What is more beautiful than turning your ideals into deeds? Being a rebel or a mercenary grips the imagination. Dutch war journalist Arnold Karskens has written a book about Dutch idealists who fought under foreign flags. A varied and colourful array of fighters on parade...

A passage from the book reads:

"Killing didn't affect me. Pulling the trigger is a simple act and I frequently aimed, but you never know if your shot hit its target. The fact that you've killed people might seem strange to others here in the Netherlands. But I didn't feel anything afterwards, I didn't have any regrets or feel sorry."

Murdering children
Those were the words of Rob van Genderen, now in his 50s, about his time as a rebel in El Salvador. In the early 80s, he spent six months fighting against the dictatorship in the Central American country. He was at home in the Netherlands, sitting on the sofa reading an article in the newspaper about soldiers who shot children climbing trees or cut a child from a pregnant woman because they were bored. He was absolutely furious and demonstrating and protesting in the Netherlands wasn't enough for him, he decided to do something concrete and flew to Central America. Before he knew it, he was involved in his first ambush:

"As a column of army vehicles approached, a mine exploded at the front of the column. The soldiers poured out of the vehicles and the shooting started. I rushed to the front and emptied my magazine. I did it automatically."

Broken heart
In Karskens' book, we read about another rebel: a solitary man who cycled across Asia and joined the Vietcong. He was driven by a broken heart and didn't survive the war. And then there are the others: a deserter from the Dutch army who fights in the Balkan War to avoid his punishment. He doesn't survive either. A teenager rushes to Budapest to support the Hungarian rebellion against the Soviets. The story of his arrival travels through the city like a wildfire. He learnt to shoot and survives the conflict.

Payback
Despite the beauty of their dreams, all of the interviewees say the bitter reality of the battlefield tarnished the heroism and the romanticism of their ideals. Hunger, cold, boredom, butchery and torture were the norms. Despite that, battlefields continue to exert their pull.

Arnold Karskens: "you can't volunteer to fight in a war without some longing for adventure and a measure of idealism. But the relationship between the two is different for everybody. Take the Jewish Dutchman Avraham Roet; many of his family members died during the Second World War and he didn't feel safe in the Netherlands anymore. He eventually went to the British Mandate of Palestine to fight for a Jewish state. He told me, "It was just like paying for your coffee in a restaurant, you just do it".

Enduring ideals
All of the survivors, except one, still believe they made the correct choice. El Salvador rebel Rob van Genderen says that in retrospect, he wishes he had made a different choice:

"Terrible things are done in order to achieve something good. Sometimes I look at my family and think about my brother, who has been a teacher for years and years. He has turned countless numbers of children into good, decent members of society and helped lots of kids solve their problems. They’re all doing well, they're successful. That's far more important than murdering people in a war that is not yours. I should have used my Western, democratic weapons instead."

Today, 30 years after El Salvador, for Rob van Genderen it's a very different life: he is now an IT systems controller.