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Medak Pocket (info, documentaries, etc. - merged)

  • Thread starter Thread starter Travis Silcox
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pbi said:
... Anybody on this board who was at Medak, or knows someone who was? ...

I know Jim Calvin from Staff College (and playing hockey - I'd give him a ride to the rink, so once in a while we'd get to chat one-on-one).

My favourite story was the road block - he cracked the impasse by holding an impromptu press conference in front of it ... followed shortly thereafter by the arrival of a higher-up (from the belligerents) who immediately let them through (there's more to this story, but I won't spoil the book for all of you).

It was also interesting for me to hear a guest speaker talk about the Bihac Pocket - unfortunately I can't repeat the eye-witness accounts of atrocities in this forum, but it reinforced the importance of the Canadian Army - we defend those who can not defend themselves ...

Christmas is coming, Hannukah is upon us - there are lots of good excuses this time of year for giving the gift of a book to friends, family, or even yourself (... and remember that over 80% of Afghanistan is illiterate ...)
 
I have just purchased and read the book. I thought it was excellent. Like most in the service I knew nothing of the firefight in the Medak pocket and am astounded that the govt did not acknowledge the huge sacrifice made by the troops during that tour.

I do remember seeing an interview with WO Matt Stopford talking about being poisoned...Don't know what ever became of that issue.

My hat is off to the guys and gals that fought there. :salute:

Well done. As for the book I would make it "recommended reading"

As a matter of fact I wouldn't mind seeig it made into a film (a good one though!) as long as the CBC didn't have anything to do with it.

Slim :cdn:
 
Unfortunately our government back then was too weak to recognize (and publicize) the fact that this was the worst fighting Canadian troops had seen since Korea. Canada back in those days was not ready to hear that their soldiers were actually shooting their weapons at a "hostile" force... although I'm sure all that were there still refer to them as the "enemy".
  It didn't get any better in Somalia either - as the numerous firefights and contacts were quickly overshadowed by one (albeit significant) incident. It wasn't until the planes hit the Twin Towers did the Canadian public actually realise that they have a military that serves a purpose greater than sandbagging and snowshovelling.
  My hat's off to all soldiers who were in the Medak and served with distinction - those who weren't there will never know, and shouldn't judge.... wish the civvies would figure that one out - then maybe their 9-5 desk job would seem a little better when they realize that there are those of out there 24/7 who protect their rights to shuffle paper and eat donuts by the water cooler!!

Chimo.
 
sapper332 said:
Unfortunately our government back then was too weak to recognize (and publicize) the fact that this was the worst fighting Canadian troops had seen since Korea. Canada back in those days was not ready to hear that their soldiers were actually shooting their weapons at a "hostile" force... although I'm sure all that were there still refer to them as the "enemy".
   It didn't get any better in Somalia either - as the numerous firefights and contacts were quickly overshadowed by one (albeit significant) incident. It wasn't until the planes hit the Twin Towers did the Canadian public actually realise that they have a military that serves a purpose greater than sandbagging and snowshovelling.
   My hat's off to all soldiers who were in the Medak and served with distinction - those who weren't there will never know, and shouldn't judge.... wish the civvies would figure that one out - then maybe their 9-5 desk job would seem a little better when they realize that there are those of out there 24/7 who protect their rights to shuffle paper and eat donuts by the water cooler!!

Chimo.

I recieved "Gohsts of Medak" as a gift for christmas. Plan on reading it soon!
 
I just received the book for Christmas, and plan to read it soon. My concern is the author, Carol Off, had quite an axe to grind against Gen Mackenzie in her previous book (The Lion, The Fox and the Eagle), and I wonder if this sort of attitude infects this book as well? Will report back when I'm done.
 
She seems to ignore Mac in this one...

  It makes for a good book - fairly accurate from what I heard from those who were with the second at the time.
 
Getting the C in C 10 years after the fact may seem a little late, though WW1 battle honours were not awareded untill 1931 and the Canadian Volunteer Service Medal for Korea was issued in 1991. Maybe everything is relative.

in the min-1990's the common feeling among job hunting (ex) soldiers that it was better in an interview to say that you spent the last (x) number of years doing drugs than admit to service time. 

All in all 10 years is a good reunion time.  Even if anyone had thought of it earlier, from a public recognition standpoint it was better to wait untill the public was ready for it.  Now we get the added bonus of slagging the government for taking 10 years.  That is having your cake and eating it too.

No one was is Croatia for the Gong, CPSM, or C in C.  Maybe the work or the money, but not the tin.

 
Chris Wattie of the National Post (and a serving Reserve Officer with the GGHG in Toronto) did a review of the book.  Unfortunately, Mrs Off did not fair well in the review.  To quote Chris "What makes Ghosts of Medak ultimately unsatisfying is that Off has written nearly 300 pages on one of the most dramatic incidents in modern Canadian history and managed to make it boring."

