Helmet

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In The General of the Dead Army (1963), Ismail Kadare narrates, in fictional form, a search for the bones/remains of Italian soldiers killed near Albania’s southern border during Italy’s invasion of Greece during WWII. They lie in quickly constructed mass graves at the sites of battle. In Kadare’s novel, an Italian general has the burdensome task of finding these remains; without adequate records of identification, he discovers to his frustration that the ‘bones” he finds overlap with those of other nations’ soldiers. But the familiesin Italy want the bones back home. Finding a WWII Italian Army helmet at a street market, collected by a veteran of the Balkan wars near where the battles were fought, I am inspired to connect Kadare’s story to the real-life repatriation of Italian soldiers back to Italy in the early 1960s. Traveling through the southern Albanian mountains to locate the soldier of the helmet’s possible resting place, I discover, as does Kadare’s general, the absurd confusion in recovering remains at battle sites: who are the remains recovered for? Would Italian soldiers lying in the graves prefer to remain with their comrades? To whom do the remains belong? My own story, interwoven with Kadare’s, posits questions of belonging and return, reflected in my own search for home and place, as well as consideration of other global mass grave sites—often of noncombatants and victims of genocide—where remains are never found, let alone identified or returned.