Too much pain, too many bad memories, memories that I have been trying to bury inside me but I can’t do it anymore so here is the story. In my country which is Iran, another typical third world country, every male must devote two years of his life to serve his country, for most as a solder in the army.
I was always told that military service will not be an issue for me because I was suffering from obesity since the day I was borne. But when my time came, which was in the middle of Iraq freedom operation, Middle East was in a hostile state. What happened next changed my life, government decided to drop all the exemptions.
My Body mass index (BMI) was off the chart you didn’t need a fancy unit like BMI to say that there was no way I could serve in military but to my amazement they declined my exemption request, after nine month, and posted me my dispatch info and that’s how I became a soldier.
So here I was, on Thursday, August 24, 2006 in front of the 01 military training base in east of Tehran. Everybody on that base were shocked when they saw me and everybody were asking me that if I had filled the exemption forms or not. Anyway you can say that I was an exception in that base from the minute I set foot there.
To be continued . . .
