A former police sergeant described how his life changed after he narrowly escaped death during a mission in Kosovo four years ago.Jeff Baron served 13 months in the war-torn country as part of the United Nations Peacekeeping Operations from January 2007 to March 2008.He shared those experiences with members of the Hamilton Rotary Club at a meeting this week.“I was invited to talk here about my experience in Kosovo and I was thinking about what I was going to talk about and wondering how am I going to explain a 13-month stint with the UN in 20 minutes,” said Mr Baron, the One Bermuda Alliance candidate for Pembroke South and the party’s national security spokesperson.He said he then recalled having shared his experiences with an “aspiring Island socialite” on his return only to have her ask: “Well what does that have to do with Bermuda?”According to the 36-year-old the leadership lessons he learned during those 13 months, specifically a combination of a “soft and hard power approach” to security, could work here.“Soft power is essentially using your alliances, using your partnerships in the community, to influence your agenda or your project,” said the Warwick resident.“[It’s] using all those actors [church leaders, community leaders, the Government], and getting them to one table.”He added: “On one hand you have hard power which is robust enforcement and strict laws which are necessary.“And then you have on the other hand the soft power. And really, when you combine them, you have something that’s called smart power.“And that’s really what we need to do. We need to balance the hard and the soft power. We need to have that smart power here in Bermuda.“And it’s been an emerging theme in international relations overseas and I think there’s certainly room for it here.”Soft power brought about a change in the country, Mr Baron said.He told the story of a wall in Kosovo that was continuously vandalised until the UN team arranged for children to paint a mural on it. The vandalism stopped.“We could have stationed armed officers outside of that wall 24 hours a day, seven days a week to prevent anyone from vandalising it.“But with the use of the soft power — engaging our social community groups in the schools — we had children come paint the nice mural and none of the locals wanted to write over it out of respect for the other local children.“That’s the perfect example of the soft power approach. We didn’t have to use force or any coercion to prevent that crime from ever happening again.”While there, he also learned not to take basic things for granted, Mr Baron said.“My first month there, it was freezing temperatures — the inside of my windows had frost on them which I had to scrape off with my Bermuda drivers’ licence.“I didn’t have heat. I didn’t have electricity. I didn’t have hot water. I showered at work everyday. I used a chamois, what people use to wash their cars, as a towel the entire time I was there because you couldn’t do laundry.”He continued: “I remember being in Kosovo thinking ‘I can’t wait till I get back to Bermuda because I can have a fluffy towel!’. Using a chamois to dry off in a public shower in an office was difficult.”Another experience also radically changed Mr Baron’s perspective on life a restaurant was bombed only minutes after he left it.“I think personally, I refocused my priorities,” he said of that incident. “I thought, you know what, I actually want to grow older and have a family and get married and have a house.”In February 2008 Kosovo declared independence. Since the declaration, the UN and the European Union have taken over the administration of the country.