Croatia - A Different World

Interviewer: And what can you tell us about what happened in Croatia?

That was a different world. That was probably the biggest reality check I had ever had in my life. Because, and I don't, with Cyprus, everything had stopped. They weren't firing at each other, they weren't attacking each other daily, but there, when you went there, you'd hear it every night. It went on, my whole tour it didn't stop in 92' -93'. You would hear light arms fire, you would hear fifty calibre fire, heavy machine gun fire, you would hear artillery fire nightly. You would see fires burning, houses burning, you would see and hear children, and women and children crying that they couldn't find their loved ones. They were hungry, they wanted food, and you just, I mean, come on you might see the odd, you know people asking for change here in, in Canada, but you don't see, what you saw there. You don't see the mayhem of the nightly situation there. And you would have to patrol in it daily, nightly you would be tasked on this patrol to go to this area and you would just see the destruction. The daily destruction or stuff that happened that night, and you know people being belligerent to you. It was very hard because you would, you know, if other Veterans see this then I don't wanna say we were fired at nightly, and you know we were under constant barrage. But yeah we took, there was some firing going on, and you know you got three different sides of military that don't want you there because they just wanna go all out. But then you also got civilians there, who are asking you why you're not doing anything, "Why aren't you stopping what's going on? " And you know, what do you say to them? It's hard, it's like you know we're trying, we're doing our best, we're you know, governments have to be involved, we're just, we're here with you, we're going through the same things.neepin_710-1_8