Karel Mynář

"And there I was (in captivity). But I couldn´t complain. None of us could. When we arrived to the collection camp, the Vietnamese army political leader was asking us lots of stupid questions. But he wasn´t stupid - he spoke German, French and English. ‘Were you shooting our people? ´ - ´I was, I was a soldier. My life was more important to me than life of someone else. So I was shooting; it was me or him. I won´t be shooting in the air and let the others to shoot me.´ - ´Correct answer. I would have done the same.´ Some people say they’re shooting in the air. Bullshit..."

"We were eating rice. Even today I can´t even see the rice. I´d rather have got potatoes or bread than rice with meat. It was just rice, rice and nothing else. We were also receiving some thin peppers, which were hot as hell. After some while I got used to it and I didn´t mind eating them anymore. Sometimes we also got some salt, but that was rather exceptional. Even soldiers’ didn´t have any salt sometimes."

„My motif? Well first of all I wanted to see the world. We stopped in dockyard in Veltrusy, it was a small dock yard. We were waiting for a while so we went to Veltrusy. It was just before the election and the leaflets were just being distributed. I remember the election catchword: ´Vote the butt, vote the thigh, just don´t vote the number one.´ Number one belonged to the communist party. We listened to their nonsense and all kinds of crap there. It was much worse than it is today. So I finally said to myself - I´m out of here, this is nothing for me. Instead of listening we went to the park. I took the very first chance for me to leave. I left without reconsidering it. I packed my stuff and I was gone."

"What a welcome party was it at the main train station! A police transporter was waiting there for us. They took us straight to Bartolomějská Street. After that we went to Pankrác prison hospital for quarantine. From the hospital we went to Mladá Boleslav where the lower military prosecutor was located. It was quite okay there. We were not separated in cells, we could stay together. We even had a shaving razor there. There was some guy- Němeček was his name, who used to shave us. He told us he was a barber. The truth is he always did a good job. The prosecutor brought the razor and said: ´Just don´t cut your throat.´ We even had a ping-pong table on the hallway. But we were bored anyway. We asked for some work to do. We were happy when they gave us the mica to peel."