Sad Memory

Near the end of our deployment in Bosnia there was a, a situation that, it was, it was hard, it was sad. We were doing a handover reconnaissance with my replacement, the new officer that was going to command my unit and we were doing a reconnaissance on a bridge construction project that he was going to have to complete. We'd done the design, the reconnaissance design, and had it all set up. There was a protest going on about a, a kilometre up the road that we'd come through and we knew we were in a bit of a sensitive area. We walked down to where the bridge was going to have to be built in this one particular village and there's one old gentleman there that was really, really, really high. Probably on plum brandy, Sljivovica, I don't know, but he was pretty much out of his mind and he came down to where we were and grabbed me by, by my fighting harness and just latched on to me like crazy, but the, the whole place was, you know, the feeling was it was, it was just gonna break out into a, into a fight, like we weren't wanted there. So here's a group, a small group of us getting ready to put a new bridge in across the river because the bridge they have is deteriorating, it's not going to be able to be used anymore. Sure, it's for a military mission, but everybody's gonna use this new bridge. They don't want us there and he's latched onto me and my driver had been, this is his second tour in Bosnia, raised his rifle butt to strike this guy in the head and I basically stopped him and said, "No you can't do that." I mean first of all, I don't want him to hit him and secondly, we're, we're all, like our health and well-being is gonna be in jeopardy because there's a whole bunch of people starting to form up on the road above us. So we, we had to get outta there and I just, it's just, you know, it's sad in a way because of, of us wanting to help them, us being there to help them and having this one individual turn that around and of course everybody that he lived with is in that village, were, were really gonna turn on, on us if we did the wrong thing. So, we basically just left and it didn't really amount to anything when you look back at it now, but it just, it just made me feel bad because of you know I'm at five and a half, about five months into the tour and done a lot of things and, and wanting to do more and I don't know if he knew who we were or what. We were just in army uniforms and he didn't want us there.