Milan Švrčina

"That was a really day, such a drizzly autumn, we were out there all day on patrol, I remember I was very tired. And in the evening it started to rain. Thanks to that training from Czechia, I knew how to pull on a poncho, how to prepare a shelter. Then in the morning I was ashamed to see how cold and sleepless the others were, I was dreaming about high school and my classmates. And then we went on patrol to see the Ukrainian unit, and they had wounded because they were probably spotted by a drone, and then there was artillery or rocket fire. And we were taking over that patrol after them, we were about two or three kilometres up that valley, and we started to go up the valley, towards those Russian positions, and again the drone came in, so we went to hide in this little draw, but one of those squad members probably fired a steel grenade over the wire that was planted there. I remember a fireball exploded seven or eight metres away from me and I shouted to the others that nothing was wrong, that I had been hit by two small stones. But by that time a medic was coming to me and he saw that blood was coming out of my arm, so it must not have been the stones, and he started to treat me."

"I went to Velehrad, which helped me enormously. I spent about three days there. And coincidentally, there was a military chaplain there. So the man thanked me for everything good. There was a direct train from Staré Město near Uherské Hradiště to Przemysl in Poland on the border with Ukraine, and I arrived there at night. The local volunteers who take care of the refugees migrating across the border there, so they helped me get to the border - and there I was already taken over by Ukrainian intelligence and the army, and one walked through the collection points to the place where the unit was gathering before going to the front."

"I joined the active reserves seven years ago, I was in them for six years, I was brought to them by a sense of patriotism, I always respected the resistance fighters and the people from Sokol, I respected what they did during the Second World War, one has Gabčík and Kubiš as role models, and I was always annoyed by Munich, somehow internally, that we really should have defended ourselves. That was gnawing at my heart. So I wanted to be prepared, because I hadn't done my basic military service. So it was out of those motives. And even when I was entering the basic course for six weeks, I didn't even think about going into the paratroopers, I thought I was going to be in some more of a rear detachment. But then coincidentally there was a boy, also from Chrudim, who had studied theology and wanted to join the paratroopers and wanted to jump, so he tempted me to do it. And there was one more moment, in Chrudim there was an open day in the police building where in the fifties the communists interrogated the peasants when they were liquidating them. And the interrogations were so brutal that experts like the 'Grebeníčkas' were taught to abuse people there. From there it's only a few meters to the main square to the church. And there I sat down and thought, there is evil and violence in the world, so it's not so bad to go to those paratroopers. And my first impression when I walked up to them was that they weren't killers with blood coming out of their eyes, they were dads from families. People who do their jobs with care and excellence. They're craftsmen of a sort, and they do their work professionally. And it goes back to the layout in my head when I went to Ukraine that a soldier's job is to do a task that has to do with stopping some evil, and when you do that task, you go home, without any passion, without any hatred. It's a craft, a job."