Themes: War and its true cost, survival, resilience, trauma, the courage of ordinary people, self-determination, the gap between those who make wars and those who die in them, the wisdom of age.

This poem is for anyone who has ever paid the price for a decision they did not make. For anyone who has survived something by the skin of their teeth and carries the mark of it decades later. For anyone who has chosen a difficult, visible, honest path over a glamorous, dangerous one, and lived long enough to know they were right. The old man does not speak of glory. He speaks of the mass graves of ten thousand soldiers and the sound of villages weeping when the men were taken.