First Mission to Cyprus

In the beginning of my career I was in infantry, 031 with the Royal 22e Regiment. It was basically, I was part of the recce platoon 3rd battalion and that was pretty much what it was for an infantry person - going target shooting, exercises, digging trenches, preparing for any eventual catastrophe or war or whatever. I was in Cyprus in 1985 and I was the service officer’s operation driver while I was down there. So any task that the operation officer had around Cyprus on the Greek side or on the Turkish side I would drive him around to the destination that he had to go to. It was my first mission out of the country. I had never been out of the country before and it was surprisingly not what I had expected to begin with because a lot of people had been going to Cyprus before and they said it was called “Club Med” or whatever and I was thinking I was going on a six month vacation which was not the case. And I found that out fairly quickly while I was down there because I used to drive the service officer and there was places where there was houses that were booby-trapped and he would point them out to me and, you know, that brings a chill to you because you never knew when these could explode. They had been there for years and years and they could detonate or whatever. It could have exploded while I was there, you know. So that got me scared.

But another time I was at Point Charlie 100 and there was a building that used to belong to the Canadians which was Beaver Lodge. At Beaver Lodge there was a Turkish soldier there with a rifle. He had pointed his rifle at me and he cocked it showing that there was bullets coming out. This is when I realized we were not actually at “Club Med.” We were actually, my life was in danger at that moment and I wasn’t expecting that so I had to call it in being that our magazines were in our pocket. You couldn’t put it on your rifle without permission so I was pretty scared there. That changed my whole attitude of the rest of the tour.