Threatened With Death!

Heroes Remember

Threatened With Death!

Transcript

I had one personal experience where I was threatened with death and it occurred when a Greek Cypriot platoon commander decided that he would send some of his people into no man’s land to pick up some oil drums – empty oil drums that were there. That would have been a violation of the status quo. See he intended to use them to fortify his location. I sent a couple of people from my observation post to stop the crew from taking the oil drums and they got into sort of a pushing and shoving match over these oil drums. I went up the hill to talk to the platoon commander. He had deployed slightly to the left of them. I remember a person with a machine gun and he said to me, “Take your people off mine on the oil drums there and give me the oil drums or I will order my men to shoot you”. So I couldn’t do that nor could I go away so I sort of prepared myself to be shot and fortunately my company commander who’d been advised by radio of the circumstances developing rushed up behind me and deployed a few cooks and whoever he could find from the company headquarters with rifles aimed at the Cypriot platoon commander. So hence the stand off. I was allowed to go down and they didn’t take the oil drums and the situation went back to where it had been, but for me it was pretty traumatic. The second experience was not mine but I was in the battalion command post. We received a message from one side or the other saying that a shepherd and his sheep had crossed the boundary and if they weren’t removed in some impossible time like fifteen minutes, this side would open fire. We immediately dispatched a reconnaissance patrol to try to deal with the situation but they couldn’t make it in fifteen minutes. It was quite far away and difficult terrain and so when they got there the shepherd and his sheep were dead – killed by a fifty calibre machine gun from a couple of thousand yards. So this was just a demonstration I suppose. That’s ... that’s what we saw I guess. I didn’t see that but ... Interviewer: That lack of value of human life that they exhibited that day ... now granted you were okay but you were with your command post who’d heard about this ... that must stick with you even today? Yes. That ... that experience is often with me. I’ve told that story a lot of times. I guess I’ve told it as an example of the situation that was ... along with an opinion that we may not have been ... did not achieve much by our presence actually.

Description

Mr. Paterson talks about his life being threatened after sending troops in to no man’s land to pick up oil drums.

Tom Paterson

Mr. Paterson was born in Vancouver BC in 1943. At the age of six his family moved to Toronto, Ontario where he graduated from high school. After graduating from high school he went to the University of Ottawa to obtain his degree. Mr. Paterson joined the service in 1964 where he became a major and did peace keeping in Cyprus.

Meta Data