Shortly after that is when I reached into the box under Reginald's bunk for the notebooks and pen and began to set down this story. It's ironic, I had read several autobiographies before this episode began and with each page turned I would always think of the author and wonder where he sat as he penned out the story of his life, what photographs sat on the desk, whispering to him of long-forgotten laughs and losses, and what trophies rested on the mantel as a testament to toil and achievement. I write mine from the confines of cell 145 in an unnamed Tunisian desert prison.

Chronicling these events over the past months has helped to focus my idle mind away from these ever refining powers of observation that plague me. It has helped me come to an understanding as to how I arrived here. But having done so, I must confess I no longer know if this is the epilogue to the story or if the preceding pages are but a lengthy prologue and this is the story.

The torture and beatings are less frequent now than in the first weeks, but lately, it seems that each evening abduction and obligatory all-night session is more thorough and earnest than the one before. Their questions, if they even bother to ask them, roll off me and their blows affect me not to their ends, but instead to my own. Reginald is awake and waiting each time I'm dumped back into my cell. And each time he cleans me up and tells me I look fine. I don't believe him any longer but I can appreciate why he says it. I lay in bed at night and the sound of my own breathing sounds ridiculous to me, as though someone else is mustering the will to see it done.

Sometimes, usually after a session with the sergeant and an interrogator from Tunis, I reread the first parts of this manuscript and marvel at the change they have brought about in me.

Blow by blow, blight by blight, the attacks pile up against you, and you are forced again to re-muster your dwindling resources and tighten the defensive perimeters of your servile mind. Slowly, one mental rampart after another goes undefended, another post falls to the enemy, and another flag is lowered in the face of their superior numbers until even the tattered remains of what you once were become untenable. Standing in the wings of lucidity, master of nothing you survey, a decision is made and it makes sense, perfect sense. But then it had to, even to be considered in the first place. Salvation is seen in a last ditch effort to escape, to rise above the conditions you've sunk to, to dissolve life here before it dissolves you. At that point you stand as the plenipotentiary of all desperate men and as such, are compelled to action.