The Lady who Kissed my Boot

I was very young when I went to Cyprus, 19 years old and so I was very impressionable and first time out of the backwoods of Prince Edward Island. I went over there and seen this culture, two cultures actually, two warring cultures, two different ends of a spectrum, okay. You had your very radical group at one extreme, at one side and same on the other and we had a lot of people that were kind of in the middle. So you couldn’t judge them all the same. We had a massacre while I was there where the Turks got after the Greeks. And they shelled a village and we were called out with some infantry. So we went down there, it was the middle of the night and I recall seeing the red tracer bullets go over and you could hear the heavy stuff going in. It was kind of thud, thud, thud, you know, they were hitting the buildings and stuff. And we were in our armored car, little Ferret, and so we pulled into the village when it got light enough to see. And as soon as we got there, we got out. No we pulled into, next to a wall and the mortar rounds were coming down and the sergeant that I was driving for he said, “Well, get away from the wall because the mortar is going to hit the wall and the wall is going to fall on top of us and we’re going to be trapped.” So we had to move out of there and as we were doing so there was a body or a part of a body and I couldn’t maneuver out of there without running over the body. So we had to run over a human being with our car to get out of there. So that kind of stuck with me over the years. And after it was all over, the people started coming out of the ruins, you know, when it was declared cease fire and this old, old woman, they all dressed in black over there. She came, me and my sergeant were standing in front of the car there and she came over and she got on her knees and kissed my boots... she was so grateful to be alive. So that was moving, very moving to me at the time as a 19 year old. Of course, she was very old then, she looked like she was 90 years old, never knew her, she couldn’t speak English or nothing, you know, she was a Greek. But did we make a difference? Yep, you know, a lot of people say the Army is a waste of money but to that old lady, we made a difference