Peacekeeping Operations

Well, I always enjoyed experiencing new places. Cyprus was very exciting with a very interesting history. We had only been back from Germany for six months by the time we deployed to Cyprus, well perhaps a year. So our battalion was still very much combat oriented. The peacekeeping is a completely different, was a completely different ball game in those days because your terms of engagement were very much reduced. You couldn’t intervene to protect the local populous for example unless you were personally being threatened yourself. So that was pretty difficult for soldiers who had been trained to fight on the European battlefield, you know, and I assume that it still is today although the rules are changing a little bit more in their favour but I am one of the people who strongly feel that peacekeeping should only be a secondary function of any military organization and you cannot keep the peace with soldiers who are not trained and prepared to go to a real war.