Soldiers Made Me Look Good

by Lewis MacKenzie

  But this desire to squeeze every ounce of enjoyment from our free time almost ended my career before it started when Gerry and I determined within the first twenty-four hours of our initial forty-eight-hour pass that we had to have a car to take maximum advantage of the local social opportunities. We recruited two other trainees to invest in the $250 down payment, and purchased a 1947 straight-six, four-door Chevy with a vacuum-operated clutch and a column-mounted three-speed transmission—in my name! Payments were $90 a month, but since we never actually made a monthly payment, the amount was academic. The Chevy logged over four thousand miles during the next three months and never let us down. We couldn’t afford auto insurance, so in accordance with military directives we had to park the vehicle outside the camp.

  During the last week of its summer training, our troop spent most of its time on the main parade square, under the direction of Corporal Downey, rehearsing for our graduation parade. Midway through the week, we had just reformed on the square after a five-minute break when I noticed a police car with RCMP markings slowly drive by directly in front of us. Less than a minute later it returned and stopped, and two police officers, accompanied by a military policeman, got out and approached the parade square. Corporal Downey was facing us, with his back to the officers; however, everyone in the troop was staring straight ahead, watching the drama unfold. It was at least a minute before Corporal Downey turned and noticed the three spectators. He gave us the commands “Stand at ease—stand easy,” and marched off in the direction of the police. From our vantage point, we could see an animated conversation taking place, with more than a few gestures in our direction. After a few minutes of suspense, Corporal Downey turned, faced us and bellowed: “Mr. MacKenzie, front and centre on the double!” I responded with “Corporal!” and took off in his direction, arriving a few seconds later. Standing rigidly at attention, I wondered if someone in my family had died or been seriously injured. My curiosity was immediately satisfied. The RCMP corporal asked, “Mr. MacKenzie, are you the owner of a 1947 Chevrolet, licence number A3849?”

  It seems the owner of the used car lot from whom we (I!) had purchased the car was a little upset that he had yet to receive a monthly payment, some two and a half months after the deal had been consummated. Fortunately for me, the survival of the local business community depended on maintaining good relations with the RCSME. The lot owner merely wanted his car back. Recognizing my good luck, I was quick to agree and returned to the troop praying that my uniform trousers concealed my shaking knees.

  You may be wondering what transpired between me and Pat Spears, the original object of my affection and the reason I joined the army officers training corps in the first place. When I arrived in the Chilliwack area that summer, I discovered that the judges of the Fraser Valley Apple Blossom Festival, displaying eminent good taste, had chosen Pat as their queen for 1958. I managed to accompany her to a few events, and each time we would be introduced as “Ladies and Gentlemen, Miss Apple Blossom Festival Pat Spears—and escort!” The events were pretty staid, and obviously Pat had to be on her best behaviour—which was, frankly, in conflict with my own priorities. Gradually we saw less and less of each other, and I never had a chance to thank her for providing me with the impetus to join the army. Hopefully I just have.

  Following our graduation parade, I was called to the office of Captain Mills, the commandant of all cadets undergoing their first summer of training. I had seen him only a couple of times from a distance, and he seemed to go out of his way to avoid me. On my entering his office, he motioned me to sit down. A smile crept across his face, and then he spoke: “Lewis, you might not know this, but your father and I are good friends. I was commissioned from the ranks a few years ago, and before that I was a sergeant major working with your dad during the time you were going to high school in Chilliwack. I even remember you pitching the odd game for our sapper apprentice baseball team. I didn’t want to make the fact that I knew your dad obvious to your fellow cadets because it might have made things more difficult for you. I want to tell you that you have done very well this summer, particularly during the leadership assignments. You should give serious consideration to transferring to the Regular Officer Training Plan (ROTP), which will qualify you for commissioned service in the regular army. Your university education will be paid for, and you will be paid a few bucks every month for spending money. You can remain at Xavier Junior College for now and go to St. Francis Xavier in due course. You would return here next year for second-phase officer training and start learning how to be a combat engineer officer.” I asked, “What will next summer’s training involve?” Immediately he responded, “Lots of bridge building, road construction, demolitions, things like that.”

  Now I was really confused. The idea of free education with some spending money as a bonus was more than a little attractive, and although I did not intend to join the regular army on graduation I naively assumed that I could always leave the university training plan whenever I wanted. The problem was the engineers. I had been a lance-corporal in the Royal Canadian Engineers militia squadron in Chilliwack a few years earlier. I had attended a summer concentration in Wainwright, Alberta, and built so many temporary bridges that we actually built one blindfolded, to mimic doing it in the dark, as part of an engineer competition. It was all good fun and challenging, but compared with the almost three months of infantry that we had just completed it seemed a little tame. Lieutenant Canfield and Sergeant Major Shaw had not only trained me, they had also inspired me. If the purpose of an army was to fight, those two were the type of leaders I would follow—not to ignore the fact that they also looked the part, with their airborne regalia. With a good deal of trepidation I responded, “Captain Mills, I really enjoyed my summer here and I’d like to apply to ROTP. But I’m not sure about becoming an engineer officer. My highest marks this summer were in all the infantry subjects, and I really enjoyed all the leadership roles, especially patrolling. Doesn’t that mean I should give serious consideration to transferring to the infantry?” Captain Mills stared at me, smiled and nodded slowly. “You’re probably right. Your father will never forgive me!”

