Vladimír Veselý

"Breznev came to visit and they [Gustav Husák] kissed, that's well known. And of course we as soldiers had to go to that weekly meeting. Now imagine, there was a big cinema hall, there were about four hundred of us. It was somehow in the afternoon. In the army, duty starts at 4 o'clock and we went on duty, so you have a gun, but no bullets, they didn't give us that. Now they put on the weekly news for us and the lights were off in the hall, and now various officers were there. And now they [Brezhnev and Husak] had that kiss and somebody said in that hall: 'Kiss his ass too, dude.' He had it stopped, and now, 'Who was that?' And now the interesting reaction of those guys, without talking, we had these rifles, machine guns, but we didn't have bullets, but they didn't know, or they didn't know if we had bullets. And we all... that were the stoppers clicking. We just sat there. 'All right, go on.'"

"That's one of the tumbles that moved me somewhere else among the addicts. I have a lot of friends who are addicts and alcoholics, and we hang out in different ways. We have these Alcoholics Anonymous clubs together. It's a wonderful thing, you see the other side of it again. So it's a roller coaster ride, of course, with the divorce and everything, but that's where I started to learn about myself, to be able to understand and forgive myself. Now my ex-wife and I are getting along very well. At first, of course, she didn't trust, an alcoholic, how can you trust? What about a drunk guy? So again you get to know yourself from another side, it's a good thing, but I don't recommend going that way, I don't recommend it."