Ten years ago this week, at 4:50 on a dark, chilly Saturday morning, I found myself lying prone in a parking lot at Canadian Forces Base London, Ont.
I was doing push-ups, and I was being yelled at as I did them, along with a couple of dozen other new Canadian Forces officer recruits. As my hands turned numb on the wet pavement and my arms grew steadily weaker, I was wondering what I had got myself into. That thought was to reoccur at regular intervals in the intervening months.
I was then a 46-year-old editor and manager, with a house, a mortgage, a long-term relationship and two kids, and there was seemingly no good reason for me to undergo such privation. Yet there it was: I had joined the army.
Why? The answer to that question stems from the questions we all will privately ask ourselves this week, then attempt to publicly answer on Nov. 11 at cenotaphs across the country:
How did Canadian soldiers do what they did?
How did they storm beaches and spend years in prison camps and twist aircraft to escape the searchlights and apply pressure to stop the bleeding and bury what was left of friends and fire the weapons that took everything away from other men?
I wanted to know.
So I showed up one day at the John W. Foote Armoury in Hamilton, Ont. — the same John W. Foote who won the Victoria Cross for his actions on the beach at Dieppe — and I asked if they were looking for recruits.
By the time I got to my final interview, an air force captain asked: “Do you understand that in the course of your duty you may be placed in danger and killed and that you may be asked to take the life of another human being?” In the forces, the big stuff gets addressed head-on.
In short order, I was enrolled as a reservist officer cadet. I started working out and running to get into shape and before long, was driving to London after work every other Friday to undergo the basic officer training program, or bot-p, as it was called. I would drive home every Sunday night mentally and physically exhausted. I was paid slightly more than $90 a day.
We learned to march, yes. And we ran, almost every morning, no matter the weather, and did push-ups, and were denied sleep and yelled at — in remarkably creative ways.
We learned how to fire a C7 rifle, identify its parts, take it apart and clean it until it gleamed. We learned how to load a magazine quickly, fire on the run and from one knee, and stop a gunshot wound from bleeding out. We learned military law and how to don a gas mask in the event of a biological attack. I recall kneeling in the snow one weekend, retching, after tear gas leaked through my gas mask, thinking as I threw up that it was an extraordinarily strange way to spend my daughter’s first birthday.
My bot-p classmates included a dentist — he would finish first in our class — a teacher, a startup entrepreneur, a divinity student, a computer coder and several university students. There was one woman.
Our course officer was a reservist captain who taught full time at a high school. He would later serve in Afghanistan. His second-in-command was a master warrant officer and Royal Canadian Regiment sergeant-major who had already served in Afghanistan, and who was jubilant the day the Harper government decided to buy more Leopard II battle tanks. The soldier who taught us how to fire and disassemble our weapons was a master corporal who had served in the Canadian Airborne Regiment.
Basic training is difficult. It is made difficult to apply stress, to weed out those who tire, who give up, who are selfish. It’s designed so that if any candidate were to get thrown into a difficult task, possibly with live ammunition, the Canadian taxpayer, and his or her fellow soldiers, would have a reasonable expectation they would deliver, rather than fold.
One weekend I was assigned to lead a group of soldiers from our squadron in the target area on the rifle range. Our task was to repair the targets after they had been filled with bullet holes, and record the hits and misses. We were safe enough, sitting in a concrete dugout, with bullets flying over our heads. But sometimes a 5.56 NATO round travelling at 900 metres a second would shatter the wooden support bearing the paper image of an “enemy,” and wooden shrapnel would fly off, hitting us in the helmet or the tactical vest. It was impossible not to be rueful, and terrified.
On Thursday nights after our unit’s parade, I would sit in the officers’ mess, with its dark, polished wood and glass cases containing artifacts from two world wars, with my beret in my tunic pocket, sipping beer and listening to the stories of other soldiers.
The following spring, we all successfully completed bot-p. Afterward, I carried myself with a little more confidence, knowing I was slightly more useful than a PONTI — person of no tactical importance, the nickname for an officer cadet. Later that summer, I took two weeks of my vacation, and flew out to Nova Scotia for a follow-up course. The other officers on my course were all full-time career soldiers.
One day ,we were tested on our ability to march. The Forces minimum standard was 13 kilometres to be completed in under two hours, 20 minutes while carrying what’s known as FFO, or full fighting order — weapon, helmet, bayonet, five magazines of ammunition, tactical vest and rucksack weighing 25 kilograms. Our course officer conducted the test at a pace that was nearly a run, to find out what we were made of. At the end of the march, we were required to drop our packs, then pick up another soldier of our same weight and height, and carry him and his weapon and our own at a dead run for 100 metres. When I picked up my counterpart, firefighter carry-style, my knees nearly buckled. I prayed no one had noticed.
On my last day of the course I sat on my bunk while a warrant officer sat across from me.
“You’re a journalist, right?” he said.
“And you’re not a young kid.
“So why do … this?” he asked.
I paused. “I wanted to know what it was,” I finally replied. “I wanted to know.
“And I wanted to do.”
He looked at me, considered this, and went back to the paperwork. When he was through, he said, “Well, that’s it.” He stood up, then shook my hand.
“You did ok,” he said.
I recalled reading stories of Second World War veterans who said that that was the very thing that kept them doing their job even when events screamed for them to head in the other direction – that they didn’t want to be embarrassed. Or to let their friends down.
I spent three years in the forces, leaving only when my wife and kids and I moved to Africa for a year. I still don’t know the answer to the questions that will be asked this Remembrance Day; the only ones who do know, of course, are the ones who took part in a fight and were lucky enough to come home.
But my three years did give me a brief glimpse behind the curtain, a tiny, humbling taste, of what it is like to be a Canadian soldier. I only have enduring, profound respect for every one of them. And for all those who serve.
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