Pride is enough drive to kill, to literally destroy the world.

For the warriors, to avoid the shame of

losing, for the chess players, to win at all cost.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the United States confronted Soviet Union over its
deployment of ballistic nuclear missiles to Cuba, the soviets deployed four Foxtrot-class diesel
submarines of the Sixty-Ninth Torpedo Submarine Brigade to the Cuban harbor of Mariel. One of
them was numbered B-59. Each Foxtrot was armed with a single Special Weapon: A T-5 torpedo
armed with a RDS-9 nuclear warhead.

Living conditions in the subs were intolerable, temperatures rose to a range of 100 to 140 degrees
Fahrenheit, CO2 build up, lack of fresh water led to widespread dehydration, and infected rashes
broke out across the entire crew.

Defense Secretary McNamara authorized U.S. ships to use special Practice Depth Charges (PDCs) to
harass the soviet subs. The blasts damaged the radio antennae and terrorized the crews. The
United States notified Moscow of its Submarine Surfacing and Identification Procedures, but the
message did not reach the Sixty-Ninth brigade.

A patrol aircraft forced B-59 to submerge with almost no battery accumulated. The American
destroyer USS Beale began pelting the Soviet sub with PDCs. It was soon joined by ten additional
destroyers from the USS Randolph carrier task force.

It felt like sitting in a metal barrel with someone hitting it with a sledgehammer. The crew was in
shock. Capt. Valentin Savitsky stubbornly kept B-59 submerged as the temperature built up to 122
degrees Fahrenheit and oxygen steadily depleted, causing the crew to begin fainting. Savitskys
was stressed, yelling at everyone and torturing himself, scared of his own shadow.

Unable to communicate with Moscow, Capt. Valentin Savitsky concluded that war had already
broken out. Savitsky ordered the crew to arm his submarines nuclear torpedo and prep it for
firing at USS Randolph. There may be a war raging up there and we are trapped here turning
somersaults! We are going to hit them hard. We shall die ourselves, sink them all but not stain the
navys honor! His political officer, Ivan Maslennikov, concurred with the order.

---------

I am an archiver, we try to keep the records, but the smarts break and little by little the old sacred
myths are being lost. It is lonely, if you are unlucky enough to be detected in the belt, you might be
burned alive, yet the hardest part is being ignored and ostracized by relatives and neighbors. If you
try to get them interested even in something useful, like arithmetic, they will dismiss it as scientific
and not fake. In old movies, you can see fantastic tales about galactic empires and planetary
federations. Yea, sure. Today a flashlight is a sacred irreplaceable object, let alone a light sable.

Now, only the chosen can be in the tunnels. There are not border controls or the like, but God help
you if you are in the wrong place when HS comes. Supposedly there are tunnels that expand across
the United States: I cannot leave my sector but who knows how far the tunnels go.

There are underground cities for the Cogs. They dream of reconstitute the government of the
world. Maybe they can, maybe not. Nothing permanent can be outside. A WE will get you sooner
than later. Its a matter of time. You might be lucky for a year or even two, but not long enough to
rebuild a normal lifestyle.

Its not like its completely safe in the tunnels. You can feel quakes even up to 10 a day. Everybody
knows someone who has been in a collapse.

The Underground must be the largest underground facility in the world. 50 million square feet. An
underground tunnel might go hundreds of miles underground. People say you can go all the way
from Washington D.C. to Colorado. Ive been in Lewiston, Maine!

The entrance to the tunnels are like Wild West border towns. The cogs dont care how they are run
if the byways are kept free and the unchosen do not go inside the tunnels beyond the allowed
limits. Nonetheless, cogs will not hesitate to wipe out a whole village if a single unchosen does as
much as to bump into a cog, or even rise his gaze. At the begging, it was not quite like this. After
all, the cogs where supposed to get things going. But once the chosen were selected, and life
outside became anarchic and ruthless, the cogs had to get rough or fall into an all-out civil war
without warranty of success.

Anyway, when you get used to be in the tunnels, you cannot go outside. At least not during the
day, so hot and bright your eyes hurt and your body kind of melts. Inside the tunnels day is marked
by a dim blue lighting and night by an even dimmer green light. You do not realize how little light
there is in the tunnels until you get close to the entrances.

When I must take a load outside, I need to wear a decoupling helmet. Its Hell. Unbearable hot
when hot or just nauseating when cold. But without it, I cannot bear the sunlight at all.

