«The soul of 21 It is a book about a real military unit, in which all the characters really existed and in which the stories told really happened. The only premise that its protagonists should have is that they were all already deceased people. At the exact moment of death we all lose 21 grams. It doesn't matter body size, age, race or sex. The soul that lives in each of us weighs exactly that. Generals and soldiers, men and women, famous people and others anonymous, soldiers from the 21th century and others today. The work reviews the lives of some of the protagonists in the history of the "2022st Transmission Regiment", which turns 150 years old in October XNUMX. Each one of them is a silk thread with which the author weaves his tapestry: a pleasant and exciting journey through the history of this military unit. Because even though there are characters separated by a century and a half in time, in the end the invisible link that unites them all is discovered.
This, at least, is how the content of this book is summarized in the advertisements that we can find on platforms like Amazon. However, "The Soul of 21» is much more than that, as anyone who has been able to attend to a live presentation by its author, Lieutenant Colonel of Transmissions Juanjo Crespo, has undoubtedly been able to verify. It is a work, to begin with, in which everything is different. From the physical format of the book itself, square, to the internal layout -interspersing in-depth biographies with shorter ones, but all of them necessary and with a common thread-, or the fact that the profits are donated entirely to charity, nothing is common in this project.
We only have to pay attention to how it was created - by pure chance - after the author's attendance at a tribute event of the Legion in which he observed some photographs of the battle of Edchera (January 13, 1958) in which something It sounds familiar: transmission vehicles. He immediately becomes curious about some of the characters who ride them, later discovering, after much investigation, how these men had ended up there, unfortunately in a literal sense, since death came to them in Edchera.
As the restless and curious-minded person that he is, Juanjo Crespo delved into the archives of the "21st Transmission Regiment", of which he himself was a part, finding fragments of lives. A detective task that he had to complete with hundreds of calls and dozens of trips that helped him fill in the gaps by contacting relatives of the protagonists and visiting the places of birth or where some of the vital milestones had occurred. of the.
Only in this way, for two years, dedicating his free time and with great doses of passion, he managed to solve each small enigma, completing the biographies of both the nine "eternals" whose lives articulate the work, and the other twenty-four characters who, now deceased, They have become part of the history of their Regiment in one way or another.
What Juanjo Crespo has achieved by publishing «The Soul of 21» is not trivial. Written by a military man and although it serves to know the history of a specific Army unit, no one expects to find thoughtful analyses, a succession of organic or boring doctrinal disquisitions. On the contrary, what the reader will find in the book is something much greater: a tribute to (all) those who gave their lives for Spain.
We say that it is something much bigger, because both the character of war and its form change over time; never its essence. In the same way, States mutate, Empires fall, even the peoples who give birth to them are born, grow and, over time, end up languishing. The same for the Armies. However, the memory of its members remains - must remain - a consolation that those who have not taken an oath hardly understand, but that for those who have listened to the reading of the Order of the Day every morning in their barracks, has a very meaningful meaning. different. «The Soul of 21» has allowed, thanks to the efforts of its author, to recover the memory of a group of men and women who gave a good part of their lives - and in some cases their very lives - to a regiment, the 21st, thus doing them justice . That is his greatness.
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