Vaclav Havel, who else?

To tell you the truth, its not just the Americans and other foreigners who think of me as a kind of fairy-tale prince or at least as the main character in a fairy tale; I to am often aware of something utterl unbelievable in my own destiny. And I’m less and less able to understand that destiny; at times I even see myself as a minor freak of history. How could this ever have happened to me—and to me in particular—to be in the very centre of events so momentous that they determined the fate of many nations and millions of people? Why did I, the author of absurd plays, experience hundreds of absurd situations…Sometimes I think my is just a dream and that one day, very soon, I will wake up in 1958 as a soldier in the barracks in Ceske Budejovice; the alarm will have sounded, and I –someone with no sense balance—will haveto go down a busy street in the morning rush hour on a bicycle with no rubber tires wearing a helmet and full battle gear, carryng a machine gun, a gas mask, and a cardboard box full of live ammunition, in order to wake up an officer in his flat so that he can lead our entire sapper regiment to the westen borders on an exercise to defend the communist world against NATO trops ( the same organization whose summit I will inaugaurate in Prague forty-four years later). But in fact, even my two years in the army, and even more so my five years in prison, seem to me an unreal and indescribable dream, albeit in this case a very dark one. And so I must ultimately pose the question as to whether all of this—the fact that such a peaceable man ended up living such an adventurous life—isn’t a result of the fact that life itself, even the most ordinary and the most inconspicuous life, is an unbelievable miracle. A fairy tale at times beautiful, at times suspenseful, at times terrifying.

Photo... my boys: Mr enthusiasmo and Wall-eye the hat, my favorite and most hard working day labourers. And, these guys would call after me on my walk home, just to check in, see how I was getting on... These are the guys I fought for.