Soldiers Made Me Look Good

by Lewis MacKenzie

  The normal procedure followed on hearing such an order— given when the right foot passes the left—is for the right foot to complete its step, the left foot to take a shortened step, followed by the right foot slamming down with as much noise as possible to align with the left. (Probably the reason most army vets suffer from lower-back problems later in life!) Unfortunately, no one in the two platoons had received a parade square order for more than five weeks while we were in the field. This fact, combined with flat feet, muscle cramps, shin splints and being on autopilot with fatigue, resulted in one of the most pathetic attempts to stop a group together previously seen on that sacred ground of a parade square. (It’s used as a parking lot today, which cuts me to the quick when I visit.) Some cadets tried to halt, but their legs refused to respond to their brain; while others just slowed down and took shorter and shorter steps until they came to a stop a good three yards beyond where they had intended. A few sleepwalkers just kept marching until I gave the halt order one more time. With some effort, we formed up into two platoons in three ranks facing our barrack block.

  Immediately a black staff car approached from the right and stopped on the road directly between the parade square and the barracks. The right rear door opened and an officer appeared, resplendent in his starched bush field dress, red tabs on his collar indicating (even from a distance) an officer of colonel or general rank. He wore a forage cap with the hat badge of the Royal 22nd Regiment, the Van Doos. As the officer marched towards us we could make out the two pips and the crown of a full colonel, along with a chest full of Second World War and Korean War medals. I came to attention and gave the order to the company to do the same. The odd groan, accompanied by grunts of pain, told me that some of us were having as much problem in coming to attention in unison as we had earlier had in halting.

  I now recognized Colonel “Jimmy” Dextraze, the commandant of the Infantry School and a legend in his own time. Soon to be General Dextraze and ultimately the chief of defence staff, Colonel Dextraze had earned the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) for his leadership and bravery following the Normandy landings, had returned to the army to command a battalion in the Korean War and was awarded the Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 1964 for his initiative and fearlessness as a UN “peacekeeping” commander during the brutal civil war in the Congo. I had no idea how many cadets were behind me, so I made up a number and reported, “Thirty-eight cadets on parade, sir; remainder are accounted for. Do you wish to inspect, sir?”

  What followed was one of those few moments in my life that I will never forget. The war hero many times over in three campaigns, the decorated Canadian who had witnessed the carnage of combat up close, teared up and didn’t turn away. “No,” he said, “you’ve earned a rest. I just wanted to tell you how proud I am of every one of you. You could have quit, and you didn’t. Well done.” And with that, he saluted and turned away before I could respond.

  I’m not sure if it was that split-second experience, where I witnessed a tough, charismatic and proven leader unashamedly show his emotions, that affected my own personality, but to this day I am more emotional when watching someone excel than when I see them suffering a tragedy. When Nadia Comaneci, the Romanian gymnast, scored her perfect 10 at the Montreal Olympics, and when Gilles Villeneuve, the champion racing driver, won the Canadian Grand Prix in Montreal, I had to leave the room to hide the tears. And yes, on innumerable occasions when Canadian soldiers did more than I ever asked them to do, and did so to an unequalled standard, I had a lump in my throat. So, more than forty years ago, on that parade square, “Jimmy” Dextraze taught us that if you loved your chosen profession you should never be ashamed of having strong emotional attachments to those who share it with you. We were learning that there was a lot more to soldiering than just thinking of it as a summer job between school years.

  Life back at Xavier Junior College was relatively tame after the summer of intense military physical and psychological evaluation I’d experienced at Borden. Now that I was firmly committed to the infantry rather than to the combat engineers, I didn’t need an engineering degree to stay in the ROTP. I took the easy way out—a less than desirable personal trait I had at that time in my life—and transferred to the arts program. I loved philosophy, perhaps because I was the only Protestant in the class and was always being asked: “Well, what does our resident Protestant think about Saint Thomas Aquinas’s view of (fill in the blank)?” I had no idea what the proper response should be, as I was rapidly learning a good deal about the Catholic faith without a good foundation in my own—a cross between my mother’s Anglican and my father’s United Church affiliations. With little risk, I offered my personal opinions on Saint Thomas and every other Catholic thinker offered up by Father Charlie, our much-loved philosophy professor.

  To my surprise, I developed a new confidence in class, no matter how ill-founded, often debating issues beyond my competence. My close Catholic friends tolerated my views from the dark side, and I experienced the most enjoyable academic year of my life. I must have disagreed without being too disagreeable, though, because the college generously awarded me the Birks Medal for academic achievement and student leadership at the 1960 spring graduation ceremony. I think that receiving the medal was in itself an education for me. I didn’t always have to agree with my peers in order to be taken seriously by them.

  Basic infantry officer training during the late 1950s and ’60s was intended to eliminate cadets who failed to demonstrate the “right stuff” during phase two—the second summer of training for university students like me. Having survived that phase the previous summer, I returned to Camp Borden and the School of Infantry in June 1960 for the final training. Success would bring commissioning as a second lieutenant in Her Majesty’s Canadian Army and assignment to an infantry regiment once I’d completed my university degree.