Its funny how important little things become. People make guitars out of oil cans and sticks, and
they will kill you if you try to take away their junk. I have no music ability and my treasure is my
Gerber folding knife. I really like this knife, its compact and small, hardly noticeable in the pocket.
A well-made and a very rigid little knife. Blade is extremely sharp and handle offers a great hold. I
like just to look at it and feel it in my hand. Yet, you wouldnt believe what I can do with it. I can
write and draw better than with a pen. Amazing. I've probably subjected my Gerber to far more
than I should, but other than a few scrapes, it's no worse for wear.

There are no families anymore. In the cities, the cogs have kept the old ways, but in the tunnels,
people is just moved from here to there like machinery with no more rights than enough food to
keep functioning and the right to be inside the tunnels, protected from the weather. There are no
children, and only women that have been assigned can have children when inseminated with
controlled semen. Women that get pregnant without authorization become unchosen and must
leave the tunnels. The cogs say its the beginning of a better world. It looks to me like the dusk of
man.

Life in the tunnels is dull. I thought about becoming a solider, and maybe even a citizen. War, with
its destruction and carnage, it can give us purpose, meaning, a chance to be noble. But I question
my compassion. I decided to go in the production fields with the propaganda corps as a faker.
Texas is ruled by the evil dictator John Hope, and the freedom fighters from the Fundamentalist
Whites (FEW) have been battling for six years for freedom and democracy. I asked to be sent to San
Antonio as a faker.

The cogs screwed up and left John Hope in power. President Singh believes hell be overthrown by
his own people, but there has been already six years of war, and Hope clings to power.

After FEW seized most of the Houston, over 400 mostly Catholic families descended upon a half-
built mall in the in the Catholic neighborhood of Victoria.

One of the girls from Houston was Myriam. A beautiful kid of about 10, blond, green eyes, sweet
smile. She was wearing a pink Hello Kitty pullover. I interviewed Myriam: "We used to have a
house and were entertained, whereas here we are not," Myriam said. "But thank God. God
provides for us."

"God loves us and wouldn't let FEW kill us," she explained.

Do you know that God loves you?

Yes, God loves us all, not just me, he loves everybody

Do you think that God loves those that did harm to you?

God loves them, but he does not love evil

What she would do if she ever had the opportunity to retaliate?

"I won't do anything to them," Myriam asserted. "I will only ask God to forgive them."

And can you too forgive them?

Yes

But that it is very hard, or is it easy to forgive those that make me suffer?

I wont kill them, why kill them? I am just sad that they drove us out of our home, why did they do
that?

The reporter asked Myriam about her life in Houston. She missed her friends. I said that he hopes
to see Myriam back in Houston. The kid eyes sparked with hope and said: if God wishes. Then, in
a sadder note: not what we want, but God, He knows

A year later, Myriam was about to return to Houston.

"Surely I am happy and joyful to return home and see my friends who didn't leave. I'll get to see
them again," she said. "I'll see my home and my country again, the place that I love."

Myriam's father, Waleed, said: "There are no words to express how we feel. But we say in Iraqi,
Wench, which is the feeling we have when we are home. It doesn't matter if under destruction."

Sister Maria de Guadalupe, an Argentinian nun, belongs to the Religious Family of the Incarnate
Word, which was founded by Father Carlos Miguel Buela in Argentina in 1988.
Right after she was consecrated as nun, she was sent to Bethlehem. After two years of studies on
Arab culture and language, she was sent to Egypt. She was stationed twelve years in Egypt, a time
of intense work an travel on the middle East. Her health was weak, and she was offered the
opportunity to choose a nice an easy going assignment to rest for a while. On January of 2011, she
asked to be stationed in Syria, because, on her travels on the Middle East, she found Syria to be the
nicest place for a Christian. She observed a quality of daily interaction between Christians and
Muslims that was lacking in other places. Christians are a discriminated minority in the Middle
East. But in Syria, Christians and Muslims were friends of each other.

The Syrian government is secular. Thus in Syria there is no sharia law and there is a degree of
religious freedom. Syria was country with a high standard of living, a rich country with a stable
society.

Then trouble started in the south, in Dara. In the news there was talk about people asking for
democracy. The neighbors talked about armed foreigners taking control of the streets. Bodies of
Christians started to appear in garbage containers with the message: Do not touch, its a
Christian.

In Damascus and Aleppo, thousands of people went to the street to support the government of
Assad. People knew that what laid ahead was Islamic fundamentalism, not democracy. What
appeared in the international news was that the people was asking Assad to leave.

The Syrian people is hurt by the treason and abandonment by the west.

A few months after Sr. Guadalupe arrival in Syria in 2011, the war began, something, Sr. Guadalupe
said no one expected. For Christians in Syria, she said, life has been one long Way of the Cross
since the civil war began five years ago.

