Soldiers Made Me Look Good

by Lewis MacKenzie

  Sharing space in our modest farmhouse was my sister, Katheryn, six years my senior and smart as a whip. Fortunately for me she was destined to be relatively short, so she beat me up only until I was nine, when to my considerable surprise and pleasure I noticed that I was looking down at her. “Tap,” as she was known back then (there were so many Katheryns in our family and the area in general that you needed to nickname them to keep track) excelled in school, which made life more difficult for me, particularly as we were all crammed into the same schoolroom. When I entered grade one, Tap was already in grade seven. Since a lone teacher had to deal with eleven grades at the same time (wouldn’t today’s teachers’ unions have a ball with that!), the more senior students would frequently be called upon to teach the rest of us, and—you guessed it—I was occasionally taught by my sister. She must have been pretty good at it and must have benefited from the experience because, some five years later, when she went to the Colchester County Academy in Truro to complete grade twelve, she won the province’s Governor General’s Award for academic excellence.

  The independence and freedom inherent in a rural upbringing in the 1940s and ’50s had a lot going for it. Our home was surrounded by forests, except for a few fields of hay, so with a few quick steps I could disappear from the watchful gaze of my mother, standing sentry at the kitchen window. The nearby sheer, two-hundred-foot riverbanks were a magnet; their almost vertical slopes rested on the edge of the Shubenacadie River, which retreated twice a day when the world’s highest tides receded from the Bay of Fundy. The banks and the exposed river bottom and, for that matter, the river itself, were a deep rusty-red colour—the result of an extremely high iron content, a legacy of the Triassic geological period that produced the rich soil so common throughout Nova Scotia (take one geology course in college and you become an expert!). The red mud had the consistency of chocolate pudding, so if you ran as fast as the footing would permit and dove head-first into the ooze, you could slide for a good fifty yards, the mud providing the ultimate lubricant.

  Twice a day, thirty-foot-plus tides would build in the Bay of Fundy, pushed by the Atlantic. The resulting onrushing wall of water would encounter the deluge of the Shubenacadie River heading for the bay in the opposite direction. When the two met, the tidal water would initially dominate, and the river water would be pushed back up the river against its normal direction. The resulting turbulence was referred to as the tidal bore, and in spite of it having taken on a mythical status as a tourist attraction over the last twenty years, I’ve always considered the bore to be appropriately named. Perhaps if we had stayed in Princeport, we could have constructed some bleachers overlooking the river and sold tickets. However, in the absence of any material benefit from the tidal bore during my time there, it merely provided another source of concern for my mother. She was convinced that one day I would be trapped at the base of the bluffs and drown when the tide came in.

  At seven years of age, I enjoyed disappearing into the forest alone with my first .22 calibre rifle. Shooting at cans was necessary in the beginning, to prove to my father that I was capable of aiming, but after overcoming that hurdle I was hunting with a purpose. There was a good supply of food in the surrounding woods, and rabbits, partridges and particularly deer were a godsend. The deer required the use of Dad’s .303 Lee-Enfield, which I was not permitted to carry by myself. Fortunately, unsuspecting deer frequently wandered along the treeline a hundred yards from our porch. I would sit in a chair and aim the rifle while my mother held me from behind to help control the recoil, and then I would squeeze the trigger. It worked on two occasions, and I can still remember waiting for my dad to return from work in Truro and seeing the look of surprise on his face as he was led to the carcass by his two lawbreakers. (There was some obscure regulation that said you were not permitted to fire a gun from the confines of your residence with the intent of hunting; we arbitrarily decided that our porch did not qualify as “confines.”) With venison and an inexhaustible supply of fish, which my father cured in the smokehouse he had built, we ate pretty well—although like most kids, my sister and I expressed a dislike for anything that wasn’t bought in a store.

  On most Friday nights we all took the trip to Truro to buy groceries, with me in the back of our Fargo. There was always an argument over how many five-cent comics I could buy, but early on I discovered Classics Illustrated comics, which in spite of their fifteen-cent price were a much better deal than three of the normal variety. To this day I occasionally give the impression that I have read all the classics, from the Iliad through David Copperfield to Moby-Dick. I owe the illusion to those fifteen-cent Classics.

  Today we pride ourselves in keeping up with the latest news by way of the Internet. Those who lived in the country in the 1940s had an equally efficient tool for staying on top of local happenings and gossip: the telephone party line. Everyone in the community had their own distinctive series of rings; ours was three long and two short. Every family knew every other family’s code, and listening to other people’s trials and tribulations was an important part of the day’s entertainment. Unfortunately, whenever someone surreptitiously picked up their receiver to eavesdrop, there was a modest but noticeable electronic drain on the line and the volume of the ongoing conversation was reduced for everyone. Occasionally, when a discussion was particularly long and juicy, so many listeners would join the audience that the two people having the conversation would no longer be able to hear each other. This usually resulted in one of them exclaiming, “For God’s sake! Would all you eavesdroppers please hang up so we can start over again!” The fact that we were the most isolated home in the community meant that my mother felt a moral obligation to the family to remain as current as possible (at least that’s what she told us!), so she spent a good deal of her time with her ear glued to the receiver.

