Do you ever do something that you’re not sure you’re comfortable with, then you forget about it for nine years only to get out of bed and say, ‘Oh, I remember,’ and then you’re not sure why it came to your mind, and worth more of your time. Well, this is that kind of story. A true story and I’ll try to put it together as best I can, from the letters he wrote to me over a twelve month period, from 1997 to 1998, out there.

He was working for the Volunteers of America, in Minneapolis, Minnesota at the time, as a counselor and case manager, for federal inmates (BOP), inmates who would be released from prison, conditionally, to find work, typically one year. before their time is up and sometimes six to three months (let me add, before I continue with this story, I do not endorse the VOA, nor Volunteers of America, nor their philosophy, I think at their greatest part, it’s a sham ((from what I’ve seen)), and I was having a lot of trouble in that facility, when I was working there, I didn’t care, and in most cases the higher-ups overlooked it, you couldn’t say who the staff inmates were: or who were the best or worst offenders, was a good question).

Anyway, I received a letter from an Amnesty International organization, I will not identify them, nor their name, as I will also omit the name of the prison and the two people involved in this story. Once again I say, I sent this letter from Amnesty, that I was trying to obtain a pardon for this person in prison who served ten years, for being falsely accused of murder. He was a native of the Philippine Islands, and around the mid-1980s, until the later part, this happened, when he was young he was involved with a rebel group.

Now before I get into the letters from this man who sent me, which is really the premise of this story, compared to the VOA, the Amnesty, he was not honest with me about this man, he is not a rate player, he is not information honest, eliminated. as if to make their search more justifiable, (I’ve been compared to a guard and a soldier, so I’ve been on both sides of the fence here) and I have little respect for them for that, nor would I support them. them in the future, although I did support these two men, in particular one, we will call him José, his friend, Manual.

When I started writing José, he admitted that he had a dictionary, English, and that I had patience with him and his English; every word he wrote was big at first, and sometimes it was misspelled, and the letters were two or three pages long because of that, if they hadn’t been so big they would have fit on one page.

In the first three months of his letters, they were quite sparse, and I asked him to be more frank with what was happening to him, now, in the past, and what his future outlook was, especially since he was sending a few dollars his way. , not much, for his extras that he could buy in prison, like cigarettes, pencils and paper, est.

During this time he introduced me to his friend, Manual, and asked me to help him financially as well, and I sent him a little check once, but it was only once, and that was it, I didn’t feel good about supporting his friend , and maybe a lover, as she often seemed to express deep emotion for him (so this is conjecture on my part).

Anyway, for the next nine months, he answered a lot of questions, some of the stuff was erased, but he was honest and said that the guards would show the letters to his friends and laugh until the sensor (the person who would read the letters again to make sure they were correct), which blackened some of the stuff and left surprisingly a lot in (and under the light I could read the parts off, for the part). Maybe they left much of him, knowing that it wouldn’t help him anyway.

I also sent a letter, two letters to the President of the Philippines at that time, asking them to review his crime, his case, which I understood to be false. I received two return letters, one saying that they were investigating his situation, which had caused some problems during his time in prison and it was difficult for me to be sure of anything. The second letter told me almost the same news, but added that he would be transferred to another prison in the near future. That’s when I lost track of him. But they also mentioned something serious too, which seemed to hamper their case.

[The Letters] The letters acknowledge that he killed a Philippine army soldier, which Amnesty did not consider murder, and the Philippine government considered otherwise. José said he was with a rebel group at this time, trying to overthrow the government that is when he met, Manual. He had the perspective, perhaps the same as I had, soldier against soldier; That is, José was fighting for a cause in which he believes, and he admitted it, and was made a prisoner of war, as he said with so many words, he also said: I deserve to be here, but not the death penalty, because I was a soldier I was just on the losing side. How true this was, but this was not the whole story. As a counselor, I never stop probing and usually discover more facts, facts that people want to erase at first or generalize.

In a letter I confronted him with his actions in prison. He said in so many words: I’ve been here for ten years, ten long years, I got into some fights and I was young again, but should I be punished all my adult life for what I did in my youth? I asked him what he had done and he told me that he had killed a guard in self-defense. He, nor the director of the prison, to whom I wrote, would give me the facts; I guess if he did, or they did, it might not help their cases, and it seemed like there were two sides to the story, so he felt. So I was getting distortions, as well as generalizations and deletions; if not the director of the prison, or José, the writers or assistants of the president.

He kept talking to me about Manual, as if I cared, and to be honest, I didn’t care much. But I knew I was alone so I left that topic alone, although I guess it bothered me, he put it in every letter, at least one sentence, if not a few paragraphs. I tried not to show my disgust for that, and I don’t think he noticed; I had enough problems without my prejudices.

About, in the middle of the process of sending letters back and forth, he talked about his early days in prison. This is what he said, I will try to write it as I remember it, because I only have two letters left from him, whereas maybe he had a dozen that he sent at once (I must rely on memory, mainly). He said that they tortured him, they burned him with cigarettes to see who could burn a hole, he threw his meat faster, a game, if I remember correctly, sometimes it was down to the bones, and the infection leaked out and he ended up in the infirmary; no questions asked.

In other letters he described a chair, it seemed to me an ordinary wooden chair, where he sat in it, or in it, naked, and his arm, one arm, was twisted between two wooden bars, which would normally rest his back and leg right, crooked between the chair legs, twisted and tied in some jacquard position, and left there for several hours, if not longer.

Another torture he had never heard of up to this point was that he would be laid on a bed, or a bench of some kind, and his hand, a hand chained around the top of the bench or bed, and his. leg chained around the top of the foot or ankle, and tied around the leg of the bench or bed (I say bench or bed, because I can’t remember which, if not both). Anyway, here he would lie on the wooden surface for several hours, with his hand stretched upwards, supporting the weight of his body hanging down, so that his torso could not rest on the wooden surface, the part of the bed, and his leg stretched down. his limit at the end of the article he was lying on, so he would have cramps in them and could not do anything, but he would suffer.

[Concluding statement] I’m not sure what’s right and what’s wrong in this case, he killed a guard, a friend, I’m sure the other guards, and they wanted revenge. He died in the war, it seems, was more forgivable than his death from the guard, so they told me. And being a soldier from Vietnam, I can understand part of this. But here was a young man who lost it, he may never know who Shakespeare, Thueydides, Herodotus was, the historian, or read the poetry of Robert Frost, or Homer, Villon, Catullus, although he once sent me a poem saying “For Please don’t forget me! “I never told him I wrote, it wasn’t part of our drama, our mixed drama, it was his show, not mine, so I dedicate this story to him, wherever he is, and he may very well be dead for all I know. It is, this story, I realize, not as diverse as I could make it, almost expressionless, where I could have developed this text much further, justified, or tried, its position if I wanted to, but it seems like a nuisance to me, why? A man cannot understand or grasp certain things clearly unless he experiences them, and I have not done it in this case, only from the side of the soldier, and his deeds; other people are involved, the soldier’s family. Maybe he deserved death, maybe not.