  Soon after my return to Sydney, I reported for an interview to apply for ROTP infantry. The word on the street suggested that current affairs were an obsession with all the interviewers, so I read the daily paper from cover to cover for a week before my appointment. No more than ten seconds after the interview began, the captain from the recruiting depot in Halifax asked me what I thought about the Marshall Plan—did I think it was a good idea? I didn’t have a clue what the Marshall Plan was, but he had asked me for my opinion. I had at least a fifty-fifty chance of hitting the right answer—if there was one. I blurted out something like “I know there’s a good deal of controversy about it, but I’m in favour of what it is trying to do.” The captain knew I was tap dancing, and he put me out of my misery by dedicating the remaining time to determining why I wanted to join the infantry.

  Three weeks later, my ROTP acceptance certificate arrived in the mail, along with my first cheque, for $69—a princely sum for a destitute college student. As Captain Mills had foretold, my father was not impressed with my transfer to the infantry and, with his tongue firmly implanted in his cheek, referred to my decision as “going slumming!” But what the hell, it was Friday, so Gerry, Leo and I went off to the bootleggers’ in the Pier and subsequently celebrated our newfound wealth.

  Now that I had transferred to the infantry, there was no compelling reason to continue with the study of engineering. To my surprise, I discovered that I preferred college subjects like logic, philosophy, history and even English to my old high school favourites of math and science. The fact that it took less effort to do well in these non-technical subjects probably had more than a little to do with my decision the next year to transfer to the arts program.

  Years later, while serving in Germany with Canada’s NATO contingent I shared a table with Albert Speer, Hitler’s minister of wartime prod
uction.* As the only defendant at the Nuremberg Trials to admit to his share of guilt in the crimes of the Third Reich, Speer had been sentenced to twenty years in Berlin’s Spandau jail. He was released in 1966. Some ten years later, the Canadian high school in Lahr, West Germany, which looked after the education of our children, invited Speer to speak to the student body. I was invited to the dinner that concluded the evening. I found it more than a little humorous when Speer was asked by a very confident grade eleven student: “Mr. Speer, how could a group of talented people like yourself be convinced to follow a madman like Hitler?”

  Speer was quiet for a few seconds, giving the impression he had never been asked the question before. Then he responded, “Young lady, probably because we were all trained as engineers! 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 in Hitler’s inner circle had been so educated at the time, we could have made a positive difference.”

  It was nice to have some justification, albeit from an infamous source, for my questionable decision seventeen years earlier.

  * When I was introduced as the executive assistant to the commander of Canadian Forces in Europe, Speer looked me in the eye and said: “Hmmm, interesting. Executive assistants are dangerous. I remember Martin Bormann.”

  4: The School of Foot

  “Washing and defecating within a few feet of each other may seem bizarre, but to the infanteer it is often par for the course.”

  OBSERVATIONS FROM THE MEAFORD TRAINING AREA

  THE FOLLOWING SUMMER, in 1959, I made the train journey to Barrie, Ontario, where I and many others were met by a three-ton truck with ample room in the back for us and our kit. I had no idea that this would be one of my last rides for the next three months, and that by the end of the summer a similar ride would seem like a holiday trip in a Rolls-Royce. We were about to report to the School of Infantry, or as it was more appropriately described by its students, “the school of foot.”

  Camp Borden, ten miles west of Barrie, was an important training centre for the army, and to a lesser degree the air force, for most of the twentieth century. At the time it was home to the Armoured Corps School and the School of Infantry, as well as some service support schools—the Royal Canadian Service Corps School being the largest of them. Adjacent to the camp’s built-up area was the field training area, which closely resembled a massive sandbox. In areas where the topsoil had been removed by the frequent passage of tracked armoured vehicles, large sandy patches dotted the landscape. We foot-borne infanteers soon came to despise the training area. For every two steps we went forward, we slipped back at least one, and digging a slit trench (foxhole, for those conditioned by U.S. television) was virtually impossible because the walls of our new home below ground would collapse before we had a chance to reinforce them.

  We were unceremoniously dropped in front of a large barrack block that had “Normandy” inscribed over its main entrance. Our infantry training began immediately.

  In any army, it’s the infantry that does the dirtiest work. This is not to suggest that the other members of the combat fraternity— the Armoured Corps, the artillery, the engineers and the signallers—have an easy time of it; on the contrary, at various times in any battle they can find themselves worse off than the infantry. But for grinding, seemingly endless physical demands and gut-wrenching tension, combined with ever-present fatigue and hunger, the infantry soldier takes the prize, a prize that is usually limited to an infrequent hot meal, a few hours of shuteye and the occasional pat on the back.

