So it was like this: just before six o'clock I got the order to engage in combat. Although I received the codes,
just as agreed, I simply couldn't believe it, honestly. Then they called me and
the centre commander repeated the order in front of practically more than half of his staff.
So most of his staff were there, I realised it was for real and that
this was no joke. So off I went, at six, and at five past six I saw a small helicopter
at a distance of about 2.5 km. I could guess, I knew it was some kind of
Gazelle, but there are several types of Gazelles, not just one, not just the one that came down in Ljubljana, so
I didn’t actually know what we were dealing with, but I tried t o shoot it down. The problem was
that the hardware was not maintained and the electronics, if the contacts were bad, it does not work properly.
And the missile didn't actually launch as it should, so I terminated the launch process.
That was the first thing. When I was still in training to be a shooter, I worked as part of the technical team,
so I had an idea of what went wrong. And then I would scratch the contacts, in fact I cleaned up
those things, I replaced the energy source as it is single use in that missile, and in that moment
when I stepped out of the tent that I had at the centre, these helicopters flew past, two of them
arrived, first flying in parallel to the centre, at about 200-300 m as the crow flies.
They were MI8 transport helicopters, transport landing for their own purposes and were seen to carry equipment,
i.e. round launchers with air-to-ground missiles. On both sides. Both helicopters. Fully armed.
I later learned that there was a third behind them. A couple of kilometres behind.
One of the people who was then a TO intelligence officer with the tank unit at Brnik,
It was supposedly a missile landing attack with special forces from Niš, who were supposed to unblock these units.
But they had, as aviation usually has, primary and secondary points, targets. Their primary target was
a tank unit, but since it had begun to grow dark due to bad weather, they decided
to strike the secondary target. They informed Pleso that they observed the secondary target, it was a training centre
and a settlement. The training centre was right next to us and the settlement, which means that if they hit the training centre,
this would also mean more than half of the settlement of Ig would have been attacked.
A person on duty at Pleso, a Serbian colonel, gave the order to attack the secondary target. And Pleso confirmed.
So all these things are recorded and the recording exists, it was confiscated at Golovec in their centre.
A person who heard this recording and who confiscated the recordings told me this because we were friends from our youth.
It's the captain who broke into the centre and took it, he basically told me what they had found on the footage.
Professionals, this means professional soldiers, got the order and confirmed it. In practice, this means that
the order will be executed. Don't for a second think that they wouldn’t. There is constant talk of recruits.
We haven't even seen any recruits, I'm not saying that maybe they weren’t there, but I think
that they were exploited too much by the media, in order to appear as if they were untrained
underdogs against well-trained TO, although they shouted at us TO members as the ones who had
no clue about anything. They were in charge, and we clueless. Unfortunately for them, the truth came out,
and things were not like they had portrayed. Basically, I saw helicopters flying past, I decided to shoot,
because I saw that they were armed, that is, it is clear to me, the usual manoeuver is to fly
past and then withdraw, but they headed in the direction of Ljubljana and then they turned back.
In fact, when I prepared the missile for launch, I aimed at the leading helicopter, I let the missile follow the
helicopter across Ig, I waited for it to move away from the houses, to avoid crashing down on them. Clearly, if it had turned
around and opened fire, I would be forced to shoot sooner. But, I didn't have to since it only started to turn past Ig,
forced to shoot sooner. But, I didn't probably also because when a missile
attack is triggered, that is air-to-ground, no attacking units should be under it to attack
on the ground at that time. That is, if you are above a settlement, you cannot know if some TO fighter is hiding in a house to shoot at you.
So it was logical that it retreated above Ig; when it flew over the last houses above Ig,
I fired a missile. It flew quite unconventionally. This type of missile usually zigzags a lot before it hits the target.
This is because of the drunken goose system, it has one pair of wings just to guide it, as a result, it must rotate and thus correct its direction.
A perfectly straight line is rarely achieved. In my case, it practically went almost entirely straight.
First, it flew over the guard container, where the guards had just changed, that is the infantry guard for the outside
centre protection, the new shift was in position; the old shift brought a crate of beer, they just
started opening it and were preparing to drink, at that moment, the detonation was heard and the missile flew over the container.
