In the years Derk Grooten was a soldier with the Royal Dutch Army trying to maintain the fragile peace in war-torn Bosnia, the internet and smart phones were years from becoming a reality.
Mail service was his primary communication lifeline to home in Heiligerlee, in northern Holland, where his wife Rianne and their families lived and he got to know the letter carriers well.
“We did have email back then, but we didn’t have access to it,” said Grooten.
“In six months over there my wife wrote me over 100 letters. We had a competition to see who got the most letters and me and a buddy were head-to-head but he won, but that’s beside the fact.”
Grooten was 17 when he enlisted in the Royal Netherlands Army infantry division and he served two six-month tours to Bosnia in 1996 and 1997-98, right after the Dayton Agreement ended the three-and-a-half-year war over control of the territory now known as Bosnia and Herzegovina.
“The first one I was just 18, very young to be running around a country torn apart by war, trying to bring some peace to the people,” Grooten said. “There was a lot of responsibility put on our shoulders. We saw some stuff I think a person in my age category should not be seeing at that point in time.
“Overall, I came away pretty good, I didn’t run into too much trauma, but it was tough at some points.”
The Netherlands has long held a close connection with Canada because it was largely Canadian troops who liberated the country after five years of Nazi occupation in the Second Word War. The brutal oppression of the invading troops combined with a harsh winter that led to a famine in rural Holland in the final year of the Second World War and the arrival of the Canadians and their chocolate bars and food rations was a joy that’s never been forgotten.
Since 1945, Canadians and Dutch people have never been in a situation where the freedoms of society are threatened by an opposing force whose aggressions leave no other choice but to get involved in a war and Grooten says Remembrance Day (which is celebrated in Holland on May 4) is the time to reflect on how fortunate the people of both countries are.
“Dutch people feel incredibly thankful for all the sacrifices that the Canadians brought to set them free from the Nazis,” said Grooten. “If it wasn’t for the Canadians the Dutch people would definitely be speaking German right now.
“Both my grandpapas were affected by the war in one way or other and it basically circled down to the family and that’s probably why I enlisted, to make a difference,” he said.
“My father was involved in the military but he was not involved in conflict. We both served a five year contract. I was in position to renew but I met my wife during that time and she went through the second tour with me and she said, ‘I’m not sure I can do that again,’ so I didn’t renew my contract.”
After his honourable discharge, Grooten working seven years as manager of a liquor store until he went back to school to study to be a radiation therapist. A job offer from by the BC Cancer Centre of the North at UHNBC brought Derksen to Prince George in February 2013. The 47-year-old lives in the city with his wife Rianne, a speech and language pathologist, and their two teenaged children, Maegan, 16, and Shane, 13.
Grooten’s time in the military left him with a more laid-back, don’t-sweat-the-small-stuff attitude. He admits he misses the close-knit relationships he built with his fellow soldiers, having spent all that time living with each other in sometimes stressful situations, and he realizes that’s a part of his life he’ll never replace.
“I think the camaraderie is something I really enjoyed, that’s hard to find in the civilian world,” he said. “Obviously at some point there are instances you put your life in their hands if you’re out on patrol and you have to trust the guy behind you that he has your back.”
For most of his first tour, from January-July 1996, before the United Nations peacekeepers brought the added safety of the Blue Berets, Grooten and his artillery unit felt more isolated and more exposed.
“For a young guy it was eye-opening; war doesn’t leave people in a good spot,” said Grooten. “I see young kids that had no houses, young kids without parents anymore and I see older people scraping the last little pieces of wood trying to get their houses heated. People using horses to get from one point to another because they didn’t have cars. Coming from Western Europe, it’s really hard to see that and put it in perspective.”
He quickly realized upon arriving in Bosnia, seeing how common it was to see people carrying AK47 rifles, that it was still a dangerous place.
“Ours is a young force, in NATO and the people enlisted, and you have to keep fighting parties apart where some people have been in wars for over 20 years,” he said. “So you’re over there as a young fellow trying to keep those guys apart and sometimes that’s overwhelming. You’re just a guest on their territory but you still have to uphold the laws that NATO put on them.”
In Grooten’s generation, conscription and military participation was still mandatory for males after they reach age 18. Attendance was compulsory for military duty that lasted 12-18 months until it was phased out in May 1997 and the Dutch Army became strictly a volunteer force.
“You train for the worst-case scenario, which is a fighting mission.,” he said. “We took off from Eindhoven Airport and I see my parents walk away in the dark and my dad looked over his shoulder at me and that’s when I feel like, ‘I might not ever see you guys again.’ That’s the overall feeling I had for the first couple weeks, just wondering what’s going to happen. I was actually more scared when I was in Eindhoven than when we got because your training takes over and the fear moves into the background. But those first couple months are tough.”
Based in a secured compound, practically every night he would hear shots fired and the occasional sound of an exploding grenade, sometimes close, sometimes distant. During his second tour, a drunk driver tried to drive through the checkpoint and the thought crossed Grooten’s mind that he would have to raise his rifle and shoot at the vehicle in a split-second decision, but it never came to that.
“You’re right on the edge of it, you never know if his car contains explosives or it’s just a drunk guy,” said Grooten.
One thing he wasn’t prepared for was the snow and cold and both his tours in Bosnia started in the coldest winter months.
“I was surprisingly cold in in winters there,” he said. “We trained in Germany and it gets cold there, but the really hurtful cold I felt in Bosnia, there was nights we had to be on guard in an outpost and it was like minus-28 C and we were sleeping in sleeping bags that are rated only to -20 C. So you had to get out every two hours to make sure your blood was flowing.
“I had my wife’s letters to keep me warm.”
