Jaroslav Kubát

"Everything was secret. I'm saying we were secret, and when we went from the barracks to military exercise, the interesting thing about it was that we went to exercise every month for a week, no matter what month it was, winter, summer, spring. And I remember that when we went to the first [exercise] after the enlistment, I was enlisting in November, so we went in the winter. And I remember we were driving somewhere, we stopped in the woods, we jumped off these cars, there was more than knee-deep snow. And now the commander there told us, 'And this is where the camp will be by morning.' There was a guy in our platoon, and he started crying."

"It was called Větrník, before that it was called Pionýr, it was a magazine, and I don't remember now whether it was still in the first Pionýr before Větrník or afterwards, then they completely closed down Větrník, then it was just Pionýr. But I have the impression that it was in the... I would guess it was in my fourth or fifth grade. So I made friends with a couple of people in the village there and we started - it was running then, it was called Tourist Troop. And it was, because you grew up on the Quick Arrows (Rychlé šípy), so it was like make a club and like do some expeditions and now write to the editor and they would write back maybe and there were some things like that. So we started a hiking group number thousand and six hundred and ten. We were called the Zálesák and we had a flag with an oak leaf and it lasted until those guys then stopped having time and somehow it didn't work. But it was awfully nice, and we even wanted to make a clubhouse somewhere in somebody's house, in a shed, like the Quick Arrows. That was really cool, so it was like... There weren't many trips either, it lasted less than a year."