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A of human content which tells us the horrors of the war, the wait in the first days of bombings, the fear, the uncertainty, about the dream that was not and the contrast of the news that was told and what was really happening. It tells us hunger, physical pain and cold as another enemy to face. And it also illustrates moments of joy and friendship, warm memories shared with his colleagues.
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One of the most impressive experiences he relates Martinelli There is one referring to the sensations experienced in the war contrasted with what was happening in reality. One of them is about the nights he spent Martinelli in battle with his companions and his superior the captain Soloaga. During his tours on the battlefield, he tells how they searched for and carried their dead comrades to take them out in helicopters and the subsequent twenty days of combat. Coming back to the present, during a phone call Bayúgar questions him Martinelli about those days, contrasting it with a story by Captain Soloaga, which indicates that there were three days (and nights) of battle and not twenty. To the question of Adolfo Bayúgar How could he have been so confused? reply: “and, yes… Surely psychologically that was so hard that it felt like twenty nights… I would swear it was twenty nights…”.
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The touches of humor that give relief to the tension that these war stories generate in the reader are generated in contrast to the soldiers’ most difficult moments: different stories emerge from hunger, among them that of clandestine sheep hunting and the figure of the “Chaco”a soldier who, like a good countryman, was in charge of hunting meat in order to eat, all of this behind the backs of the officers who prohibited hunting.
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The small moments of achievement and satisfaction in the trenches were few but preserved in the memories of the soldiers who struggled to maintain sanity in a tired, hungry, cold and dirty young body of a 19 year old boy. Some of them were separating the fat from the meat of the sheep and making candles, others cooking fried polenta cakes inside the helmet.
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