  Phase three training saw us treated more like “gentlemen” than as wasters of rations and quarters. The classes were oriented more towards military law, administration and planning, culminating in the delivery of orders to tactical groupings up to company (approximately hundred-soldier) level. The cadet attrition rate was extremely low compared with the previous summer’s rate, and most of those who left did so of their own accord, convinced the military was not for them.

  During a rare free weekend, good friend and fellow cadet Chris Smith asked me if I would like to accompany him to a motor race at a track near Jarvis in southwestern Ontario. Chris had joined the PPCLI as a private soldier a few years earlier. On his promotion to corporal, the regiment decided Chris had considerable potential, so he was enrolled in the Officer Candidate Plan (OCP) at Camp Borden. The OCP candidates crammed their three phases of infantry training into one year, rather than the three summers taken by those of us at university. It was universally agreed that the OCP guys had the harder course. For one thing, they trained throughout the winter, whereas the rest of us had the luxury of three summers, longer days and decent weather.

  Chris, having drawn a salary as a soldier for a couple of years while the rest of us were bumming off our parents, had cash flow and a car—and not just any car. Parked behind our barrack block was his blood-red PV544 Volvo, a 47 Ford lookalike and Sweden’s version of what a practical sports car should be and do.

  I’ve often contemplated what my life would have been like if I’d turned down Chris’s invitation. I had no idea that this one day trip would have an almost immediate impact on my military career.

  We were about a mile or so from the Harwood Acres racetrack when the short hairs on the back of my neck sprang to attention. I had no idea why. In retrospect, after having many similar experiences over the years, I realize I was responding to the king of senses—smell. Most race car engines in those days were lubricated with castor-based motor oil. When this oil was abused by a high-revving engine, what emerged from the exhaust had a strong pungent odour that was extremely persistent and settled at ground level at the track and surr
ounding areas. To most non-motor racing enthusiasts it was disgusting. To the rest of us, it was Chanel No. 5.

  Minutes later we were in line, waiting to purchase our tickets, when yet another sense was triggered—hearing! In my twenty years I’d never heard the exhaust note of an unmuffled, free-flowing race car engine. I felt weak, nervous and excited, all at the same time. Obviously, a race had started because I could hear at least twenty engines screaming in unison. I ran a few hundred yards to a pathetically flimsy wire fence a few feet from the track and stood in awe as a lifetime passion was planted, nurtured and born in the presence of Porsches, Austin-Healeys, MGs, Jaguars and even Volvos, all driven by new heroes as they flashed by at over one hundred miles per hour.

  I was smitten. In a moment, all my life’s priorities (such as they were) were subordinated to sports cars, preferably race-modified sports cars.

  Chris and I returned to Camp Borden, and for the last few weeks of our phase three training I daydreamed much too often about sports cars and how I could arrange my life to afford one. Fortunately, my inattention to what was being taught at the time did not have a terminal effect on my training results: I managed to graduate, along with the twenty other cadets in our platoon who had survived three summers or the equivalent of tough, challenging infantry training. As the years passed and infantry officer training included more advanced subjects and less physical and psychological testing, our collective response was: “We might not have been be all that smart on graduation, but we could lick anyone who tried to keep us from doing our job!”

  To our considerable envy, those OCP candidates who graduated with us were immediately promoted to second lieutenant and posted to a battalion within an infantry regiment. There were six regimental possibilities. The Royal Highland Regiment, the Black Watch, was stationed in Gagetown, New Brunswick; the Royal 22nd Regiment, the Van Doos, had battalions in Valcartier and Quebec City, Quebec; the Canadian Guards were located in Picton and Petawawa, Ontario; the Royal Canadian Regiment were in London, Ontario; the Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada, although originally a Toronto regiment when formed in 1860, were in Calgary, and the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry’s home was in Edmonton. To complicate matters, a game of “musical bases” was frequently played when the three Canadian infantry battalions, on an average of one per year, rotated into or out of Germany for service with our standing brigade-group commitment to North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). For example, if a battalion left Calgary for a three-year tour with NATO, there was no guarantee that the unit would return to Calgary three years hence.

  All of this was germane because for some new officers, a preferred geographical location for a good portion of the rest of their career was more important than which regiment they joined. For others, a combination of family tradition, regimental history and reputation, or the regiment of the most respected instructors, would subordinate location in the selection process. For the majority of the cadets, though, it was a moot point because only the top few graduates actually got their first choice of regiment.

  For those of us who still had university to complete, it was back to school. In my case, a combination of skipping senior mat-ric and transferring to arts from engineering meant that I still had two years of academics facing me before commissioning, joining a regiment and receiving a salary! The military wasn’t quite sure what they would do with me the next summer while I was waiting for my senior year at St. Francis Xavier. Most of the speculation indicated that I would probably be sent to a battalion that was short of officers as a temporary fill-in for three months.

  I was still obsessed with getting a sports car, and the thought of waiting another two years was daunting. For the past three summers, I had been drilled to practise methodical and quick decision making, which is absolutely necessary when leading soldiers in operations. I had learned that a good strategist considered the advantages and disadvantages, weighed them and went with the option that provided the best chance of success. I ignored everything I’d been taught and acted on impulse. I quit university.

