separated from government threaten I never knew at all if they comply. It's funny but I never ask the military to include me on your list objector, or as disobedient me directly cross it, and that hot day in late June I went to the station of Atocha to present my first extension I do not remember but a certain feeling of shame, while waiting with my papers in line, as if trying to evade a duty or obligation, avoiding fallacies and tricks what should have been an honor. It's funny, I say, because I look now, I compare with what was then, and I do not recognize.
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henever I like reading but I always read the same things. At fifteen years, for example, I spent hours engrossed in the novels of Tom Clancy, author of works neat where ordinary men and industrious citizen, married, with children, sacrificed their lives for the cause of their country and died lacerated by bullets while grabbing hard on a flagpole. I read those stories and, as can be done only in adolescence, he lived: with warplanes decorated the walls of my room, I knew all the models, the full panoply of each army, wanted to be military pilot, flying under antiaircraft fire.
At about that time I told him my uncle, a summer night strolling the streets of Santander, the argument of one of those heroic novels that caused me so much joy and, to his visible lack of enthusiasm I asked how he would feel if a foreign country, France, for example, we invaded at dawn. He shrugged and argued: "Well, if the French govern us better. . .. " I still remember the huge disappointment that I felt, especially because it came from someone I revered so much.
Eventually I got tired of reading Tom Clancy, I still liked his stories but I had already begun writing and literary readings needed, better told. I left an entire course to the United States to study the COU, among other things I learned what a country full of himself, his little story and changing its recent flag. I loved that way of life, their wives, their countryside, but warned its citizens an almost inborn arrogance, based largely on ignorance of other cultures other than their own. When completed the COU, I went from there, two FBI agents visited the family that I had hosted that year because they did not understand that my name appeared among young people American graduates of the promotion of 93 but was not, however, the list of eligible persons to be called by the country in case of war. Told me then my American family, agents do not set up any shed, knocked down doors or not entered the race through a dense white smoke, hardly went beyond mere curiosity, the idleness of a dumb question: had not checked advance my foreign nationality, which of course I apologized to enlist in his army, nor hesitated to appear well-dressed in front of the door for a year was also my home, alerted to the possible existence of an American that was not a patriot.
On my return to Spain entered the Faculty of Physics and learned why the sky is blue by day, red at dawn and dark of night. United States, apart from endless notable experiences I had brought some books, including, interestingly, an English copy of Tom Clancy that still waits in the dusty shelf in my room to read it. And although I was not aware then, I brought an appreciation for American literature that I was slowly inoculated Mrs.Bennington, which had been my teacher of English literature. And over the years I read some American authors, Faulkner, Hemingway, Bradbury, Henry James and Nabokov. . . But also to European authors, world classics, Shakespeare, Goethe, Proust, and I realized that just giving the nationality or the color of their flag, all wrote about the same feelings, love, anger, revenge, melancholy. . . and only the setting or the time were different, under a constant simply human, not national, timeless. Later I learned that this, precisely, is called literature.
Today more than ever, I am a citizen of the world, human being, not just English. I feel linked to the customs of my people, to the distant reconquest of the peninsula, the heat of the plateau, the processions of Holy Week, but I also feel close and connected to expel Arabs and named most of the stars that gleam above us, the Nordic peoples and indomitable spirit or the Indians Americans who travel three days after guiding the European expeditions needed rest for another three, they said, their souls would reach behind and merge again with their bodies.
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hour mandatory period is exhausted, the last of my extensions to go to military service and soon expires'll come to headquarters to ask what a few years ago, that summer night in Santander, I would not have happened: the objection, not academic or requested by reasons of personal interest, but the truly moral, the most consistent, conscientious objection.
In the eyes of distant relatives South calling at home for dinner I notice that they recognize in me what they think is fear or cowardice. Referring to military service, I speak with pride of long walks, blisters and nights in the open, and perhaps think they do not understand them because they were not there that morning in late June, just days after he requested one of my first extensions, when a few friends we met very early in front of the door of the faculty, we took some photos under the rusty iron letters nailed to the lintel stone and then loaded with our backpacks, we began to walk toward the north. We arrived in Segovia three days later. It was an adventure, it was rather an ordeal, a rite of passage as narrated by Faulkner and then I had not read. No sleeping in the open but under the stars, we walked for miles, but to earn the horizon, the distant mountains, and beyond. And I did in the company of friends who loved and respected, with those who walked three days in complete freedom by the simple desire to do so, to achieve that goal recommended by our youthful bravado. I will continue listening for a long time in the military is a man, but I know that the experience of military service, it certainly was big and exciting for the men of my family, that led to them to leave their villages or hometowns and let them know people who did not have the same accent, I will have little to me that I spoke to my young children a language so different from mine and lived in lands as far away as men to this side of the ocean took thousands of years to discover.
My uncle was right. The life of a Frenchman is to me as valuable as a English and neither is it much like my sister or my best friend. I am the son of the world rather than the son of Spain, I am a foundling of any nation and I hate them all for the same reason that I admire the hundred years of solitude by Garcia Marquez, I shudder with Bradbury Chronicles, or suffer with childish wickedness Lolita.
No, of course not, I do not want to do the military, have long since stopped believing in the nation to believe only in men.
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