When I think about the first time I held a rifle, I feel the cold metal as if it were still glued to my hands. I was 19 years old, and until that moment, my worries revolved around the family farm and the old radio that brought us news of the world. It was the radio that announced the mandatory draft. The war was distant, but suddenly it was in our backyard, and there was no escaping it. My father said it was my duty; my mother, through tears, handed me a charm that, ironically, was supposed to protect me.
I arrived at the training camp with a mix of fear and excitement, like it was an adventure I would never choose but was now inevitable. There was a tall man, maybe ten years older than me, shouting orders. He didn't seem human—his voice was dry, sharp, like a gunshot in the void. "You're no longer a man. Now, you're a soldier." Those words echoed in my mind, like an irrevocable sentence.
The days at the training camp were endless. The smell of gunpowder filled the air, and the shouts of the instructors, constantly reminding us that we were expendable, became the anthem of our new lives. Each shot I fired was accompanied by a thought: What if it were against someone like me? That idea was unbearable.
But there was one moment that brought me peace. At night, when everything quieted down, I would look up at the sky. The stars were the only thing the war couldn't touch. They reminded me of home, the silence of dawn on the farm, the look in my mother's eyes when she thought no one was watching.
But that comfort soon disappeared. War doesn't allow pauses; it consumes everything. At the end of training, I was assigned to a unit that would be sent directly to the front. There was no time for proper goodbyes. My father shook my hand firmly and whispered, "Come back a man." I didn't have the courage to say that there might not be a return.
On the journey to the front, I realized something: the silence was more terrifying than the shouting. The train swayed on the tracks, and we all stared out the window as if waiting to see something that would justify what we were about to do. But all we saw was emptiness. An emptiness that, later, I would discover wasn't outside but inside us.
When we arrived, there were no ceremonies. The war didn't welcome us; it just absorbed us. The sound of bombings was deafening, but what struck me the most was the absence of anything human in the eyes of those who were already there. It was as if their souls had been left behind, somewhere between the first shot and someone's last breath.
Meanwhile, I held my rifle and thought: Will my heart survive what I am about to become?
The war called me, and I answered. But at that moment, I knew that something in me had already died.