Ing., Lieutenant Colonel (ret.) Vladimír Kubánek

“The commander of the 5th Chemical Defence Battalion Lieutenant Colonel Luboš Šmehlík took me with him to test fire Grad rocket launchers. Every rocket launcher was armed with only 10 rockets. Otherwise they can fit 40 rockets. We saw a volley from a battery of Grads and the subsequent impacts and explosions on the hill. One of the Grads was armed with a full volley, that is 40 rockets, for an army film. Luboš and the army film makers were in a trench not far from the rocket launcher, I stood above and behind them. The Grad let rip. We were ‘right fools’ because after they were fired the rockets discarded their aluminium casings, which bounced off the ground and whizzed by our heads. If any of them had hit us in the head, we’d have been gonners. Luboš and the army film makers fell flat on the bottom of the trench. I doubt they filmed anything. And I legged it some 100 metres to the forest.”

“A the Štít [Shield] 84 exercise, the chemists were tasked with creating smoke screen 2 km longs in the first line, to hide the attacking tanks. Every chemist was to light 10 DM-11 smoke bombs, which meant running along and lighting one fuse after another. A trifle, it seemed, but to organise that, to coordinate and command some 80 soldiers spread out along two kilometres, turned out to be far from easy. Of course, first we rehearsed the separate phases according to training script. The whole thing was then demonstrated to high-ranking military and government officials. The task was taken up by the commander of the 5th Chemical Defence Battalion, Luboš Šmehlík, because the functionary from the chemical section of the Western Military Territory didn’t really know what to do. Šmehlík realised that disaster could strike, and so he assigned every soldier and officer a spot, where they should hide after setting fire to the smoke bombs, so that they wouldn’t be run over by the tanks. He assigned one ditch to Lieutenant Lacuš, commander of the chemical company. During the full rehearsal the lieutenant didn’t make it to his assigned ditch in time. Luckily. After the tanks passed by, he found out that the ditch didn’t exist. In the end it was decided that the chemists wouldn’t use smoke bombs during the demonstration itself.”