Soldiers Made Me Look Good
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SOLDIERS MADE ME LOOK GOOD
A LIFE IN THE SHADOW OF WAR
MADE ME LOOK GOOD
DOUGLAS & MCINTYRE
VANCOUVER / TORONTO / BERKELEY
Copyright © 2008 by Lewis MacKenzie
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For a copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.
Douglas & McIntyre Ltd.
2323 Quebec Street, Suite 201
Vancouver, British Columbia
Canada V5T 4S7
www.douglas-mcintyre.com
Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada
ISBN 978-1-55365-350-9 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-55365-318-9 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-1-926706-92-4 (ebook)
Editing by John Eerkes-Medrano
Copy editing by Ruth Wilson
Jacket photograph courtesy of Lewis MacKenzie
Uncredited photographs courtesy of the author
We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, the Province of British Columbia through the Book Publishing Tax Credit, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for our publishing activities.
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED to the Canadian soldier of today, a member of a tiny army fighting well above its weight on the international stage and bringing much credit to Canada as the rest of us safely observe from the sidelines.
“We were pragmatic to the extreme, and we thought every problem could be solved by an equation or by adjusting the numbers. Not one of us had any education in the humanities— even Hitler fancied himself an architect, in spite of his lack of formal training. While serving twenty years behind Spandau’s walls I constantly studied the humanities, and I’m convinced that if a few of us within Hitler’s inner circle were so educated at the time we could have made a positive difference.”
ALBERT SPEER, speaking to Canadian students in West Germany, 1976
Contents
INTRODUCTION
PART ONE: COLD WAR GRUNT
1 Small-Town Canada
2 Welcome to Cape Breton
3 Just a Summer Job?
4 The School of Foot
5 Field Training
6 Working for a Living
7 German Patrol
8 Libyan Desert Dust-up
9 The Wainwright Swamp
10 Mutiny at Battle River
11 Segue
PART TWO: ROADS FROM SARAJEVO
12 Naked on Civvy Street
13 Rapist
14 On the Road Again
15 Hostage Release by Cellphone
16 Political Waters
17 Back to the Balkans
18 ICROSS Canada: Our Drop in the Bucket
19 Accused Rapist, Again
20 Off’s Fox
21 Roméo Dallaire: A Leadership Disagreement
22 Leadership: What It Looks Like
23 The Enduring Canadian Peacekeeping Myth
24 A Sea Change: Afghanistan
25 “More With Less”
26 An Army Afloat? Yes, Please!
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
SOURCES
Introduction
IN 1993, THANKS to the curiosity and support of a large number of Canadians, I was fortunate to be the author of a national #1 bestseller entitled Peacekeeper: The Road to Sarajevo. No one was more surprised than I was, and I assumed that writing a book was a one-time experience, sort of a “been there done that but don’t push your luck” type of thing.
What I did not anticipate was the somewhat flattering interest from publishers hoping for a second book. I was leery of the suggestion and kept thinking of Michael J. Fox’s disappointing film, Back to the Future, Part ii. I had really enjoyed the first Back to the Future but the sequel was a bit of a flop, and I had heard that it was basically a montage of clippings gathered from the editing-room floor after the first movie had been completed. It seems the producers of the sequel assumed they could reap rewards from the positive legacy of the first movie during the distribution of the second. It didn’t work, and I was concerned that I might suffer the same experience if I wrote another book. So I resisted the overtures.
We retire from our chosen Profession of Arms pretty young. Let’s face it, we don’t need some fifty-five-year-old turning around and shouting “follow me!” to a thousand armed nineteen-to twenty-five-year-olds as they storm the enemy on a hill in some faraway land. I took off my uniform a month before my fifty-third birthday in 1993.
To my considerable surprise, life did not come to a shuddering halt when I turned in my military ID card and ventured out the door and onto civvy street. During the past fifteen years I seem to have been on fast-forward and involved in a significant number of interesting and—most of the time—satisfying experiences. I have written about them all: returning to Somalia; involvement with the release of Canadian hostages in Bosnia; multiple appearances before U.S. Congressional committees and dealing with accusations of rape and murder from the Bosnian prosecutor that followed; heading up a team to restructure the Irish Armed Forces; running in the 1997 federal election; hosting an award-winning documentary on the UN; helping CTV cover NATO’s bombing campaign against Serbia from Belgrade; assisting a small Canadian NGO founded by a fellow soldier with its humanitarian work in Africa; commenting on military and foreign affairs, initially for the National Post and later for the Globe and Mail; maintaining my love for (obsession with) motor racing by continuing to race Formula Fords and anything else I’m offered and, along the way, speaking to well over a million people in eight countries on the professional speaking circuit.
Two chapters of this book are dedicated to what will probably be controversial subjects. One deals with Carol Off’s biased, highly critical and error-ridden personal evaluation of my performance as the UN commander in Sarajevo in 1992. The other chapter analyzes the probable genesis of a serious disagreement between Senator Roméo Dallaire and me regarding leadership priorities.
