Karel Ladýř

"Once they dropped us off as a company for a training exercise with the People's Militia. I don't remember what year it was. Well, it was a kind of cowboy thing, like in the movie "Copak je to za vojáka" ("What Kind of Soldier"). They knew where our guys were going to be dropped off, they had a map of where they were going to be dropped off. They took over the whole airfield with these people - well, the army, the morons, and they threw our boys in the middle of the airfield! And the idiots ran after them, and as he hit the ground, they arrested him. We used to have exercises like that. We used to get a kick out of it. Even when the paratrooper was landing on the ground, they'd pull him down. From the plane, I could see exactly where they were. They weren't even looking for us, they just pulled us right off. From the plane, I had it in the palm of my hand, I was just dropping them off. So I could see the airfield, occupied by the vets all the way around like this, and I was dropping them off in the middle of the airfield. I saw the boys jump out, and I could see it rushing in. The ants running across the meadow. That was an exercise - well, they were playing cowboy. Then I said, 'Well, that's a real exercise!' Well, not one of them ran away because it didn't work at all. It was like in that film "Copak je to za vojáka" ("What Kind of Soldier is it"), something like that, the rubber men, the wooden ones. The guys didn't have a chance to do anything because he was landing on the ground and there were 30 people waiting down there."

"The funniest thing was that maybe a kilometre or so from the barracks there was a hill and the film Pahorek was running at the time. The alumni would always drive us out there and say, 'It's ten o'clock, at ten twenty you'll be on top of that hill!' With binoculars they could see up there, they put full armour on us and we were off. When we ran up, they gave us a sign that they could see us, that it was good. And down again. And if we made any trouble, it was like twice on a stump and such, well we took it as fun. Some people didn't, some people weren't athletically or otherwise trained to do it. It was usually no fools who joined the paratroopers; they were intelligent guys, at least with some brains. We had a good crew there, and we liked it. The graduates used to come with us to the woods, we survived there until the next day. They taught us how to survive, what you should do, how to disguise yourself, we liked it. "Personally, it didn’t bother me because I was really into sports, so someone giving me ten or twenty push-ups wasn’t a big deal at all. Those fresh graduates couldn’t really mess with me much. They tried, sure—they made me the leader of the barracks, which was such a 'big' role. If someone messed up in the barracks, I’d take the heat for not keeping an eye on things. But honestly, they couldn’t really hassle me too much because they didn’t stand a chance against me physically. I also had a buddy there, Pepík Wienfurt, who was also into sports. He was about the same height as me, but he was just as athletic. We stuck together, and no one could really mess with us like that."