My name is Ed Williamson. Some of you may remember my name. Some of you may remember me. I hope so, as it in a sense means that what I did wasn’t meaningless.

I’ve been thinking about what is and what isn’t meaningless a fair bit recently.

So I’m pretty sure that what I did over there wasn’t meaningless. The fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq takes all the media attention but that doesn’t mean that the fighting I was involved in was meaningless. I fought. I fought hard, and took the lives of what were probably good men. Was that meaningless?

Sometimes I think about it. Well, I mean that I think about it a lot. I think mostly about the bit that got me into the papers. And the bits that the papers didn’t mention.

I carried him all day in the sweltering heat. I was beaten furiously for it, but I wouldn’t let him go. He was in a bad condition. I had surrendered so he could get medical help.

On the journey to their base they would hold back the branches of bushes to let me pass but let go of them so they would snap back at me. One made my nose bleed.

Nothing they could do could make me drop him or leave him.

As long as we walked I carried him. Lucky that those folks are little. Lucky that I had managed to get myself in good condition.

Coming into the base camp I was horrified by the squalor. And they had the nerve to call us bandits.

Cold fear came over me when I saw the cage I was going to be put in. It was like something from a Vietnam film. I suppose that in a weird way I in fact wanted it to be a Vietnam film. I was always interested in Vietnam. I still am.

One thing that I can’t really understand is why they never even interrogated me.

Maybe they knew where our camps were and they didn’t need to know anything else. Maybe they thought that I didn’t know anything as I was a foreigner in their little not-so-civil war.

Perhaps they had no respect for me, thinking I was a mercenary…and so didn’t think I would have any useful information.

Later on that day I was beaten hard for the first time. I think that I blacked out sometime during the beating.

I was raped.

Sometime later on during my stay they brought him out. They had given him medical care so he was actually better.

He was in a good enough condition to survive – perhaps even without any big problems. They tied my head to my cage so I couldn’t move it. Then they forced him on to his knees and slit his throat. They had made him better just so they could kill him in front of me.

Escape was always on my mind. I got out with the help of a kind female soldier there. It still hurts to think that I killed her. She was so frightened when the troops came looking for us that I was worried she would panic. I broke her neck.

Damn it – I’m going back to finish what I started. See you in Hell.