Thanks for the welcome. Having only racked up three years service I don't have much on tanks that I can contribute, although I did once kick a Russian captain in the bollocks after he had knocked with me down with a rifle butt in a dispute over the border not far away from Berlin. The Russki then went on to bayonet my orderly but couldn't get his bayonet through my man's webbing ! It was all hushed up at the time (as was the Vietnam business), but I do know that the Russian saw out the rest of his service breaking rbig rocks into small ones in Siberia ! Of course, I could talk about my 6 months service sorting the Paddies out in Belfast, but that doesn't fall within the remit of this Forum ! Malladyne.
Did you take the man's vodka, I mean water? Example of the fine training of Russian border guards. My Mother had told me how some years back, her school went on a field trip to East Berlin. When they got to the border checkpoint, one of her fellow students made a not-so-nice comment to a big, ugly, Eastern-European woman border guard. In response, the guards took the bus completely apart and left it in that state. The students, teachers, and bus driver had to spend the rest of the day trying to put the bus back together!
In case this is the cause of the confusion: Paddies = Irish people. The British Army spent a long time in Northern Ireland during the troubles (basically a long, drawn out terrorist campaign to reunite Ireland / keep Ireland as it is by the two rival sides that has been going on for effectively hundreds of years)
