It is a small oasis of peace, in the busy center of Tilburg. The freedom park. Six war memorials are together there. But they are regularly marred by dog -drools in the grass and litter. It is a thorn in the eyes of a former soldier Jeroen van der Waaij: “I think it is disrespectful.”
Jeroen sums up what he encounters in the park near Koningsplein: “Laughing gas balloons, tubes of joints, empty bags of weed. That people do that, okay, but clean up your shit!”
The former soldier finds tranquility in the Vrijheidspark, he can think. “To people who died, have committed suicide. And then you see this happening in front of you.” He points out: “Look, you can already see small bottles at that couch.” We walk to it. “But beware, because it is full of dog -trolls here.”
“It differs in color because it is pissed against it.”
Every monument in the park stands for an event in the Second World War. Such as the 10 May bombing, resistance fighter Coba Pulskens, the liberation. Jeroen knows all the details. We walk to his favorite monument: “Window on the past, look at the present”. “Look at the bottom of the pillar.” It points and you see that the color differs from the top. “That is because there is pissing against it.”
He sees it happen, people who let their dog poop in the park. “If it happens before your eyes, they still want to clean it up.” Occasionally he addresses people, but usually an angry look of the former soldier is sufficient. “I come here for reflection … Ah Gatver! Look this I mean, right?!” We walk through the grass in the park and yes: Jeroen lifts his foot and bite. A turd.
“It’s the freedom park, but this goes too far for me.” Yet Jeroen does not want to hear any bad word about the employees of the municipal cleaning. “Big compliment for the municipality. It comes to clean things up every day.” But the mentality of some visitors to the park, he can’t reach it with his cap: “I’m not that way. I am old -fashioned, I am decent. I never throw anything on the street.”
“I fought with drunk people in the ambulance.”
Jeroen started in 1990 at Defense as Hospik: Wentenzorverer. He did not go on missions, but worked on three barracks on the ambulance. In the first instance it was about leg fractures and heart attacks. But that changed: “At the back of the ambulance I literally had to fight with drunk people.”
After soldiers returned from their mission to former Yugoslavia, he had a lot to do with alcohol poisoning. “At least one every night. They fell half in coma, arrive again and saw me first. And then I got a tap. While it’s just your measurements, isn’t it?”
Jeroen always bothered it. While we talk, he continuously scans his environment. “That is a thing we all have,” he refers to the veterans for whom he is now committed to the Veterans Hart van Brabant Foundation in Tilburg.
What should happen to the monuments in the Vrijheidspark? Jeroen finds it difficult. “You can’t put someone at the gate seven days a week, 24 hours a day. There has been a discussion to relocate these monuments to the city forum. That could be a good location, because I think people there will not let their dog go there.”