During a four-hour shift, about 70 vehicles drove through. There were many "dead" hours, that's not so bad. Part of the matter was that commanders who'd had enough let them pile up; you could refrain from inspecting vehicles for about half-an-hour without creating too much of a "bottleneck". As for me, because I really was in touch with part of the population – the same people crossed every day -- so I became a kind of "complaints official" for them. Every time things got messed up they would come to me afterwards. For example, there was a young commander who was assigned to the checkpoint who would humiliate them, vandalize their belongings, stuff like that. Some things I solved inside the unit, and when not, I passed them on to the higher echelons. There was one commander, whose name I'd rather not mention, who even got arrested for harassment at the checkpoint.

When you say harassment, what do you mean?Puncturing tires, requiring people to undress for no reason, things like that. Once he wanted to impress the soldiers who were with him on the jeep, so he caught some chicks grazing out there and used them for a shooting range. I mean, yes, it's just chickens, but I know that for whoever makes his living from his little home chicken-coop this might be quite significant.

You say these things were investigated, looked into?Yes, in fact.

You were not there, you heard about it.I was not there in person.