Mine. But they didn't know whether it was mine, or if it had flown in from the other side, they could not know.
The speed is such that you don’t see it, it could be the other way around. The beer ended up on the floor, and they ended up with guns
in their hands and in positions. The time to relax was gone. Basically, the missile flew very low since both helicopters
according to the point where I stood, were practically in the horizon line. For the Russian missiles Strela 2M
the minimum condition for launch is at 4% above the horizon, that is, you have to have an angle to avoid interference
from the ground. Interference from the ground happens because earth warms up and emits heat, and this can interfere. Given
that I was not quite in line with the earth, that is, the angle, even though it was somewhere around zero,
was still within that point that made it possible to shoot. A little less known fact is that
these anti-aircraft missiles can also be used to attack important targets on the ground; there are tricks how
to prepare the missile to fly where you want it to go. Let's say a jeep, a vehicle and the like. Well, after I came to Ljubljana,
someone had the idea to shoot at tanks, which is nonsense. A tank cannot be destroyed
by such missile. You would not achieve anything; and other thing – which also applies to important targets – we were trained
even for this type of shooting. This means that shooting at a zero point of the horizon, which is impossible under the basic instructions,
in fact, is not quite impossible. But it's hard, you have to be really top-notch. Because of this, the missile flew very low,
it flew practically a few hundred meters toward the helicopters, then it turned sharply upwards. It flew over the roofs of the entire village of Ig,
let’s say 5–10 m above the roofs. The missile was actually unnoticeable and what was the problem? The Yugoslav army had its own
observers probably in the settlement itself and given that it was such a non-standard trajectory, they didn’t know which missile shot the
helicopter and which weapon it was that shot it down. Because the missile flew unusually given its type.
The missile, after being fired, turned sharply upwards, made a couple of zigzags and hit the cockpit of the upper helicopter,
the leader of the group. Interestingly, when I released the trigger, both helicopters showed me their tail, which means it should have
hit the rear engines, but why did it hit the cockpit? Because the helicopter started to turn back.
Why did it start turning? Because it had received an order to fire at the centre and at Ig. It needs, after taking a position,
5 seconds at most to aim at the target and open fire. As a rough estimate, I was faster by 5–7 seconds and that was it. If I missed that
window, missiles would already be flying at us. These are things which we analysed subsequently, there was even
footage of the shooting, but someone decided that it should be erased. Strange. The point is
that people today think of it like it is nothing special, you fired a missile and something happened.
But you need to know something, we were TO members, we had our civilian life from which we were
dragged into this war. We were not taught to be psychopaths and murderers, if you understand. So none of us
came there to kill. We all hoped that there would be no war at all, to be quite honest.
I think I can say without exception, people from the top and those lower down, we all hoped it wouldn’t get that far.
It was crystal clear to me that a helicopter does not fly by itself, the MI8 transport helicopter, even if empty,
has at least three crew members. It was crystal clear to me that if I shoot, I could kill someone. And in the moment
when I decided whether to shoot or not, I was flooded with adrenaline, I was actually
shaking like a leaf for a few seconds, because that was the moment of truth: yes – no, I could
have decided any which way. When I decided to do it, then it was like I was in a training simulation,
where we practiced shooting, and then I did it cold-bloodedly, as if it was part of the training simulation, not in war.
People often don't understand what courage really is, you know, fear is normal, it’s a simple thing.
Courage means to overcome fear, not the opposite. Who wins this fight? That's courage. Therefore, someone
who today does not have the courage, who is overcome by fear, tomorrow can become the bravest person in another situation.
This is not something given by God, to be brave or not, many things influence it.
A lot of what we did required quite a bit of personal courage, we were aware of the possible consequences, we even
thought staying in the woods for years and fighting like partisans, that is, a guerrilla fight, before
the Yugoslav army withdraws from Slovenia. Luckily, things ended much easier,
but I dare say that if there had been a massacre at Ig, we would have experienced the same fate as Croatia or Bosnia and
the war would have dragged on for years. You know, there were young boys from all over Slovenia, recruits, their brothers and fathers
they were in TO units throughout Slovenia. What would be the reaction if someone had killed their sons?
