Out of Africa

(On the banks of the Niger)

Ruben Juarez Miranda

Rubén Juárez Miranda, author of "Out of Africa (on the banks of the Niger)" He is a non-commissioned officer in the Army. Specifically, parachutist. He is also someone who loves his work and, fundamentally, a good guy. I know this well, because he was my instructor, although unfortunately only for a few months, at the old CIMOV, in Cáceres, too long ago. Now, apparently, he is also a writer, something I didn't know about and which has been a very pleasant surprise for me.

In this book, written from the notes he kept in his diary during his stay in Mali, the then First Sergeant Juárez tells us, in first person, the days prior to a deployment of this type: from the moment he received the news to the preparations and the farewell (very hard in his case, since he had just become a father) to the trip, always heavy and full of unknowns.

Anyone who has been deployed, no matter where (Mali, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq, Kosovo...) will connect with the author from the first page, as there are experiences that, no matter how personal, are common to all soldiers. Despite this, Mali was at that time a practically new setting for the Spanish and due to its particularities, it is worth approaching this book. A work that, above all, has two virtues:

• It is deeply human: It perfectly captures the feelings, often mixed, of any soldier deployed abroad when encountering poverty, the effects of war, children, the sick. Especially when, no matter how much one wants to, he cannot do as much as he would like. No one should forget that dedication and sacrifice are cardinal values ​​of any soldier and that, precisely for this reason, these types of missions, although they bring out the best in each of us, always force us to pay a high price in the form of frustrations.
• Despite being a subjective book, it is very rigorous in its explanations: When the author talks about the conflict in Mali, he takes pains at all times to situate in a perfectly intelligible way the situation of the country, of each side, of the threats and problems that affect it. In the same way, when he talks to us about the work he carries out, together with his colleagues, as an instructor for the Malian military, he tries to make any technical term understandable, so that a reader lay to the subject can follow the thread easily. and without getting bored.

Beyond all this, the work even has literary value, something that is not so common or so easy to achieve. Juárez demonstrates a remarkable talent when it comes to describing landscapes, people and feelings. It is true that the book can become monotonous at times, but even this is not in itself a defect; A good part of the missions consist of that, in monotony. Getting bored, even desperate, repeating the same cycles and actions over and over again and, even so, waking up every day with the desire to give the best of oneself for a noble objective, for a flag and, above all, for those who you have next to you.

"Out of Africa (on the banks of the Niger)" It may not be a book for everyone, but it is a good book. Furthermore, anyone looking to get an idea of ​​what a mission of our Armed Forces is really like, far from fantasy and ideological distortions, should read it. For less than five euros that its Kindle version costs, there are no reasons not to do it...