Your description sounds right. It would have been around 2002-2003 or so. And no, it's not important at all.
But I am curious about what you mean by "in the loop." I had no idea that there were any of these rigs around.
For years I was heavily into Unimogs, and that morphed into more exotic military soft skins - then I moved for a while to the Czech Republic, actually had a nice talk with the factory reps about import/export of the T815's. At that time, Tatra SRO was really only in Czech Republic, and old East Germany/DDR. You'd see a few other places, but not that common. When I made it back into the U.S.A. I found one Tatra support dealer in Alaska, and that was it for some years...then gradually they started to make incursions into supplying the BLM with wildland fire trucks, some municipalities with trucks, and eventually some of the 8x8 Kolos trucks started to come over to the U.S. Digging into my memory, I'm pretty sure Littlefield brought some in, one farmer up in Oregon bought a bring back from a GL auction, and was trying to sell it for some ridiculous amount at the MVPA national convention. His big thing seemed to be claiming the truck was Russian, plus some other things. Wanted 37.5k for it. Making a long story short, it was bought by a guy in Los Angeles who had it for some time, then finally sold it...clutch problems and no one would work on it. In the meantime various importers started to bring the Kolos trucks into the states...by now I'd estimate there might be 50 or so here. Problem is that they're not really supported any more, so you want to bring a parts truck or two along with them....all adds up to being pricy.
Basically, it amounts to the fact that I'm a bigger nerd about vehicles, especially exotics than other folks...but you can find us on Steel Soldiers, Mog lists, Pinz lists, etc. You'll find more Moggers have an interest in this stuff, especially since it shows up at Mogfests every so often.
Back in '96, I could have bought T813's, running condition, with light problems, for $500 each. I had a couple of T805's at one time, but after the move back they stayed there...still have some manuals for them. Somewhere.