What follows is an excerpt of an opinion piece penned by American-Armenian novelist Chris Bohjalian that appeared in the December 6 edition of the New York Times.

The forward trenches in the hills just beyond the abandoned village of Talish, in Nagorno-Karabakh, are reminiscent of World War I: long, endless, slits in the ground, the dirt buttressed by wood, with periodic firing posts and dugouts. Stacked tires packed with dirt stand in for sandbags, but otherwise it looks like the Western Front 100 years ago. Behind the trenches, alongside the road, tanks are angled to counterattack.

On the first day of September, the sky cerulean, Capt. Gegham Grigoryan, 32, stood with me and pointed toward the northeast — toward Azerbaijan and the minefield and buffer zone less than a mile away.

“If you want peace, you should prepare for war,” he said, shrugging.

Earlier this year, Nagorno-Karabakh, his small, unrecognized Armenian republic, got war. Azerbaijan attacked across the eastern border in the small hours of April 2, breaking a cease-fire that had largely held since 1994. Here in Talish, the 400-person village was so badly shelled that today it has been abandoned and the residents resettled in other parts of the country.

Captain Grigoryan, a father of two girls, has a degree in international relations, but believes that Nagorno-Karabakh needs him in the military: “It is better for me to wear a uniform than a suit.”

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Photo: Vahram Baghdasaryan/Photolure, via European Pressphoto Agency