I fought in Bosnia and in Kosovo and in both wars I learned to respect the own artillery, minefields and small arms fire.
Especially at night or during ambushes (laying out your own or running into an enemy ambush) there can be a lot of confusion. You can get easily shot by one of your buddies. I often had to duck away quickly not to get shot by my comrades.
Then there were the mines. One time in Kosovo, where I fought with the Kosovo Liberation Army, I was putting boobytraps around our base. These were activated by tripwire. When I finished my work I went inside our base to grab all my stuff because we had to leave the place due to overwhelming enemy forces.
I hadn't slept for days and that might have been the reason why I totally forgot that just minutes ago I had mined the whole area.
Ten metres out of the door I felt a wire around my feet and stopped immediately. I called a comrade and he slowly and carefully inspected the mine that I almost activated. Touching the wire removes a pin and then the mine explodes. In this case the pin was still in the mine, but not more than 1 mm. It was so far out that we didn't dare to put it back inside. We didn't want to leave the mine unexploded so we decided to detonate a hand grenade near the mine to neutralize it.
In Bosnia minefields were a big problem. The enemy's but also our own. Several times I walked into one of our own minefields. Luckily, I never got hurt.
Then there was the problem with the NATO air strikes in Kosovo. They were directed at our enemy, but sometimes KLA bases and civilians were also hit: Collateral damage.
One night I almost fell out of my bed when a NATO bomb hit the ground about 200 metres away from my sleeping place. The next morning we checked out what had happened. Fortunately the bomb fell on an empty field and nobody was hurt.
I think in every war there is quite a high number of soldiers that are killed by friendly fire. And often these cases are not reported and the killing is just attributed to the enemy. Every soldier knows about this, but nobody really likes to talk about it.
I definitely wouldn't have thought before going to war that this is a thing to be scared of.
Read other answers by Roland Bartetzko on Quora:
- What are some of the war secrets/experiences that soldiers don't want to talk about after getting back from a war?
- What does war smell like?
- What are the most mind-blowing tricks used during any war?
from Quora http://ift.tt/2ctycyd
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