Cyprus, My First Tour

Interviewer: And I understand that your first operational deployment was to Cyprus. It was 1978/79. I was thinking back recently to that tour and looking back at some pictures and the first thing that strikes you is how young you look but at the time you thought you were a pretty tough soldier at the time. It was a bit of a culture shock but not as much of a culture shock as we see now with the type of deployments we do or certainly have recently seen through the last twelve, fifteen years. As far as we were concerned when we arrived in Cyprus it was still a war zone. It was still a combat zone so it was very exciting, a lot of adventure involved, a little bit of apprehension as well because you didn’t know what you were getting yourself into. Confident in your training but certainly it was a culture shock but not a huge culture shock. It was still a very sort of European country at the time but certainly the scars of war and the devastation that that brought were evident everywhere. In particular, what we called the Green Line which separated the Turk Cypriots and the Greek Cypriots which remained of course largely undeveloped for obvious reasons. So a culture shock but I don’t think we felt really sort of out of our depth as perhaps we might have in deployments further on down the road.

Initially a culture shock, Mr. Bradley shares his positive views on his mission to Cyprus.

Daniel Bradley

Mr. Daniel Bradley was born June 24, 1958 in Ottawa, Ontario. At 18 years of age, walking by a recruiting centre, Mr. Bradley made an impulsive decision to join the military having a desire for the infantry. Mr. Bradley became a member of the Royal Canadian Regiment holding rank as an infanteer and obtained training at CFB Cornwallis in Trenton, Ontario. After training, Mr. Bradley spent a bit of time In Canada service but in 1978 experienced his first operational deployment to Cyrpus. In 1992 Mr. Bradley was given another opportunity to deploy to Somalia and joined a contingency from the RCR and became part of the Airborne Regiment where he held rank of Chief Warrant Officer. As his military career continued Mr. Bradley was part of an operational to Croatia in 1994, Bosnia in 1997 and more recently 2002/03 travelled to Afghanistan on two different operations, one being Roto O as Company Sergeant Major. Mr. Bradley retired in 2011 with 35 years of military sevice.