To me, time stretched, literally. Those few seconds when the missile flew felt
like several minutes. I prepared the missile for launch, released the trigger, that’s the so-called manual regime,
when you can follow on the first knee, on the second knee you launch the missile, it means that it follows the target right from the barrel.
It basically follows its warmth. When I pulled on the other knee, my training came through, I automatically
pulled the barrel up because the missile at first drops down a little and only then it goes towards its target. So if I didn't do that,
the missile would hit the grass. But I did this subconsciously, it was from my training, I didn't even think about it anymore,
it all went by itself. Because I shot from the hill, the missile started relatively low, the engine exhaust
literally blew me 3–5 m back. It threw me back. The glasses I was wearing at the time,
I still have them at home, they're full of specks, burnt gunpowder that flew out. It could have ruined my eyes,
glasses are used in such shooting because you may get hurt otherwise. The missile went over the container first,
then it flew over the entire village of Ig, 5–10 m above the roofs, it flew over the chimney of someone who was burning wood, but such a small
disturbance does not affect the missile, the electronics system ignores such things. It made a few zigzags and came vertically up
in front of the cockpit of the lower helicopter, a colleague told me that the recording sounded like
the lower pilot yelled “ra”, he probably wanted to say “raketa”, but before he could utter the word, it was
the end, the upper one had already been hit. A couple of zigzags and a hit directly into the cockpit, the helicopter turned into a
fire ball, a little mushroom, much like an atomic bomb, though not the same thing, then it started falling
into the main propeller of the lower helicopter, fragments flew around as the two were relatively close.
The two of them were far enough apart, but when they started to turn back, they came closer and that's when
the upper one was hit, so that according to my information the lower one was damaged, too.
This helicopter fell like a rock into the Barje marsh. So after the order was confirmed,
one helicopter was shot down, another damaged. If you lose a third or more of your equipment and people
at the beginning of the attack, before you actually strike, the tactic says to withdraw. Later I was told about
what happened to the colonel on duty at Pleso who ordered this; allegedly, a general came to the centre
with military police, took his military rank away and drove him away. There was nationalism and soloing.
It’s hard to say that the attack against the centre, beside being a secondary target, was well prepared
and organised, as it was mainly an ad hoc campaign, which, if successful, would make the colonel a great hero of the
Yugoslav Army; since it failed, he was probably imprisoned. Sometimes you risk and you win, sometimes you lose.
Interestingly, after that story we told with the radioman last night about numerous full-range TO units,
in fact, high-altitude reconnaissance planes flew high above us the whole morning. I believe that without this story, the centre
would have been attacked in the morning. After they made sure that there was no missiles there, they would execute an attack.
Then they found that anti-aircraft technology was there, and the shock was even worse. I was asked during the war and after it
what this helicopter was shot down with, and they didn’t believe it was really with 2M Strela, they were sure
that it was shot down with some more advanced tool. They get information about patriots, then about a strange
missile trajectory and a helicopter crash after they made sure that there were no missiles there; put yourself in their skin,
their intelligence was a terrible mess. They didn’t really know what was going on. Do you know how
they solved this after the shooting? A 10km circle, height 15km, airspace blockage. We had de facto liberated that part of the
airspace with this shooting down. Then no one flew over there any more. Strictly blocked. It was set up by
the Yugoslav Army itself, as they did not know what shot down the helicopter and how, things were so unusual
after all the reports that nothing was clear to them anymore. Does TO have anything else in stock? They were afraid of
Armbrust launchers, which are nothing special, even Russian Zoljas are more dangerous, they were scared, because it was an unknown weapon.
They knew that weapons were smuggled into Slovenia. But not exactly which ones.
It is easier today to analyse what happened so long ago, but actually things went pretty well for us. There were some
very successful campaigns, including the warehouse, certain
blocked columns at Brnik…then also some things like the sloppiness of the Yugoslav Army when their tanks
overturned in ditches. There was a lot going on. There is a saying in the world: fortune favours the brave.
Our entire war can be embodied in this saying. We had enough courage not to wait, not to procrastinate,
Dilly-dallying would have cost us the country we have today.