Tinita's Bar and a Ghurka

in hive-185836 •  3 years ago 

Once, maybe thirty years back, I was drinking at a local bar which was famous with sailors, mostly Dutch sailors, it was called Tinita's Bar, it was a wooden structure in the center of town a few blocks from the municipal wharf where the banana votes docked. I was not a regular customer, but it was an all right place, there were girls and they would cook you up some food if you so wanted.

On this particular day, I saw a kind of strange looking guy and since I was half drunk and we both were at the bar I asked him where he was from as it was obvious he was not Honduran, he was kind of bulky darker skin than I and he had an oriental look to him. Well, he told me he was from Nepal. I was actually surprised he spoke English but of course, the next question was "What are you doing here?"

And his answer surprised me, he told me he was with the British army in Belize, that he was a Ghurka and that he was here in La Ceiba because he found the place attractive and cheap. He was right, things were cheap back then, a beer went for anything between $0.50 and $1.00. Of course, I started flooding him with questions, and eventually, he told me had been in the Falklands War against Argentina.

He told me that several times his group had come upon Argentine camps that had no guards and they would go in quietly and kill a few. I asked him if he did not feel anything about killing like that and I remember he told me "Why?" They were lazy, we took advantage of that.

I am just telling you this so you will know that soldiers the world over have the same view the mission is to kill or neutralize the enemy and nothing else matters, if a civilian gets in the way that is just too bad for him or her. This is just a fact, I am completely against war, it is a foolish and horrible event where the worst in humans comes to the surface, and the worst thing is that it is just to satisfy the greed or egos of a group of people. In Ukraine, this should not have happened, and I don't just blame Putin. I started reading about this when hostilities were just a far-off possibility and yet I saw no country try to stop them through dialogue, all of them threatened, the West with sanctions, Russia with military action, and that got us to where we are now.

I looked for a picture of Tinita's but found nothing, the place was demolished a long time ago. As for the Ghurka, I can't remember his name and also I have no idea if he was telling the truth, but I am sure he was with the Brits in Belize because he did show me a credential.

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