Description
Mr. Fraser shares a story about a tense encounter he faced with a Turkish soldier.
James Fraser
Mr. Fraser was born February 25, 1946, in North Preston, Nova Scotia. After obtaining his high school education, Mr. Fraser decided on a career in the military and joined the army. In 1967, he accepted his first tour of duty to Cyprus followed by deployments to Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Golan Heights. In his very satisfying 34-year military career, Mr. Fraser achieved the rank of Command Chief Warrant Officer with the Canadian Forces. After his retirement, he returned to Nova Scotia with his family.
Transcript
In ‘67, we happened to be patrolling and we got a little too close to one of the Turkish outposts and the young fellow was pretty upset. He was going to shoot us, I mean that’s the bottom line. He was going to, he had an old .303 weapon. We didn’t know whether he was pointing it at us. We didn’t know whether he could. . . . Just some of these things, they were so old you didn’t know . . . you could barely touch them and they could have went off. Managed to calm the young soldier down and he let us go so we were all right. But again you’re young, I was twenty one years old so you just . . . you never think about it and now to be honest you never think about, at that stage, of actually dying. You think about that after, after you get down off that hill and you’re almost back to your outpost and you start to think about it. Yeah, yeah, but it’s not something you can dwell on because you’re going to have to go back out there the next day and do that same patrol all over again.