Culture of Hatred

There it became obvious that people, certain groups hated each other. Cyprus it was a, a line on that map and you could see where that line was. Bosnia, there was no line, really, and we were working with some of the people and you had to be careful who you were bringing in the room with who else and you sort of got more into the human aspects of, of, of the job and we were moving around the country doing some of the, of the missions that we had to take, do, we were in different minority areas and we had to be a bit more cautious about what we were doing and how we were doing it and who we involved, and sometimes we could, we could take one translator, but not the other depending on where we went because of their religion. So there was, there was a lot of things at play that let you know that there was hatred in the country. I think it was much more obvious in the sense that you could, you know, they, they weren't warring in 1997, that it'd been kinda still or calm for at least eighteen months maybe twenty-four months, by that point in time, but you would go through villages that had been entirely decimated and they, one in every five houses left standing. I flew over an area in a, a, in a Black Hawk helicopter on one reconnaissance and you could see one village was gone, the next one was fine, you know, and talk about what, what happened, they were only five kilometres apart. One, the one village went to the other village and basically annihilated the village. That's what happened and the same thing with the housing and you went by that daily basically so... Even in Sarajevo you, in Sarajevo you could see exactly where the entire bombardment had happened for that entire two-year period. It's indelibly marked on the south side of every single apartment building all the way down the, the centre of town so, I don't know why, but it was just more obvious there was this hatred in, in the country and even though we'd talked about it and studied it, that was, it was harder to, I guess harder to deal with cause it was kinda there in the people that you dealt with. They didn't trust each other.