Back in
Turin, I was once the part of a group that was trained by the Italian army to
handle captivity as hostages. It involved a simulated hostage situation in which
we were ambushed by their soldiers in a bus journey and held captive/killed.
I don’t
recollect everything with any great clarity from the exhaustion and stress that
we all endured that day. It was pretty much like a real hostage situation and
they did everything possible to drain the last drop of our energy and hopes. Threatened,
shouted at us, made us kneel on our knees for hours under hot sun, shot us with
blanks using AK-47s and made us dig our own graves.
It was exhausting
and depressing. I’d never thought mere physical exhaustion would induce welcome
thoughts about death. At one point they forced me to lie head down on
the grass in the noon sun for a thoroughly long period of time. I spent most of
the time studying couple of grasshoppers. The key was to divert
the mind from paying attention to physical suffering or mental stress.
I toyed with
the idea of escape twice, once identifying a blind spot taking advantage of
which I could make run for one of their trucks and if it had the key, I could pull
out from the situation. Next was when one soldier was forcing us to run while being
attached to each other and we reached a spot far from his company. It was five
of us with him alone. But our instructions were not to escape and just bear the
experience without attracting their attention as any such antics would
have invited harder punishments.
By the end
of the exercise they covered our heads with sacks, led us blind to some kind of
a grave or pit of some sort, dumped us in it and started shooting like crazy. The
bullets were blanks but they sounded very real. Moreover, we had no clue
that it was the end of the exercise. A couple of false hopes before had
deceived us and a sort of crazy desperation had set in. I started penning down
the stuff below in my mind to pass time and keep the desperation under check.
“I could feel the blue sky above, the fluttering
leaves in the spring breeze, the teeming life of the wilderness and the damp
earth tempting me to burrow. It was fresh air that I took in and the moist
winds filled me with an unhinged excitement.
And I decided to dig. Loosing myself to the surreal
deception.
The dark milieu of roots surrounded me. The
blue sky was no longer the vastness but a fast fading patch I no longer cared to
notice. Breathing in the stale air, I panted and dug on. In a while, I felt the
damp mud covering me and I still kept going. My grave, I decided, would stretch
to the centre of the earth.”
Kept
repeating it to myself.
It was quite
an experience. Once it was over, we had drinks with the soldiers and all that
but I really started doubting whether I’d survive something like that in real
life. Got over that bit of immature enthusiasm which used to
associate such situations with some sort of a thrill.
Found the
passage above in some old folder in the computer today. “The End” by doors was
playing in the background. And thought I’d write about it lest I forget it all.
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Image courtesy : Brian Jackson (Rhunyc @ deviantart.com)
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