Fearing For Your Survival

Heroes Remember

Fearing For Your Survival

Transcript

One night we were at a place called Mr. Kareem’s Chicken and it was the equivalent of KFC in downtown Peshawar and a young guy drove up in a little white Suzuki Swift, and got out and babbled something and said my name, Commander Jerry. A couple of others sort of hustled him away and there was myself and my Sergeant-Major Dave McCracken, another Canadian named Wally Tobin and two New Zealanders. There was a, one of the contingents that was there besides us was New Zealanders. There was also Australians, Americans and Norwegians in our area. But two of the Kiwi guys, Terry Hokianga and the other guy and I should remember him more than Hoki. He was the guy that actually saved my life. The guy, the young guy, the Pakistani came back 10 or 15 minutes later with a pistol, jumped out and pointed it at me and just before he shot the Kiwi hit his arm and the round went off in the air. So we all hustled ourselves out of there pretty quickly. Now the other local Paks got a hold of the guy and took the pistol from him. Now why they did that I’m not clear either because we were obviously white and Christian and shouldn’t have been, you know, there. And we had gotten a little bit complacent I guess about our own security in where we would go and what time of day and stuff where we would go. We thought that we understood things fairly well and realized pretty quickly at that, that, you know, we weren’t in the right place that time. I mean that was a lesson on personal security. Time to start paying a little bit more attention to what we were doing and where we were doing it. And even though it was only 7 o’clock in the evening, having chicken at Mr. Kareem’s was not one of them.

Description

Mr. Deveau describes an incident when his life became threatened, and realized the importance of personal security and the protection of oneself.

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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