My Book

As I promised I'm now going to start to write my book on my blog some names and places have been changed but everything is true perhaps the tense is misleading but I wrote this book in the 90's and starts off in 1991.

"Soldier of Fortune Or Soldier of Love"

Chapter 1

Once upon a time, those would be great words to start a fairy tale but this is no fairy tale. This is a factual account of one man's struggle to help others less fortunate than himself, it is a story about myself, an ordinary man, the only thing that separates me from others is that I am an idealist, an idealist that not only talks about things but acts on them. My parents are also idealists,my father Richard believes in raising money for certain causes, my mother Margie believes in helping the aged and helping children in Ethiopia, these are their ideals and they try to live up to them, so why should I not be allowed to live up to them. My name is C.S.Hollaway and up until one year ago I lived in a small village in South Wales, I was a self-employed taxi driver owning two cars and an old Jaguar and employing three drivers. During this time I was married the second time to my wife Karen who had 5 children by a previous marriage and we were reasonably happy until things started to go downhill with my business. The drivers I employed had accidents while driving my cars, I was caught several times by the police for speeding which ended up with me being banned from driving for a short period and I started to get behind with my repayments of my business loan. There was no problem with getting business as I had an abundance of regular customers but because money and car problems I started to lose control of the business, in the end it came to the point that it would be better if I went bankrupt than have a nervous breakdown because I was worrying so much about everything. It cost me 150 pounds to go bankrupt, so I saved the money up over several weeks and started bankruptcy proceedings. Once everything had been sorted out I found out that I owed somewhere in the region of 21 thousand pounds so instead of being a self employed business man I was resigned to signing on the unemployment register every week, what a comedown. What to do for the best was the all important question because I did not have any occupational training to fall back on so therefore there was no real job that I could do, the only thing that I knew was how to be a soldier.

After sitting around the house for a few weeks, just watching TV and reading newspapers I totally I was totally disinchanted with my life, I felt absolutely useless. My wife and I were arguing all the time for stupid and trivial reasons, we were not getting on at all, our marriage was very rocky and I did not know whether it would last, there had to be something that I could do about my employment and financial situation, perhaps then our marital status would improve or that was what I hoped for. While watching the TV one day I saw a report from a place called Vukovar that was in Yugoslavia, it was a report about three ex British soldiers who had gone to Vukovar, joined the Croatian army and were fighting alongside the Croatian's who were striving for independence from the country of Yugoslavia. In an instance I knew that this was what I had been looking for, a job doing what I knew best and a chance to earn some money no matter how little or how large the amount was but most of all a chance to help others achieve the freedom and democracy that we in the West take for granted. All my life I had constantly taken from others now it was my turn, my opportunity to help others, my chance to repay the help that I had been given over the years, so there and then I decided to go to Yugoslavia. How to get there and how to get the money I needed for travelling expenses, these were the things that would occupy my mind from now on. Everywhere else in the world communism was dying away even in the heart of Russia, Germany these countries had all fouhd out that to become a democracy was better than their old way of life. There were people all over the east trying to bring this democracy to their own countries, it started with Poland and Solidarity, now there was no stopping this tide of freedom that was washing over the world. This was going to be my fate, this was what I had been born for to help the people of Croatia. 

Follow and share and have a great day.