Description
Collection of interviews with veterans of the Canadian Armed Forces recounting their experience of military service in the Balkans. Lés veterans in the video are: Darcy Neepin, Ross MacDonald, John Bilinskis Steven Gasser, Allan Roberts, Clint Slusar, Robert Wiseman, Jesse Adair, Lewis MacKenzie, Denis Allaire, James Fraser, David Ott, Perry Campbell, David Laxton, Alfie Bojalil and Darcy Grossinger.
Transcript
(John Bilinskis)
The first day we got there we were shelled so that baptism under fire happened immediately.
(David Ott)
We were the first Canadians shelled since Korea.
(David Laxton)
It became very real, very fast.
(Darcy Neepin)
That was probably the biggest reality check I had ever had in my life.
(Ross MacDonald)
Never ending machine gun fire going on. Battles going on all around us.
(John Bilinskis)
It was like CNN called it at the time, the most dangerous place on Earth.
(Ross MacDonald)
As a peacekeeper you have to be out in the open all the time so as a peacekeeper you are a walking target and you had that mindset and you accept it. You can’t do the job as a peacekeeper and hide inside your vehicle.
(Steven Gasser)
I think that’s where we’re lucky as Canadians. I think that we’re at least able to stay in a neutral position. I think we’d really get a really hard time if you moved yourself out of that, if you didn’t internalize the neutral position, I think you’d be in big trouble.
(David Laxton)
We weren’t there to tell anybody what to do or anything like that so we were the first contingent to actually go across this confrontation line.
(Allan Roberts)
The number one aim through all of this, regardless of peacekeeping or peacemaking is to de-escalate as much of the violence as possible.
(Clint Slusar)
You would see a bus drive by and hear a shot or two. The bus would pull over and they would bring a body out of it because there were snipers there shooting at innocent women and children constantly. It just didn’t make sense.
That’s why peacekeeping to me is a bit of a misnomer. It doesn’t, doesn’t quite fit.
(Darcy Neepin)
There was nothing but death, destruction and mayhem there. It happened daily, nightly, hourly and by the minute and there was no peace to keep there.
(Robert Wiseman)
What a way to live. The air in Bosnia itself, I could never, there was a rotten stench to it every morning when I woke up, a rotten stench. It was raw sewage, it was death.
(Jesse Adair)
I won’t say it was a third world country, it wasn’t but it was just a, it was a second world country that tried very hard to blow itself to pieces. Did a pretty good job.
(Major General Lewis MacKenzie)
And just about everybody hated us because we were a protection force and weren’t protecting anybody. We were just bringing in food and medicine.
(Ross MacDonald)
There was a lot of that nasty ethnic cleansing. Pets, livestock shot, every single thing. I mean if you walked into a village that had been ethnically cleansed, every single living thing was killed.
(Denis Allaire)
If I was a Croat, you were Serbian, well I had no value for your life. You were dirt.
(James Fraser)
You’d end up with relatives against relatives because at one stage they did marry each other. But now they’re on the opposite side.
(David Ott)
The bloodlines are not separated there. There’s no real enemy there. It’s not like the east versus the west, there’s three or four different enemies.
(Perry Campbell)
Some of these soldiers were kids. Like I’ve seen kids no more than twelve years old in clothes that didn’t even fit them and a rifle hung over their back and they’re down in the city, right and you look at it and say: It’s just a shame!
(Denis Allaire)
When you’re seeing one side using kids of another ethnic group as a shield or a pawn...
(David Laxton)
What’s the first thing you see? Your child. You know. And if you don’t have kids you see your friend’s kids and that. And you see a kid, you just see a kid and it’s not a Bosnian kid, it’s not a Serb kid, it’s just a kid.
(Alfie Bojalil)
I, sometimes I wish I could go back in time and go back and maybe save a life but it wasn’t possible.
(Darcy Grossinger)
I mean it affected everybody differently but it did affect everybody, there’s no doubt in my mind.
(Darcy Neepin)
And then they went through their phase and then they started living together so my last tour in 2000 I honestly feel that I noticed a difference there. I noticed a country getting back to normal, getting back to a routine way of life where they were neighbours. I don’t think those people smiled for about ten years, you know, and finally you saw them living again.