Roto O Operation in Kosovo

Well Roto O to Kosovo when the UN decided to go in and make peace into Kosovo. It was a little bit different, I went last minute because somebody else was sick so I only had a few weeks’ notice I was going over. So I was one of the last flights in, we got in the country, FYROM, Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. So we were going from there up north into Kosovo. I wasn’t with the front line troops I was with the re-supply groups, the service battalion. So we set up in different camps and we were going in there the day like within hours of them going across these bridges and stuff to take over Kosovo and you could see all the holes in the wall with the wires still hanging out of them from the engineers who had just gone through and removed the bombs and the bridges that would have blown up and everything else and refugees on the camp all around there that we had all seen on tv before we went, it was true. You could see it all around the border, hundreds and hundreds of tents with all the people and they are all fenced in. We’re going through at night in blackouts; you can’t see, you don’t know where you are; very had to see where you are going in the dark and everything like that and you’re following the vehicle in front of you about thirty or forty kilometres an hour at about ten, fifteen feet and stuff like that and all of a sudden the Americans show up and stop you and look all over and make sure everyone is who they are and what we’re doing, sort of resupplying the battle as it moves forward in the middle of the night. So that was a real experience in heightened security, you’re really, really nervous because you realize you could be shot. Who knows who’s hiding in the hills, even though they’ve pushed the fighting forces up to Serbia, they could still be there because maybe they didn’t get out in time. And you realize that when the light comes up and you look around you, you see how decimated the place is. Like I said, all these holes from the engineers clearing the bombs and stuff out of the tunnels and the bridges, they were all wired to explode when people drove over but we just got to them in time and we cleared them. And there are still Soviet tanks everywhere. We were actually caught in one place when probably fifty to seventy five tanks and armoured vehicles rolled underneath the road when being escorted out of the country and we were stuck watching them as they rolled right past us.