My Son Was Supposed to Complete His Service Today and Return Home: Barsik Gishyan

The father of fallen soldier David Gishyan, Barsik Gishyan, wrote on his Facebook page: “Today is July 7, my son was supposed to complete his service and return home, but he did not return. More precisely, he returned from the mountains of Syunik to Yerablur, better through the Georgian-Azerbaijani ‘Krasni Most’ checkpoint. At the same time, a truck carrying the bodies of 32 Armenian soldiers was arriving from Georgia via Novembor, while my daughter passed in the opposite direction, going to light a candle for her brother at a shrine on top of one of the high hills of Novembor, where my children always spent their summers.

My son had a divine humanity and generosity, a deep human compassion. Once, when he was small, he saw a villager caught in heavy rain on a dark mountain night, wet and shivering, at 2000 meters high, cold and dark... he made me take him to our shelter and keep him until morning. Another time, I remember watching from a building's balcony in Yerevan, a cat fell under a car... he made a box from cardboard, placed some clothes inside, put the cat in the box, and took it to bury it in the field. My son was generous by nature; there was something celestial in that generosity, and perhaps that is connected to his sacrifice.

There is a lot of information and videos available online indicating that when the Azerbaijanis approached my seriously injured son, they later killed him after staging a fake medical assistance scenario. This is not true; they did not kill him in a severely injured state, but they were cruel.

I will write more details later. Every day I walk through the images of our soldiers in Yerablur, looking at the innocent faces of young men, mostly aged 18-22, filled with youthful romance and patriotism. But what about their families...? Will they ever be able to get back on their feet...? I doubt it; the next generation in their families will bear the burden of lost lives of 19-22-year-olds. Only a professional army with fewer casualties, specialized, and technologically equipped is capable of preventing all this. But what kind of army can exist without allied armies (huddled in positions at the mountain peaks without allies), what kind of army without a developed economy, political system, society, education, and science?

In Yerevan, near Parakar, there is a road among the fields that I often walked with my son on my shoulders when he was small.

Now he is gone, and that road pulls at me like a magnet; I endlessly change my path so that I can keep going back and forth on that road, perhaps until the end of my life... that road still holds what was there 18 years ago—my 1-2-year-old son and me... him, my little boy, sitting on my shoulders. Every day I walk that road, feeling him on my shoulders; my soul hurts, but I do not yet have the strength to abandon that road.”