If I wanted to start this book at the beginning, describe how I ended up in the military and then jump to my post-military career, I had a problem. I would have to account for the thirty-three-year-gap, and I couldn’t describe the most interesting experiences I had in uniform because I had already done that in Peacekeeper. I thought about various options on and off for the last few years, and I’ve come up with what I hope is a satisfactory solution.
Rank progression in the military is frequently inexplicable to those both inside and outside the Profession of Arms. Many factors come into play: some within an individual’s control, such as performance, knowledge, fitness and commitment. In many instances, though, other factors are well outside the individual’s control: timing, exposure, an articulate boss and the severity of the challenges at work, all of which come under the general heading of Luck! There are many highly talented people in uniform who might have performed to an outstanding level well beyond their current rank, but the absence of luck in their careers has denied them the opportunity. For those of us fortunate enough to benefit from Lady Luck’s smile, our success is due in no small part to those talented people who work for us and who—with all their experience and talent, but less luck— make us look good. I decided I would cover my military career by describing the events that I thought were the most responsible for the good fortune and satisfaction I experienced in my thirty-three years of commissioned service. Not su
rprisingly, I emphasize the large role played by luck in each anecdote.
It would be inappropriate to conclude this book without discussing the two subjects that dominate my time at present: Afghanistan and leadership. I feel compelled to write about our sincere efforts to help the Afghan people get their country back to a secure state under their own control. I will offer some comments about how we got there and what we are achieving. My visits to the country have me longing to be back in uniform, but I realize that the current generation of our soldiers has moved on to establish their own enviable reputation as second-to-none. They make us all look good, at home and abroad, in spite of the few critical rants to the contrary. Any of them who pick up this book will be bored to tears reading about the experiences of a one-time Cold War soldier, considering what they have experienced on the post–Cold War battlefield.
This book comes from a soldier who spent most of his career training for a big fight with the Russian-led Warsaw Pact. Fortunately for all of mankind, it never materialized. Lurking around the corner was a new and equally challenging international threat to peace and security, waiting to fill the vacuum once the Berlin Wall came down. Our current generation of solders is in the thick of that campaign, doing something about the threat, while too many Canadians try to wish the problem away. I look forward to reading the books they will write about their experiences. They certainly won’t be boring!
SOLDIERS MADE ME LOOK GOOD
PART ONE
COLD WAR GRUNT
1: Small-Town Canada
“Lewis is a disrupting influence in the classroom. With his capabilities of leadership, he should be setting a much better example.”
MISS SHAVER, GRADE SEVEN TEACHER
I WAS AN UNLIKELY candidate to be a soldier. I was born in Truro, Nova Scotia, the site of the hospital nearest to our tiny village of Princeport. I’m not sure if Princeport still has the official status of a village today. In the 1940s you needed a church to qualify, and we had that, along with a one-room, eleven-grade schoolhouse a scant twenty-five yards away on the same piece of property. Unfortunately, amalgamation fever was alive and well even in the 1960s, and both buildings disappeared beneath the blade of a bulldozer when it became obvious that a population of just over fifty souls could not sustain them.
Princeport consisted of a collection of relatively small farms overlooking the junction of Cobequid Bay and the Shubenacadie River. My grandparents on my father’s side lived there, and my father, Eugene Murdock (“Connie”) MacKenzie, the third of four boys and two girls, lived a few hundred yards away at the end of a seasonal lane—“seasonal” meaning that it was easily passable only during the hot, dry summer months. My father had left school after grade eight to help support his family, like so many of his generation. The Great Depression saw him searching for work throughout the province, ultimately landing a steady job with the Mersey Paper Company in Liverpool, Nova Scotia.
When I first saw the light of day on April 30, 1940, the Nazi Blitz was on against London and my father was training at Camp Petawawa, two hours west of Ottawa. He and two of his brothers had joined up at the outbreak of hostilities; these brothers joined the air force and navy, and Dad went to the army’s combat engineers. The youngest brother had suffered a serious gunshot wound from a hunting accident that prevented him from joining his brothers at the Halifax recruiting depot.
My mother’s family, the Whartons, were originally from Nova Scotia’s south shore town of Liverpool. Mum’s name was Shirley, and her father, Newman Wharton, was a master sea captain of considerable renown. He operated his schooner, the Jean and Shirley, from the world-famous fishing and shipbuilding port of Lunenburg, an hour northeast. The Jean in the Jean and Shirley was Mum’s older sister.
My grandfather, like most of his colleagues, enjoyed racing back to Lunenburg from the Grand Banks off Newfoundland once his boat had taken on a full load of fish. One of his closest friends was Angus Walters, the skipper of the legendary Bluenose, and one of my first recollections is my mother telling me that Angus had said my grandfather had twice beat him racing back from the Grand Banks, “fair and square.” These unofficial races took place with boats carrying a full load of fish and using conventional sails; however, when the fast schooners ventured forth against the world’s best in competition, they mounted racing spars and purpose-built sails.
