Luis Gernnini, 52, was a reservist during the war guarding the Patagonia shoreline in case the British thought to head towards the mainland, and today is part of a protest encampment outside the Casa Rosada demanding he be paid a pension for his service.
But the staff that stayed on during the war stood guard at night.
Mr. Ballard, the lawyer, recalled that the World War II guard house ended up in his backyard, where he and his brother used it as a fort.
After a century of war, of guard towers and barbed wire, of tanks and gas chambers, "boring" sounds tantalizingly close to that much desired national normality.
The actor Bill Pertwee played more than a satellite character in Dad's Army, the perennially popular BBC sitcom about a hapless Second World War Home Guard platoon on England's south coast.
They spent most of the war under guard at Japan's Santo Tomas internment camp for foreign nationals in Manila, where they faced near-starvation and were ravaged by disease and malnutrition while treating nearly 4,000 men, women and children.
The fort was built during the Civil War to guard the city against attack from the East River, but it closed in 1995, and since then, much of the land, along with many of its dilapidated Victorian buildings, has been handed over to the city.
That formidable French system of fortifications was built in the '30s by André Maginot, the French minister of war, to guard against invasion from the east.
"Is that a problem?" Despite his gun, and the scars of a four year civil war, the guard could only stammer a reply.
If so, then Demjanjuk's epitaph is just: not that he died a free man but that he died, in the eyes of the world and for all history that follows, a convicted Nazi war camp guard.