  * As far back as the 1950s it was considered politically incorrect to call our enemies by their real name, the Soviets, so Fantasians had been introduced as a pseudonym.

  6: Working for a Living

  “I see your ‘X’ ring. Did you room with Brian Mulroney or Frank McKenna?”

  ALMOST EVERYONE THE AUTHOR MEETS

  SINCE MOST OF the infantry regiments were short of junior officers, the powers that be kicked into overdrive and I was advised that I had but one option. I could take my release from the ROTP and the Canadian army and, minutes later, accept re-enrollment as a second lieutenant with a five-year short-service commission. If I agreed, I would immediately join the 2nd Battalion of the Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada, the QOR of C, in Calgary. The unit had just returned from a three-year tour in Germany. A short-service commission meant that in five years the army would look at me and I would look at the army, and if one of us wished to sever the relationship there would be no option but divorce. Compared with two more years in the classroom, two years of guaranteed regular monthly paycheques seemed like a good idea. I signed on the dotted line.

  It took a few years for me to understand the negative implications of my rash decision. Taking my release—albeit for only a few minutes, if that—meant, according to the fine print buried somewhere in the bowels of the Queen’s Regulations, that I had given up all seniority credit for the time I’d spent in COTC and ROTP, including the eleven months spent on three phases of practical officer training at the Royal Canadian School of Military Engineering in Vedder Crossing, B.C., and at Camp Borden, Ontario. The moment I accepted my commission, my seniority was identical to that of some civilian walking past the recruiting office in downtown Toronto who stops, turns around, enters and says to the recruiter, “I’d like to join the army and train to be an officer.” What made matters worse, and slightly more ridiculous, was that if I’d known the implications of my one-minute release from the army, I could have stayed at the university, deliberately failed all my courses and been commissioned as a second lieutenant with full seniority credit for all the time I’d spent on training, including the three months I’d devoted to failing my last semester. In a delightful touch of irony, proving that God has a sense of humour, some fifteen years later I was the military assistant to the author/enforcer of that regulation, and ten years after that I was the officer in charge of that regulation, which then mysteriously disappeared forever. Seven years after that I was invited back to St. Francis Xavier to give a convocation address and accept an honorary doctorate. During the ceremony I was presented with the famous and highly recognizable university “X” ring, which I have proudly worn ever since, responding “no” to people when they say: “Oh, I see your ‘X’ ring. Did you room with Brian Mulroney or Frank McKenna?”

  Before boarding the train in Sydney for Number 1 Army Personnel Depot in Halifax, where the commissioning would take place, I made my farewells at home. My father, the sergeant major with the tough façade, for the first time ever got emotional over something I was doing and reminded me that I always had a home with them if things didn’t work out. My mother, having said goodbye to her first-born some six years earlier, was looking at an empty nest. Having now experienced that moment myself, I know how she must have felt. At the time, however, I couldn’t wait to get on the train, break away from life at home and find my own way somewhere.

  The ceremony in Halifax was short and sweet. With one pip on my shoulder, indicating my rank of second lieutenant, I was accorded a status a little lower than a snake’s belly. While my rank was saluted by non-commissioned ranks as part of military protocol, any genuine respect for the holder of the rank would have to be earned. At least my first day as an officer was easy, as that evening there was a mess dinner scheduled at Royal Artillery Park, adjacent to Citadel Hill in the centre of Halifax, and I was invited. The attendees, all very senior to me, were collegial and welcoming—a pleasant surpr
ise to someone who had been an officer cadet for the previous three years, a rank that made the snake’s belly seem sky-high.

  I arrived in Calgary three days later. I was picked up by a fellow QOR junior officer, Dennis Murphy, who had experienced some “personality differences” with his first Black Watch of Canada commanding officer in Gagetown, and as a result had rebadged QOR of C, which brought him back to his hometown of Calgary.

  I noticed on the drive to Currie Barracks, in Calgary’s southwest corner, that the bus line terminated at the “loop,” about 300 yards short of the camp’s front gate. When I returned for a second tour in 1970 there were over thirty avenues beyond the camp gate, and when I returned yet again in 1977 as the commanding officer it seemed the sprawling city stretched halfway to the Rockies, sixty miles to the west. If only I had bought some property there in the 1960s . . .

  7: German Patrol

  “Murphy and MacKenzie, I’m sending you to Germany. Now get out of here and behave yourselves.”

  LIEUTENANT-COLONEL DAN OSBORNE

  FORTUNE SMILED ON me more than once in my thirty-three years of commissioned service. Looking back on those years with 20/20 hindsight, I can now see that a few key events must have given my career a boost. In today’s world, similar career boosts are often and quite properly related to demonstrating leadership under enemy fire. During the Cold War we trained and waited for such opportunities, but in the more stable years that followed—when the Warsaw Pact nations had been deterred— those occasions were rare or non-existent. One had to make one’s mark either during training exercises or behind a desk. I was fortunate—lucky—mostly to be able to experience the former.