  While my daughter, Kimm, was growing up, I probably bored her more than once describing how I had walked for miles through two feet of snow to get to that one-room school in Princeport. It was a bit of a shock to discover during a recent nostalgia visit home that it was under a half mile, but at least it was an entertaining half mile. It’s not a bad start to a day when you walk through a forest alive with the sounds of animals and birds too numerous to count. Emerging from our woods, it was a clear run across an open pasture past my grandparents’ home, always a warm refuge in the winter when the temperature dipped below zero (that’s Fahrenheit!). My grandmother could dry frozen mittens and snowsuits faster than anyone— and without igniting them! Then down the hill, past the swamp on the left of the lane—it was impossible not to stop each and every time, to and from school, because the swamp offered an advanced biology course if you paid attention. The passing of the seasons was revealed by the changes in the bog and its inhabitants. The frogs’ eggs, tightly packed together like tapioca pudding, virtually overnight were transformed into thousands of minute tadpoles that soon grew tiny legs, and ultimately the bulging eyes of an adult frog would appear. As winter neared, the summer’s vocal sentries would make their way to the muddy bottom before November’s ice presented us with a modest skating rink a few feet above their resting place.

  The single schoolroom’s routine was a team builder par excellence. I didn’t realize it at the time, but those female schoolteachers— including a particularly attractive one, Margaret, who married my youngest uncle—were my first leadership role models. They managed to get more out of us than the sum of our parts, and more often than not they made learning an enjoyable experience. We, their team, restricted to one spartan room, helped each other learn. I didn’t understand synergy then, but that’s what I was witnessing.

  If every life has a dominating turning point, mine occurred when the North Korean army swarmed south over the 38th parallel into South Korea on June 25, 1950. Two months earlier, I had celebrated my tenth birthday.

  Following the Second World War, Canada was ranked the fifth-largest military power in the world, behind the United States, the Soviet
Union, Great Britain and China. Over one million men had served in the war, 708,500 of them in the army. However, the euphoria of total victory, combined with unrealistic optimism for the future—particularly after the signing of the United Nations Charter on June 26, 1945—saw almost total demobilization. By 1947 the Canadian Permanent Force, as it was known at the time, numbered a mere 8,000 souls. As the Cold War intensified, even Canada was aroused from its new and comfortable isolation. In 1949, threats to our north justified the creation of the Mobile Strike Force, whose title was significantly more impressive than its operational capabilities. Even as the force was exercising for the first time “north of 60,” Canadian politicians and military thinkers were focusing their attention on Europe. Czechoslovakia was taken over by the communists in 1948, and the Soviets blockaded Berlin in June that year. Shortly thereafter, the Soviet Union’s 1949 nuclear test made the idea of a land defence of Canada’s north dated, to say the least. The western European countries got together and formed a defence union to face down the Soviets. Canada led the way in turning the union into a trans-Atlantic club, and ultimately, in April 1949, into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). With the creation of NATO, Canada could exercise its new stated policy to “defend Canada from as far away as possible.” Participation in NATO required that some dues be paid, and by the end of 1949 the strength of the regular army had grown to just over 20,000 and that of the militia to 37,000.

  The outbreak of the Korean War created a problem for Canadian decision makers. While Canada had no obvious self-interests threatened in Korea, it had been an outspoken supporter of the United Nations’ responsibility for maintaining “international peace and security” when the UN Charter was signed four years earlier in San Francisco. At the same time, Canada’s modest military was required to help defend North America and, if necessary, to deploy (albeit very slowly) to help the Europeans in the event of Soviet aggression. Thus, it looked like Canada would have to recruit an additional force for deployment to Korea.

  On August 7, 1950, Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent went on national radio and announced that a Canadian Army Special Force would be recruited to be available to meet Canada’s obligations to the UN and NATO. A scant few minutes after the prime minister’s pronouncement, only the dust from my father’s 1942 Fargo truck lingered in the air as he left our view on his way to the army recruiting station in Halifax, a good two hours away.

  With my father heading towards the recruiting depot, I soon discovered that our rural lifestyle, in all its simplicity, in concert with a solid educational foundation and everyday country activities like running, throwing and roughhousing, would be of considerable value when a Cold War conflict halfway around the world dictated our next stop. To my father’s considerable surprise, when the army recruiters found his old file and saw that he had been senior instructor when he was released in 1945, they offered him the rank of warrant officer second class, one rung lower than his wartime rank. It was a heck of a deal, considering the number of ex-soldiers who were lining up to get back in, and with no hesitation Dad signed on the dotted line. What followed was six months of menial jobs at the Halifax garrison, which permitted visits home on the weekends while the “system” debated what to do with him. In January of 1951, Sergeant Major MacKenzie was posted to the Royal Canadian School of Military Engineering, at Vedder Crossing, just outside Chilliwack, British Columbia. To his chagrin, however, he ended up helping to train others on their way to Korea and missed yet another opportunity to serve overseas in an operational theatre. To further complicate matters, since the army was not yet sure how it would employ its new crop of ex-soldiers and, indeed, how many of them would adjust to military life outside of a world war context, it decided that families would not accompany the new “recruits” to their initial retraining.

