The Blasts of Gunfire

Heroes Remember

The Blasts of Gunfire

Transcript

In the city of Peshawar, all day long and through the night we would hear gunfire. Where we lived in a large villa-type house, and everyone of them was in a huge walled compound and so on. The house next to us was an American contingent from the US Special Forces and then the very next house to them was an Afghan house. We know, or I certainly realize now what they were, they were clearly Taliban. Across the large field out by the back of our house there was another house and they were Northern Alliance guys and we would sit up on our roof and watch them have fire fights in the middle of the day. And they would shoot each other, occasionally somebody would get killed. They would stop, drag the bodies away and that would be it. But there was constantly gunfire through the town and it didn’t matter whether it was day, night, whatever. For some reason in that part of the world they think it’s alright to shoot up into the air. I think most of us have seen that on television, the Arab world and the Muslim world do that routinely and for different reasons, for celebration, for, you know, whatever, but there were also a number of people every day in a city that size that were killed from falling bullets. I remember on one occasion there was a, I believe they were either French or Dutch, I think they were little Dutch girls playing in a compound by a place called the American Club which was the only sort of club that we could go to, the white westerns could go to, to socialize. And they were just out in the grounds playing and there were tennis courts there. And there was a French national who was playing tennis with, I don’t know if it was with the Dutch guy or somebody else, but falling bullets come down and one of the little girls took a round on the top of the hand, another one took one through the top of the head and the French guy, the French nationalist playing tennis, took one that came down through his eyebrow and took a piece off the end of his nose and that’s just cause he was stretched out at the time when the bullet came down.

Description

Mr. Deveau describes the sights and sounds of daily acts of gun fights amongst the local people.

Jerry Deveau

Mr. Jerry Deveau was born in Middleton, Nova Scotia on November 20, 1950. Looking for excitement, Mr. Deveau believed he was up for a reasonable challenge in life and decided to join the Canadian Forces. Mr. Deveau joined the Army and after going through a personnel selection unit held occupation of Combat Engineer. In 1990, Mr. Deveau participated in his first operational tour to Pakistan and in 1994 accepted another tour to Rwanda as Chief Warrant Officer. At the end of his military career, Mr. Deveau held rank of Major. Mr. Deveau became employed as a Peer Support Coordinator with the OSISS (Occupational Stress Injury Social Support) program, a federal government network that provides support for military personnel returning to civilian life. Mr. Deveau resides in Fredericton, New Brunswick with his family.

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