The Forgotten: He who died for me

There was always something that bothered me about the man in olive fatigues holding a gun who stood at the top of the street. I think this is a feeling that was/ is shared by a good many people in Sri Lanka over the last years and now. The fact that he stood in the sun, two wet streaks running down the sides of his face, while we scuttled to find a shady spot bothered me then. It bothers me now.

But I’d never really been able to put my finger on why it exactly bothered me. I rationalised that in a country where there was a war, someone had to die, someone had to give their life. For if I didn’t think like that, I guess I would need to take up arms and give my life too for ‘the cause’ whatever that was.

Yesterday, I found why it bothered me so much. I went for a concert held as a fundraiser to fund a housing scheme for soldiers. At the start of the concert two minutes’ silence was observed for those who gave their life for us. And images I’d seen in the media rose unbidden while I stood thinking, being reminded once again, that every day of my life I stood on the blood and tears of so many men. And though for a moment something snapped within me as it always does at the end of this train of thought, this wasn’t the powerful moment. That was to come much later.

In the middle of the concert a soldier, who had lost his leg to the war, sang a couple of songs too. After the singing, he hobbled off stage – stiff-legged, leaning heavily on a metal cane, concentratingly watching his feet put one in front of the other. That half a minute he took to painfully walk off the stage brought home the fact that no matter how much we thank the forces, no matter how much we give to ‘them’, it’s never enough. Never.

We thank the army, the navy, the air force, the entire thrivida hamudava. But how many of us remember that it’s not a ‘people’, a mass we must thank, but one person at a time? One person at a time? A person who will live the rest of his life without an arm and/ or leg that was familiar to him as much as my arm and leg is familiar to me now?

When we observe those two minutes of silence, when we see images of the dead, our dead, we think of them as those who died for us, but forget to see that it was he who died for us.

And I guess that is the reality of war. Not that someone had to stand in the sun so I can stand in the shade, but that when I pay tribute, I pay tribute to a lot of people. Not really to the one person who watched life expire from his limbs, lungs, loved ones.

In reality then, doesn’t that one soldier, that one person who died forever, or in bits and pieces as he was de-limbed, therefore remain to me forever nameless? Faceless?

Forgotten?