My grandfather was tempted to try his hand at professional racing, but the fate of his brother, Lewis, haunted my grandmother. Lewis Wharton had been captain of the schooner Columbia, a highly successful racer sailing out of Gloucester, Massachusetts, in the 1920s. In order to qualify for the International Fisherman’s Trophy, an entrant had to have been a working fishing boat for at least one year. Tragically, during the great August gale of 1927, the Columbia was lost with all hands in the Atlantic graveyard off the coast of Sable Island. The drowning of its twenty-six crew members was the largest single loss of of life on any ship sailing from Gloucester harbour in over four centuries. My grandmother inaccurately blamed the loss on racing modifications to the Columbia and would not tolerate the thought of any similar modifications to the Jean and Shirley, so my grandfather was forced to limit himself to unofficial races back from the Grand Banks. Thirteen years later I was named after my late, great uncle, Lewis Wharton.
My mother was smart and excelled in school. Her parents were strict disciplinarians, and it rubbed off on their offspring. We spent every summer during the war at my grandparents’ home in Liverpool, Nova Scotia. It was a real treat to live and play, if only temporarily, in what to me was a sprawling metropolis. They say that the sense of smell is the greatest trigger of nostalgia. I tend to agree, as every time I detect a whiff of a pulp and paper plant I think of the war and my summers in Liverpool, played out under a sulphur-rich, yellow cloud generated by the Mersey paper plant, close to the centre of town.
My mother ruled with an iron hand, frequently wrapped in velvet, when we visited her parents. Her father was a kind and extremely quiet man, quite the opposite of the stereotypical master seafarer, while her mother was misemployed in life: she would have made an excellent sergeant major or drill sergeant. You spoke when you were spoken to, and that was that. My grandfather now stands out in my mind as someone who proved beyond a doubt that you don’t have to rant and rave to be a successful leader. He established his reputation by his deeds, not by the volume of his rhetoric.
My dad, much to his frustration, never made it overseas during the war. While engaged in a training exercise, he had a finger blown off, which kept him in Canada. The fact that he was stuck in Petawawa, Ontario, as an instructor while the war raged on weighed heavily on his mind and was to have a significant impact on our lives within a few years. In 1945, following the end of the war, he was demobilized and returned to Princeport. He had reached the rank of warrant officer first class, or chief warrant officer in today’s terminology. This was a significant achievement, considering his lack of formal education.
Fortunately for the family, my father was good with his hands, missing finger notwithstanding. On his return home, he worked at various jobs, depending on the season. He built his own boat and knitted his own nets for fishing on the Shubenacadie River, a scant hundred yards from our back door. In the winter he was employed as a sheet metal worker and took on steeplejacking whenever the opportunity arose. He was probably one of the original “ambulance chasers.” Lightning strikes were a major problem in Nova Scotia in those days; barns and churches were tall and attracted lightning like a magnet—at least that was my dad’s line, and he kept to it. Any time there was a report of a lightning strike in the province, he would be off in a cloud of dust to speak with the neighbours of the strike victim about immediately mounting protective rods on all their tall buildings. Churches that had been struck generated by far the most business for us. Anyone who lived nearby assumed that if God’s natural forces could target a church no one was safe, so they’d better put up some rods. Dad was standing by to oblige.
The installation of lightning rods was an expensive proposition, primarily because of the outrageous cost of copper wire in post-war Canada and the requirement to work at some pretty significant elevations. But my father was unafraid of heights, and one of my favourite snapshots shows him standing on his head on the peak of the roof at the Dorchester Penitentiary in New Brunswick—where, I hasten to add, he was working under contract to repair the smokestack.
As the years passed and I reached all of ten years old, I began to help Dad with the really high work, because he was becoming less and less comfortable with heights. The change was a result of a different lifestyle that Dad had adopted during his five-year stint with the army; he had become a weekend alcoholic.
A weekend alcoholic is someone who follows the old and much-quoted adage, “Work hard and play hard.” Once the soldiers were out of the field, where drinking was tightly controlled, they routinely “tied one on” with their mates at happy hour on Friday evenings. Because they were away from home, they had no compelling reason to sober up on Saturday, so they carried on partying into Sunday. About noon on Sunday—or later, depending on their constitution—they cleaned up their act and dried themselves out so that they would be ready to go, bright and early, on Monday morning.
This affliction was common in Dad’s time and continues to this day, although its occurrence is greatly reduced, thanks to changing attitudes. I myself frequently followed the route as a young, single officer. Fortunately, however, I spent a lot of time in the field, so drinking didn’t develop into a conditioned reflex as soon as 4:30 PM rolled around on Friday. My dad, on the other hand, had five years to practise, without the intensity of surviving the battlefield to break the routine. In hindsight it was a pretty impressive performance—drink for a day and a half, don’t touch another drop for the next five and a half days, then repeat. At the time it caused a lot of tension in the house, as my mother was not a drinker, nor did she enjoy going anywhere with my father when he was imbibing. Out of the house Dad was a good, even outstanding, party person. He was gregarious and generous to a fault, and he loved to dance. He was popular and always good for a laugh; yet, with the benefit of hindsight, I think he secretly resented the fact that he never got overseas, and he found some solace in alcohol.