The media talked about [peaceful] demonstrations from the Syrian people, who looked for liberty
and democracy, Guadalupe recalled of the Arab Spring, though in reality it was very different.

Reports of non-Syrian armed groups entering Christian neighborhoods and killing Christians began
to travel back to university students who were studying at the mission in Aleppo.

Aleppo, she noted, is the most important city and the economic center of the country, so terror
groups targeted the city and besieged it for a full year. Electricity was available only one to two
hours a day. Water came every 10 to 15 days.

The Christian neighborhoods and churches have been targeted the most, she noted.

So we always expect a massive attack during Christmas and Easter They destroy our churches,
monasteries, shelters, everything.

After the Muslim preaching and prayer on Fridays, he said, his community would be targeted,
threatened, directly attacked, because we were the only Christian community in the area.

Christians, he said, are kidnapped, tortured, martyred, beheaded, cut in pieces.

Regularly they broke the windows of our houses and cars, or there were times when they entered
into the houses of our consecrated sisters with knives, threatening rape or martyrdom, [and]
commonly harassed them when they had to go on the streets.

Or they threw their cars or motorcycles against the children of our small Christian school. I
personally defended my children from them.

A Christian woman was tied to a pillar and beaten by passers-by until she would ask to convert to
Islam. However, she never asked, de Guadalupe said.

Children and priests have been special targets for brutality. They have been buried alive in front
of their mothers, and beheaded with their heads put on spikes in public squares.

This is the moderate opposition that we have in Syria, she continued.

Yet the Christians, despite tremendous suffering, have seen their faith grow.

Suffering purifies faith and strengthens it, she continued. At the end of the day, the thing that
we want is Eternal Life.

At the end of the day we have the cross that Jesus Christ gives us, and that is the way.

Suffering also helps Christians to live as though every day is their last, because for Christians in
Aleppo, it may well be their last day alive.

Are we going to waste time in the last day of our life? she asked in her testimony at the congress.
Are we going to keep living in sin in the last days of our lives? I can die today. I want to go to
heaven. So today, I am going to make the most out of the day.

We are missionaries, and we have the opportunity, the possibility to live with the martyrs of our
time. This is a privilege, de Guadalupe concluded.

She has seen how a bountiful and rich country is now in ruins, and she knows that one of the
groups that are suffering the most are Christians.

"You can see that their first target is Christians. Their neighborhoods have suffered the worst
attacks. The neighborhoods of Al-Midan, Sulaymaniyah, Al-Aziziyah. Neighborhoods in which the
attacks are much more intense. Easter, Christmas. A storm of projectiles of and missiles. It is a
direct attack against Christians. Killing people every day just because they are Christians.

And, according to Sister Guadalupe, the massacre of Christians is not only a humanitarian tragedy.
The country's diversity and cultural life is also being destroyed.

"Muslims say it. They have told me. Muslims in Aleppo. They say 'we are worried that Christians
are disappearing. What will we do without Christians. In Aleppo there are half a million Christians,
and now there are barely 20,000. Muslims in Syria fear for their country without Christians. They
said that it is Christians who raise the academic quality in universities. It is Christians who raise the
cultural level. Christians bring values to our society. Values that we do not have, such as
forgiveness. They are aware of the importance of Christians in the Middle East. More so than in the
Western world.

This is what persecuted Christians live daily, the nun said. They say Dont worry - kill me. They
cant take away the heaven from me. You can take my head, you can burn my churcheswhen I
die, I wont die.

His eyes reflect deep sadness. The eyes of a man sentenced to death. His name is Hamadnur
Mahdar. He is 28 and he is from Damascus. His uncle and a cousin were killed in the war. He and
his brothers and sisters will keep on fighting until Syria is free from the invaders and thugs. I have
a wife and four sons. When I speak to my sons on the phone the ask me: Dad, when are you
coming back? Wait, Ill come when I finish my service. Before, people could drive freely from
Damascus to Al-Qamishli without their IDs being checked. The roads were safe. But now, no one
can drive even three kilometers. Either the country will be safe again or we will die. This is our
path. Our forefathers taught us our land is our honor and we need to protect our land. God will
save Syria. All soldiers in the Syrian army are brothers. We serve together, maybe for 10 or 20 days,
or 4 years It doesnt matter, we still brothers. We are equal here, none is special. We have only
one rule: die or win. There is no third option. We must serve our country. I ask all young men to
come and help. No one should say I cant or I dont want. We all need to help our country.