Accomplishments

In our immediate area, anybody that was basically, we took care of problems as we seen, as we saw them. Like, for example, in the village we lived in, we made sure everybody was fed. We made sure everybody was protected. We, we did, you know, we made, we did whatever good we could when we saw it and, and maybe, you know, we did, we did, we did prevent a lot by, by being there which was our mission. And we'd, we'd accomplished a lot of it, but in you know, in hind sight we were, there was, there wasn't so much large scale conflict going on when I was there as it was all small, small unit, small unit things were going on. A lot of, a lot of jump across the line and hit a house, hit, you know, shoot up a school, shoot up something small. There wasn't, there wasn't a large, there wasn't a large force for us to protect against. It was a lot of small stuff. Like we, we moved south to Okachani, which is in a Serb held area and we were supposed, there was, a Croatian tank brigade was expecting to be rolling through here which eventually did happen. But we were there and we, we set up a defensive on the hill and said, "Okay, you guys gotta stop it." Which was fine, but we didn't have anything to stop it with, with our, our biggest, we had a eighty-four millimetre anti-tank weapon. You fire from your shoulder. I mean, sure we might have hit one or two of them but we, you know, we basically, the, the idea, our mission was to stop them by being there, you know not, not physically. We didn't have the force to stop them, but by being there we were suppose to stop them and by this time, would have been early spring, late winter, early spring, we, that's when we moved in there. I mean, they never did roll through when we were there, but they did soon after, after we left unfortunately.

Mr. Grossinger talks about how they made sure that everybody in the village never went hungry and that they were protected.

Darcy Grossinger

Mr.Grossinger was born in 1969 in Germany, and was raised on army bases around the world due to his father’s service in the Canadian Forces. Seeking adventure and the opportunity to travel, Mr.Grossinger enlisted in the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry in November of 1989. He became a rifleman and climbed the ranks quickly becoming a corporal. In the fall of 1992, Mr.Grossinger was given his first assignment overseas in Croatia with the United Nations Peacekeeping operations. Over the course of the six month tour, Mr.Grossinger did many jobs, including releif convoys, escorts and patrolling missions. It wasn’t until 1997, and again in 2000, Mr.Grossinger would return to that area, only this time he was stationed in Bosnia under the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Shortly after his 2000 tour in Bosnia, he was sent as part of an American brigade doing sensitive site exploration in the challenging mountains of Afganistan.