Ing. Milan Koutný

"The Americans had offices across the hall, and I remember they didn't have a television. We had a television or satellite there at the head of the national delegation and we watched the news when we needed to or whatever to keep us informed, even though we were getting briefings from various sources. I know I was somewhere off the premises, and when I came back, the Americans were in the office of the head of the national delegation. I wondered what was going on, why everybody was crammed in there, so many people. And then I saw a transport plane crashed into the towers there. I wondered what kind of film they were watching, so I asked them, and you could see they were all absolutely terrified. And so they told me that there were these terrorist attacks, and the whole world was changed by that." - "How did they react at that point?" - "They were certainly devastated because no one expected that so many planes had been hijacked, could be directed somewhere without anyone noticing. Then travel changed, and that's not taking Covid into account. The checks, everything just, got tighter. Then it started to become a thing that we all had cars, too, that we either bought there or brought in from the Republic, and everybody who worked at AFCENT, later AFNOR, had the first two letters AF. Which actually, wherever you were, everybody knew who you were. We lived in blissful ignorance that anyone could identify us at any time. So they started changing the tags for random numbers and there were more of those things, they tightened up the access to the headquarters, they checked everything, they started building more defenses and protection mechanisms, so there was a lot of that."

"In the first year, there were some communist slogans everywhere, communism was here, the ideology was here, but nobody told us anything... That came later, they started offering us to join the party, to consider it, not to consider it, and so on. Of course I didn't want to join the party. Well, before it could roll over on us, the revolution came, which caught us at the university, and everything was different." - "What was the revolution like in Košice?" - "In Košice, in the east of the republic, we already said that whoever went through the Kysacky tunnel, that there was already Asia, but I don't want to offend the Slovaks... What was in Prague didn't appear in Košice until a few days later. We were even in a pub in Košice on Saturday, when there was a strike in Prague, and nobody knew about any revolution. Moreover, the television and other media were still subdued at that time. So we didn't find out until the next week and then the situation developed because nobody knew what was going to happen, what was going to happen next. What was going to happen with the school, there were a lot of subjects like Marxism-Leninism, they were eventually cancelled and we didn't even have a state exam on it, as the original plan was that we should have an exam on Marxism-Leninism."