Mgr. František Kotyz

“In 1984 I received a summons that I am to come to the army office for an intensive three-day training session. They took us by bus to Bílina. We got out and found ourselves standing in front of an arms depot and being told we’d be issued camo suits. I didn’t want that, so I started organising things there. They’d only sent us an invitation on a postcard, and now they were trying to dress us in camo. An officer ran up and started solving the matter. I told him: ‘If you want to see me in camo, send me a draft notice. Like this and could have but didn’t have to have come. You won’t get me dressed up in camo based on a postcard.’ A few people caught on to me. I shouted an order, we marched off to the gate, where I announced: ‘Write down: Kotyz plus thirty, The Bloody Knuckle pub. And when those hotshots decide whether civvies or camos, send someone to tell us about it.’ The pub’s name was derived from the nearby hospital. You won’t believe it. A helicopter came flying in two hours later. We ran out and saw František Veselý [commander of the Western Military Territory - ed.] come rushing up from the helicopter, shouting at some local officer: ‘Who is this Kotyz?’ So they brought me to him, and he started shouting at me too. To which I said: ‘You’ve got green duds on, but I’m in civvies. And if you want to speak with like that, send me a draft notice.’ ‘You want a draft notice.’ And he issued me one on the spot. Everyone else went home after three days, and I was stuck there for another month.”

“A lot of the vehicles didn’t make it, so they had to be towed again and again by Tatra lorries with low loaders. The question is, why did that happen. If we had been going to fight for our country, perhaps they would’ve all made it. But no one knew where we were going, no one told us anything properly. One thing was clear, they were preparing some dirty trick. When we neared the Polish borders, people were gripped with the fear that we’d actually go in. We all sensed it in some way. It’s no problem for the driver to incapacitate a tank in half an hour. All you have to do is shut the louvres, rev the engine up, and the temperature will shoot up to over a hundred degrees and burn the insert washers. The engine gets flooded by coolant and that’s it. The Hungarian FUGs and the Soviet BRDM worked in a similar way. The question stays, what was sabotage and what was deficient machinery. The exception was the Praga V3S, those are indestructible vehicles, they can’t overheat. They have air-cooled motors.”