  Our isolated farm on the near edge of nowhere was not the ideal location for a growing family while Dad went off to the other side of the country, and it was decided that after I completed grade five we would move to Truro, the Las Vegas of Nova Scotia, or so it seemed from ten miles out in the country. The town was referred to as the “hub” of Nova Scotia because of the junction of rail- and roadways within its town limits. The resulting frantic level of activities promised to make life interesting for a transplanted eleven-year-old. We rented a small apartment on the second floor of a modest house on Young Street. One of our neighbours was the combined police and fire hall, and the other was the Nova Scotia Teachers’ College. Directly across the street was a large and imposing funeral home, a stark contrast to the open field and treeline I’d grown accustomed to.

  Soon after arriving in Truro, I made the short walk to Central Elementary School and reported in for grade six. It was a significant change to have only one grade in the same room and only one teacher to look after thirty or so ten- to eleven-year-olds. My new teacher was an unforgettable character: I’m usually terrible with names, but I certainly remember Miss Bruce-Payne. She was British, authoritative, impatient, caustic and yet totally dedicated to her charges. What set her apart from everyone else I had met so far was the fact that she had survived the German bombing blitz on London ten years earlier, during the Second World War, and she never let us forget it! Throughout the year I spent at Central, whenever things got a bit boring in class, all one of us had to do was ask Miss Bruce-Payne about the Blitz: “What was it like? Were you scared? Did you see anyone killed?” The subject of the current period would immediately be forgotten, and Miss Bruce-Payne became our personal Second World War tour guide, taking us on mental excursions into the London Underground, where we shared the horror of air raid after air raid and the joy of each “All clear!” I never forgot Miss Bruce-Payne, and for years afterwards I paid her a visit whenever I returned to Truro.

  Truro has a significant black population. During my country upbringing I had seen black people only from a distance on the Friday night grocery runs to Truro, and racial prejudice was unknown to me. I was more than a little surprised when our grade six schoolyard activities were unofficially segregated along racial lines. At times there was virtual warfare between blacks and whites, and since the blacks were greatly outnumbered they usually got the worst of it—despite the fact that, one on one, they were usually superior when it came to physical confrontation. For some reason, even as a child I preferred to side with the underdog. It’s tempting to claim that I instantly recognized the stupidity and cruelty of discrimination, but more likely it was the excitement of picking a fight that I knew I would have to work particularly hard to win. And though I call it excitement today, it was more likely fear. Whatever it was, it produced the adrenalin rush I needed to help me survive.

  And it helped me make a few friends among the school’s black students. This fact soon raised the ire of the white bully in our class. I certainly was not going to be his friend. One day, early in the school year, he and his partners in crime saw fit to chase me home after school. Fortunately, I was fast enough to beat them by a respectable margin to my front door. Unfortunately, though, I used the extra time to run upstairs to our apartment, grab my air rifle and take up a firing position just inside our open living room window. When the bully and his buddies appeared, I got off a few shots at their lower extremities before they beat a hasty retreat screaming something about seeing me the next day. In the fear of the moment, I’d forgotten that I wouldn’t be able to avoid meeting them at school for the next year or so.

  I didn’t sleep that night. I knew I had bitten off more than I could possibly chew and that I might live to regret it (if I lived). I considered running away, but the proximity of the police station was intimidating enough to keep me inside. The next morning I put on my sneakers, in case speed might be necessary to contribute to my survival, and headed off to school. (At the time, I thought I was sick to my stomach from fear; now, having experienced a similar sensation hundreds of times during my adult life, particularly while being shot at or in the cockpit of a race car just before the flag drops, I r
ealize that it is merely a good dose of adrenalin working its way through my body to help me cope with a situation I should never have gotten myself into!)

  When I arrived at school the next morning, I was approached by the bully’s delegation and advised that a fight had been scheduled for 3 PM that afternoon in an alley just across the street from the our schoolyard. I spent the entire day contemplating my fate. Being new to the school, I didn’t have a lot of folks aligning themselves with me, although I did receive words of encouragement from some of my black classmates. It seemed that 3 PM arrived much earlier than usual that day, and I made my way into the crowded alley. I saw that the bully and his ever-increasing gaggle of supporters were blocking the far exit, so I made the slow walk towards them—it was like a scene out of the movie High Noon. I didn’t know anything about boxing, but my country upbringing had prepared me to wrestle all day if need be, and I understood the importance of surprise. Twenty feet from the bully, I broke into a sprint and let out a scream. Convinced that I had gone mad, he stood there (frozen with fear?) until my leap was complete, and I knocked him to the ground. I wrapped my right arm around his neck and proceeded to squeeze, hard. About thirty seconds later, when his resistance had all but disappeared and his gallery of supporters were looking more than a little concerned, I asked him if he wanted to give up. I interpreted his bulging eyes and his barely audible moan to be a yes, and I relaxed my hold. It was all over. I had survived the first of many ill-conceived confrontations.