Hours For Stouffer's Outlet Store, Solon Ohio

THE WAR IN KOSOVO
In the night between 24 and 25 March 1999 the Balkans erupted once again in their history. Un'imoponente the United States launched air offensive against the Serbs in Kosovo .

I and my classmates in fifth high school, the year of matriculation exams. We had eighteen. We already saw on TV the Gulf War, but we were small children, little understood, the images were muffled by the games of children and childhood memories. And the Gulf, where the hell it was, then? Beyond the sea. We knew only that. One of the many distant wars.

This time the situation was very different. That morning the TG saw the first images of a real war, vicious, a few miles from home. A war that could involve me and my classmates, now all-age recruitment.

I woke up and went into the living room to watch the TG in the morning, the ultimatum had expired during the night. The world is asking, and I with him would be war, then?

Yes I remember the dark room, lit only by the dim light of the television ... Dark colors in the background a pillar of fire - an American plane had just hit its target - and a fire truck. First Plan a big word "is war."

I was immediately reminded of a song by Eugene Kelly, "Crescent" , listened to a concert a few years earlier. The interiorizzai and felt more relevant than mai.Era war, so ."... here for the first time I heard a man next to many men, with my own thoughts, my fears, my concerns ... " I wrote in my diario.Quella-morning in school and not just at school, in restaurants, at the Oratory, wherever there were people of my generation - we kids were all really worried. We saw a march through the woods of Serbia, dressed in the camouflage that in my imagination has always been green and black.

More to school that morning, Professor d'Errico explained the philosophy of the twentieth century. Bergson, Spencer and Proudhon. I took only a few notes, my mind was elsewhere. I drew for most of the time. I collected the drawings below. Among the sketches appear more than once I and my friends dressed as soldiers, with a terrified expression. My living room with TV and the announcement of the attacks. Gas masks, American pilots, frightened faces, peace symbols, a Red Cross worker who gives orders, at times agitated following an attack.

The Sept. 11 would still have arrived, and with him the war in Afghanistan then in Iraq, and dozens of other unpleasant events that I and others have seen. Images of violence, very strong.

But the war in Kosovo was the first that I and my companions had had to "deal" with potential players, and made us feel just that. No more children, the law exempted from the affairs of adults, but now part of a mechanism bigger than us, well call it life, which would not have saved more than they once reserved only for large.

"March 26. Last night I dreamed that I killed on the mountains are in my unconscious the Yugoslav ..."