Getting Through the Check Points

One night I was on duty and there was a call came through and it was . . . anyway, it took a bit of trying to figure out what the guy was saying because most of it was in German but he was the Austrian Force commander’s driver and he had been going back to the Austrian Contingent, Famagusta, and had been involved in an accident. So he was quite excited to begin with having been in an accident. He was trying to relay this to us to get assistance. So what I did is I took Wolfgang, who was the Austrian, spoke German fluently, I called him back in to talk to the guy to find out what’s going on, so he got the story. So then we had to get a little convoy together. We had to get a wrecker to go and get the vehicle, we had to get the ambulance and military police vehicle and then we have to go through the check point and we have to sort of make, you know, like we need to go through because we’ve got to go help this guy and you never knew how you would be received. Sometimes, a lot of it, I think, was bluffing almost. You’d say, “We’re going through,” you know. I mean, if you want to shoot at us go ahead but we’re going through. We have to do the job. We have a job to do and we’re going to go and please understand. And often at these check points you’d have somebody, whether it would be the Greek or the Turkish there was always somebody that spoke English so you could have a pretty good conversation.