  During the 1950s, if you aspired to be a leader in the army in general and the infantry in particular, you had to prove to a collection of war-hardened vets that you had the potential to survive the physical and mental challenges of the World War II and Korean War–type battlefields. A number of our instructors had been in combat as recently as six years earlier, and they knew where to place the emphasis in our training. With no human rights legislation, no access to information and no government-imposed social experimentation to distract them from their responsibility to produce junior leaders for the infantry, they had a free hand to do what they knew was necessary from experience.

  Our first few weeks of instruction, dealing with the basic elements of infantry work—map reading, field craft, small arms training, military law—was dominated by what we affectionately referred to as “chickenshit.” It was designed to rid us of any notion that any one of us was more important than the group. If one of us screwed up, we all paid. We were quartered four to a room, and daily inspections of our surroundings were routine, culminating every Friday with the platoon commander’s surgical evaluation of our progress. The floors of each room were waxed to a brilliant gloss that was maintained by each occupant skating his way around his area on two grey wool socks that acted like modern-day skateboards—without wheels. Woe betide anyone who dared to walk on our floor without first mounting the wool skids at the entrance to the room. Beds were made to a standard that would have pleased any nurse. Hospital corners were the norm, and the tension of the top blanket had to be such that a coin would bounce clear of the bed when dropped from a modest height by an inspecting non-commissioned officer (NCO). Obviously, there was a choice to be made: you could make your bed to an acceptable standard on Sunday and sleep on the floor for the rest of the week, thereby gaining a few extra minutes of peace and quiet each morning, or you could opt to make your bed daily. Most of us chose the former. Occasionally a no-notice inspection would find us sound asleep on the floor, whereupon the instructors would gleefully tear our beds apart as we stood rigidly at attention.

  At the time, the purpose of the constant hassle by the instructors was lost on us. However, when I returned as an instructor on the same course five years later, I could see that some candidates expended too much energy sweating the small stuff and were unable to identify the important issues. Any theatre of operations is full of distractions, and to be effective a leader has to know which issues are critical and which are superficial, and treat them accordingly. Mind you, there were a number of benefits that justified an apparent obsession with neatness, cleanliness and order. Living under field conditions during operations is a filthy business for any army—TV and movie images of war notwithstanding. During defensive operations, the safest place to be is underground in a hole you have dug yourself, while during the offence, more often than not you will find yourself on your belly moving towards the enemy at night and in the worst possible weather. Ablutions take a back seat to sleep, unless the importance of proper sanitation is drilled into your brain. Washing and defecating within a few feet of each other may seem bizarre, but to the infanteer it is often par for the course. It was blatantly obvious to us all within a few days that if we were going to survive and not receive the dreaded “pink slip” that would put us on our way home and out of the army, we had to get our act together and perform as a team. Patrolling and small-unit tactics would come soon enough. During those first few weeks we had to work together, even if the only result was the shiniest floors and toilets in the barrack block.

  For the first half of the summer, we made it to the field for only a half a day of practical training a few times a week. More often than not, we thought the only reason we were driven to the field training location in the back of a truck was to give us a starting point for the run back to camp with a full kit and a weapon a few hours later. We grew to hate running and marching in the sand but, if nothing else, it probably made us fitter than we would be at any other time in our lives. Occasionally we stayed out overnight to gain some rudimentary skills in night patrolling, but we never deployed to the field for more than a few days.

  As we neared the last half of the summer training, rumours circul
ated about a one-month killer exercise that all second-phase infantry cadets underwent in Meaford, a remote training area about fifty miles to the northwest. The third-year cadets who had experienced the exercise the previous summer and who lowered themselves to speak to us told stories of endurance tests that resulted in sixty per cent attrition rates, with cadets quitting the exercise—and the army—every day.

  Resigning or quitting was the potential culmination of a psychological game between instructors and cadets. Most of the instructors were NCOs—corporals, sergeants or warrant officers—first class or second class. The fact that “officer cadet” appeared on the rank chart above “warrant officer first class” and just below “second lieutenant” was more than a little misleading. Simply, officer cadet was not a rank but a species resting at the bottom of the military food chain. We had no authority, and our lives were in the hands of our NCO instructors.

  Fortunately, it was in the interest of the NCOs to do the very best job possible of training each cadet in the skills needed to help him qualify as commissioned officer. If they permitted an underskilled or wimpish cadet to progress through the system, he could end up being their boss in the not-too-distant future. With the Cold War hot and heavy and memories of Korea fresh in everyone’s minds, the instructors knew that a future battlefield might be just around the corner, and they didn’t want to be caught under fire with a weak and or incompetent junior officer. Therefore, they made it extremely easy for anyone to quit. In fact, they encouraged it. When the going got a little rough and sleep was at a premium and a cadet was heard to complain, he was told: “Well, Cadet, why don’t you put yourself out of your misery and quit!” The invitation had the most appeal during tests of physical endurance. Midway into a ten-mile march and run in the driving rain, after twenty-four hours without sleep and carrying a kit plus some common platoon items like mortar bombs or a radio, the enticement of “Mr. MacKenzie, you’re looking a little tired. Why don’t you throw your kit up here into the truck and pack it in? You say the word, and we’ll drive you into camp and deliver you to your quarters” held a certain attraction.