Lieutenant Colonel (ret.) Pavel Koutenský

“We were in Sereď for a year and in Bratislava for another two. They kept nagging at me there to join the CPC because I had a good understanding of things. I knew a bit of Marxism-Leninism. Without realising what I was getting myself into, I did it, but then as soon as I came to my unit I found that things were not as they seemed at all, and so it started irritating me. Although my unit was a rocket guard brigade, there were such dolts there, you just know it, and one of them even ratted on me later on... Well, and that’s why they discharged me.”

“At half past ten or eleven o’clock, I’m not sure, I arrived there and suddenly found we were being occupied by the Ruskies. We didn’t know about it, not a clue. Well, what could we do, nothing. Svoboda [the Czechoslovak president - ed.] told us we mustn’t fight. So we at least handed out live bullets and grenades and prepared to dig trenches around the barracks. Well, but they didn’t let us do that either. The new barracks in Rokycany was surrounded by fields back then, and they drove up and deployed there – tank, gun, tank, gun... All the way around; they even dug the guns in. And when I observed them with my binoculars, I could see they were standing by the guns with the lanyard that fires it held in their hand, and if someone had given them the order, they would have blasted it straight into us and the whole barracks would have gone the way of the dodo. There were three sections there, some nineteen-hundred soldiers in all. I think they would have blasted us. When I saw that, I got a throb and said to myself: ‘Boys, I’m done with you.’ And that’s when my troubles started.”