Attached is a copy of the review.

kurt
Author "All Tigers No Donkeys"


In 1993, 600 Canadian soldiers -- half of them reservists -- fought a battle in a desolate corner of the former Yugoslavia. Outnumbered and, outgunned by their Croatian foes, they nonetheless fought them to a standstill and forced them to retreat.  In the process, they helped uncover evidence of ethnic cleansing by Croatian forces who were determined to evict ethnic Serbs before the Canadians could
enforce a shaky UN peace agreement.

The story of their battle, and the physical and mental scars that plagued the soldiers for years after, went largely unreported in Canada. Government and senior military officers, distracted by the Somalia scandal of the same year, did little to put out the story of the largest military action by Canadian troops since the Korean War and the troops returned home to little fanfare or recognition.

Eleven years later, along comes journalist Carol Off with The Ghosts of Medak Pocket: The Story of Canada's Secret War, a book that purports to be the never-before-told story of how Lieutenant-Colonel Jim Calvin and the soldiers of 2nd Battalion, Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry fought and suffered.

Well, not exactly.

For a secret war, Medak Pocket has been awfully conspicuous over the past eight years. And Off was far from the first one to let the "secret" out of the bag. In fact, the battle has been in the media since at least 1996 -- three years after Lt.-Col. Calvin's patchwork battalion fought off the Croatians in the
UN's Sector South.

The Ottawa Citizen's a journalist first told the story in a lengthy article which featured interviews with Lt.-Col. Calvin and most of the same soldiers that Off features in Ghosts of Medak. The article was picked up by Canadian Press and reprinted in newspapers across the country. The Toronto Star ran it on their front page.

Global TV and CTV did stories on Medak in the wake of a journalist's article and Scott Taylor, the publisher of the military magazine Esprit de Corps, wrote about it in his gadfly publication and later -- in 1998 -- devoted an entire chapter of his book, Tested Mettle, to the battle, as well as the persistent health problems suffered by the soldiers who served in the nightmarish Croatian battlefield.

In 2002, Dr. Sean Maloney and John Llambias published Chances for Peace: Canadian Soldiers in the Balkans, which exhaustively chronicled Medak, using the soldiers' own words, and remains the definitive published work on the battle.

Some secret. Yet all of this previous work on Medak is given only a passing reference by Off, and in the case of Taylor, a dismissive reference.

Still, for some Canadians, the story Off lays out in Ghosts of Medak is not a familiar one -- which should be as much a national disgrace as the shameful treatment of the veterans of the battle by the government in the years after their return -- and there is a need for a book on Medak that appeals to a broad audience.

In Ghosts, Off covers the events leading up the battle, setting the context with a brief summary of the bewilderingly byzantine history of the Balkans, and she does a reasonable job of laying out the diplomatic wheeling and dealing into which the Canadian troops were thrust in the summer of 1993.

But her description of the action itself, drawn from interviews with many of the soldiers involved, is confused and sketchy. Granted, the situation was "fluid" -- military parlance for chaotic -- but the book gives the reader little help in keeping the main players and significant troop movements straight. A few judiciously placed maps would have done wonders.

But they would not have helped overcome Off's flat prose, which manages to deflate the dramatic impact of the events she describes. A point-blank firefight involving one platoon of soldiers reads like a baseball game covered by a bored sportswriter, and the troops who should be the heart of her story never come to life for the reader as the book skips erratically from one character to another and from incident to incident.

The best passages in the book are those where Off lets the soldiers tell their own stories, including their descriptions of the horrific evidence of ethnic cleansing which Lt.-Col. Calvin and his soldiers found after
forcing the Croatians out of the Medak Pocket.

The last third of the book is the most disappointing, as Off attempts to chronicle the years of sychological and physical problems the troops faced after their return home. She seems determined to prove that the government conspired to hide evidence of the battle from the public, but comes up with no proof. Her contention that senior military officers and a Liberal government with little love for the Canadian Forces co-operated to cover up evidence of a battle that was politically inconvenient may well be true, as other military analysts have claimed, but there is nothing new in Off's discussion of the issue and no solid evidence to support her thesis.

In fact, while the military was probably happy to let the battle slip beneath the media's radar, at least one of the public affairs officers quoted in Ghosts of Medak informed me recently that they had plenty of
co-conspirators in the media. Military spokesmen on the ground in Croatia in 1993 were practically begging Canadian reporters to come see what the troops were going through, but got no takers. Government officials and generals, it seems, were not the only ones preoccupied with the Somalia scandal.

Most of Off's lengthy discussion of the health problems faced by the Croatian veterans -- including the sad and bizarre tale of Warrant Officer Matthew Stopford who was poisoned by his own troops -- amounts to little more than an inelegant synopsis of media reports and the transcript of an official military inquiry into the matter.

