“No one teaches you how to come back from war. How to move from the sound of gunfire to the silence of a room. How to sleep peacefully after years of being awake. How to walk among people as if nothing has changed, when inside nothing is the same anymore.” This is what appears in the last Instagram post-a video with a caption-by Alex Pineschi, the contractor who died in Ukraine, where he had been fighting soon after the Russian invasion in 2022.

“War,” wrote the Italian volunteer, “does not end when the mission ends. It stays with you, changes how you think, how you breathe, how you see the world. Then you learn to fight again-not against an enemy but against yourself. Against the noise, against the memories, against the emptiness that comes when you stop surviving and must begin to live again.”

On social media some described him as “a man endowed with solid and deep ethical and moral principles! A professional trained mainly in the field. Empathetic and well-mannered.” When called a hero, he replied: “I’m nobody; the heroes are others.”