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Burkhard Strelow remembers the daily guard duty at the Berlin Wall as being extremely monotonous. He recounts how the young conscripts smuggled pocket radios into the watchtowers, played with their weapons or painted the walls out of boredom. Spots that offered a view of West Berlin were popular among the guards. Burkhard Strelow recalls an incident near the Lohmühlen bridge in the fall of 1989:
"I was once pelted with stones in my guard tower. [...] They ran away, they were just brats. I didn't hear them because it was near the water and you could sunbathe there, even in late fall. I was looking at that and didn't notice that they were attacking from the front."
In the interview, Burkhard Strelow recalls that some watchtowers with a view of West Berlin were considered “popular” among young soldiers at the time. Looking back, he notes with some distance today, that this was partly because they could sometimes see into apartments where people had no curtains or where couples were intimate.