“Our lives were at stake. Isolated incidents occurred. As I said before, someone planted a directional charge under the driver’s seat, and it exploded right after my two colleagues, Czechs, got out of the vehicle and only suffered light injuries. Hard to say if it was a warning or what. We don’t know if they set it off remotely intentionally after the men got off so as not to kill them or if it was just poor timing. Then, someone fired a bazooka into the window of our office in Sulaymaniyah. My colleagues from Austria were sitting in the backyard of a house they had rented. In the garden. Most houses there have tall concrete walls around, and someone threw a grenade at them over the fence. Things like that happened there quite often.”
“The infamous Colonel General Veselý, the commander of the Western Military District, came over one day and said: ‘Tanks won’t drive up the switchback road! Tanks will drive straight up!’ It looked like that overblown Soviet attitude to me. They ordered us to make a tank road straight across the hill. The slope was quite steep, so we decided to make a cut into the hill so that the tanks could tackle it. Even tanks are not capable of tackling just everything – the slope must not exceed a certain gradient for a tank to cope with over it. We started cutting the road with earthworks machinery. We hit the bedrock soon, so we had to blast it and do all sorts of things. The deadline was approaching. I recall that we were ordered to work overnight. The bulldozers had no headlamps. We had a wheeled dozer and some bulldozers, and they worked the slope to make the road, lighting the way for each other and helping one another. I left the site to have a supper or what one night, and came back at two or three in the morning. All the machines were still and the drivers were asleep. They stopped at various points on the slope – a bulldozer tilted downwards, with its trowel extended. Near it, a DOK stood on the slope… We woke the poor guys up and continued working.”
“The year 1968 struck me a lot, I think. I was 14, it was the summer holidays between my 8th and 9th grade in elementary school, so I knew a bit about life already. Russian convoys drove right past our house, like 20–30 metres away from us. It was a narrow street with old linden trees on the sides. God only knows for how long the men didn’t get any sleep; they would fall asleep behind the wheel. They drove day and night and all they saw was the tail lights of the truck ahead, and that will lull you into sleep. I learned what this is like in my own military career – when you drive slowly in a convoy, it will put you to sleep. So, one of the trucks hit a tree near our house. A truck ground to a halt nearby; it was in such a poor condition it couldn’t drive on. They left the crew behind, two or three men, for about two weeks without any provisions. They likely had like one can of food for one or two days and maybe some of that Russian bread or biscuits, but that was it. So, two or three days later, they had nothing to eat, and most people wouldn’t give them anything, so they begged for food or sold fuel from the truck’s tank. It was a big truck with back-up cans, so they sold the fuel bit by bit and got their food for that. Then they just disappeared. And we boys just wrecked that truck. We cut the tires, broke the windows, and broke off the rear-view mirrors.”
“As for the impression that 1968 left and what it did for us… Well, we went to school, the ninth grade, just nine days after the invasion, and we all as a class agreed to refuse to learn Russian. Our Russian teacher tried to convince us but we were adamant. We refused to respond in any way during the lessons for a day or two, and then she complained to the headmaster. We genuinely respected our headmaster. He had spent time in a concentration camp; his name was Hynek Růžička and he was a sportsman. He played handball. There was a quite good handball team in Ivančice and around Brno in general, they played the second league… Simply put, we respected him as a person. He tried to talk us into learning Russian… and then started telling us about World War II. He said: ‘We learned German. It is important to know your enemy’s language.’ This is how he gradually convinced us and made us get back to learning Russian again.”
“An officer from the Brno-venkov District Military Administration gathered four of us in Brno. We were instructed to come to the Brno train station. We met him there and he took us to Bratislava where the military engineering school was supposed to be, where I was to enrol. We arrived in Bratislava, it was called the Kutuzov Barracks, and they told us that the military engineering school was not there anymore – it had moved to Holešov during the summer holidays. I am mentioning this as an example of what an ‘organised’ mess the military was back then. He brought us back from Bratislava, sent us home, and said: ‘Come back the next morning.’ Then he took us to Holešov. I learned later on why the school had relocated so suddenly during the holidays. Until then, the Military Political Academy was in Prague, and in 1968, students and maybe some teachers too revolted against the invasion and the Party, so the leaders decided to crush this hub of the ‘enemies of the socialist regime’ and relocated the Military Political Academy to Bratislava. But since there were no premises available, they put the Academy in the barracks where the military engineering school was. The military engineering school was forced to vacate the place, and was moved to Holešov. There was an airport and a paratrooper regiment in Holešov. The paratroopers were also involved in opposition against the Soviet invaders, so the leaders dissolved the paratrooper regiment, the barracks were vacated, and so the military engineering school moved in Holešov.”
Oldřich Lacina was born in Ivančice near Brno on 6 August 1954. He spent almost all of his live in uniform. He took part in three international missions, including two where he served as a military observer for the UN. He did a guard service tour in Iraq where his life was in danger several times. He did not wish to become a soldier initially, though – he was always more of a shy boy. His father insisted that military service would boost his morale, so Oldřich enrolled in a military engineering school in Holešov at 15 years of age. His father used to be a soldier and a National Socialist Party member, and held an openly anti-communist stance. When the communist party seized power in 1948, Oldřich’s father had to quit his job as a technician at a military airport due to his political views. Oldřich Lacina completed the school and served in the barracks in Litoměřice. When the military began to struggle with a shortage of officers in the early 1970s, he got an opportunity to obtain an officer rank through examination. He then graduated from the Command-Technical Military University (Vysoká škola velitelsko-technická) in Martin in military engineering. That is also when he started learning English. As an English-speaking officer, the opportunities unfolding towards the end of the totalitarian regime were unprecedented. He went on his first mission in Africa in 1989; it was the very first international mission that Czechoslovakia took part in. Missions in Iraq and Tajikistan followed. He took part in subsequent missions as an international military observer, was employed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and helped traumatised war veterans in returning into normal life. In 2022, he lived in Litoměřice, chaired the Litoměřice branch of the Czechoslovak Legionaries Association, and had a wife, two daughters, and two grandsons.
Spolek Sdružení válečných veteránů České republiky
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