An Olds resident who served in the military and who saw some horrific things in Bosnia says we need strong armed forces because people and countries will always be aggressive toward others.
Robert Steele, 69, was born in Edmonton and raised in raised in Pigeon Lake.
He served in the Royal Canadian Air Force and was eventually stationed at the Canadian Forces Europe headquarters in Lahr, Germany.
While there, Steele coordinated shipments of supplies for Canadian troops as they tried to keep the peace during and after the Bosnian war in the early '90s. He did the same during the first Gulf War, also in the early '90s.
But it was in Bosnia that Steele saw the horrific consequences of war firsthand.
"We did a tour of all the checkpoints and everything that they'd established to keep the two warring factions or the three warring factions apart ñ from killing each other," he says.
"Everything was blown up ñ houses. If you were a Serb in one town, your house was obliterated. There was just a row of flowers left around the house and a pile of rubble about two feet high.
"In the next town, it was the opposite. (The house of) a Croat would have been blown up.
The nightmarish sights got even worse.
"Eventually, when we got a pathway in there, peoples' heads would be cut off and put in the middle of the road, things like that, just to intimidate anybody who was down there to help," he says.
Steele was not only horrified by those sights as a human being, but also because he remembers what the place was like before the war -- for example, when Sarajevo hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics.
"It was a beautiful place. It looked like Germany; roadside fuel stations and snack bars, roadside stops, everything along the way," Steele says.
"But when I got there, anything I saw was burnt, blown up, otherwise destroyed. It was just a mess. It was hard to believe. There were starbursts in the concrete where grenades had gone off.
"Part of a platoon was set up in an outlying area in a place that had been a family sawmill. The home looked OK on the outside but the inside was just destroyed. It looked like someone went in there and shot them all and blown up the mill."
That's why Remembrance Day has such great meaning for Steele. He lost some great comrades in conflicts.
"When I was in Royal Military College ñ of course, my degree's in military and strategic studies ñ we always wondered, what causes war?
"This is the constant debate ñ why is man so inhumane to man? And no one could figure it out. But it's really what's in the heart of mankind," Steele says.
"The example I would give is, how long do you think a person could live in Calgary if you removed law enforcement? Not very long, because basic nature comes out and pretty soon they're stealing, killing and destroying.
"It's the same in the international community. That's why we need a standing armed force. Because you may want to be at peace with your neighbour but if he doesn't want to be at peace with you, even right here in Olds ñ the same in the international community ñ if your international neighbours don't want to be at peace with you and they want to come and get you and they have overwhelming force, you'll be taken over, and that's what Hitler tried to do," he adds.
"In order to have peace, you have to be prepared for war. So when Nov. 11 comes along and I think of all my fallen comrades ñ and there've been a few ñ I think what a shame it is that someone has to be on the front lines and give up their lives to keep the rest of us free."
"Why is man so inhumane to man? And no one could figure it out. But it's really what's in the heart of mankind." ROBERT STEELERETIRED MILITARY OFFICER