What makes Ghosts of Medak ultimately unsatisfying is that Off has written nearly 300 pages on one of the most dramatic incidents in modern Canadian history and managed to make it boring.

© National Post 2004

 
c4th said:
All in all 10 years is a good reunion time.

Ill say!, heh our JR's (The Patricia Arms Club) Had the single most profit in one day since its inception! :o and that was back in 1972 some time.
No one was is Croatia for the Gong, CPSM, or C in C.   Maybe the work or the money, but not the tin.

Damn Straight.
 
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Quote from: pbi on October 23, 2004, 09:51:19
Ok, thanks. Anybody on this board who was at Medak, or knows someone who was? Cheers


I know one, but he's never talked about it  ???
There were alot of reservists on that tour it seems?
 
Hi All,

You have to remember the saying "Never judge a book by its cover" on this one. I almost didn't buy it because of the cover.........the person on the front has a BFA on the rifle!!!!!!!!!! First impression was that this book would be a waste of money.........what made me buy it however was that I have a lot of friends who were over there........

It was a good read for me and I did enjoy it.
 
Mike you have pointed something out that was conveyed in very specific terms to Carol Off's publisher. Several of my friends and I wrote the publisher (I believe it was Random House) and stated that it was a complete disgrace to all that  served in the  2VP Battlegroup to feature an American soldier in MOPP gear on the front cover. The publisher did write back and apologised profusely , promising that future copies would be changed.

"Chances for Peace" is also a very good book, I would reccommend it to all CF members who served in the Balkans. As it provides accounts from throughout the conflict from CF members of all ranks and trades. It was also the first time that I could actually visualize C-Coy positions during the firefight as the authors Maloney and Llambias provided maps.

Cheers
Noneck
 
I was with the Engineer Troop attached to 2PPCLI in the Medak Pocket. I participated in the search teams through the villages and recovered bodies from the mountains. The memories and stench of the Medak Pocket will last forever.

Chimo :cdn:
 
I was with D Coy in Medak.   I finished the book last week.
While I do agree that Carol Off's portrayal has been rather emotionless with some disjointed organization, I'm quite happy with what she has done(although the lack of maps is almost inexcusable in order to properly set the stage to describe the story).
I found Tested Mettle by Scott Taylor to be a well worded work of fiction.   Ms Off, while having a few glaring time/place errors has done quite a good job at describing things.   She keeps it pretty factual rather than emotional.   I've actually read about a couple of buddies I haven't seen since pretraining in Winnipeg and I've wonder what happened to them after.   Bear in mind that this tour was one of the most significant incidents in many of these men's lives (as it was in mine and continues to be almost daily).   Ms Off only gives a small amount of words about the Maslenica Bridge mission but it was pretty much as significant as Medak was with the extremely harsh conditions (Sector south as a whole was) and the amount of fire the Coy took in those areas (Of course realizing the book is really about Medak).

One major point is for the people that were affected by it.   I've heard stories through the grapevine of the various effects on the people I knew there (including the leadership).   One thing is plain from my own experiences after the tour.   It is that here is no help from our government.   Unless you are imminently dangerous to yourself or others, there is no recourse to any strife each person may be dealing with emotionally.   Only the support of buddies and family are left for them.   For those of use who have been able to work through it, its probably the best way, but shame on our gov't for not doing more.   I still don't think they do enough.
 
I was in 10Pl.  I managed to drag myself down to the PSP for help with PTSD 10 years after the fact and those turds gave me the cold shoulder.  I had to go to the VA for any help.  Stupid thing is I'm still in.
 
Just a couple of small nitpicky points, otherwise I found it well written. I was on Roto1.

Camp Polum she states was between Pacrac and Lipik, it was just outside Daruvar, and Lilpik was on the otherside of Pacrac

She also says that the Dragovic Rd linked Pacrac and Lipik, when it actually went East of Pacrac to the town of Dragovic, hence the name.

The last one she states "....they couldn't go to the local bars and cafe's (if such things existed)..." Well I have to say that my liver would argue that fact, as the local economy was quite robust when we were there. In fact there was a Pizza joint just outside of camp, who finally started making a semi respectable pizza.
 
I have purchased and read the book, which I enjoyed immensly.

My hat is off to all of you who served there!

Slim
 
and the whole battle was a lie concocted by the Canadian Army to bolster fledgeling public support for the forces after the Somalia scandal. Also a liturgy of various instances of drunken and undisciplined Canadian soldiers, many of whom were reservists, brutalizing Croatian civilians.

<a href=http://www.nsf-journal.hr/issues/v3_n3-4/10.htm>Tolstoy-esque article</a>

Go get a coffee before you start reading, it's rather lengthy.

 
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