Soldiers Made Me Look Good

by Lewis MacKenzie

  There must have been more incidents than I can remember, but the key “lucky” events that I can pinpoint occurred in three places: West Germany, Libya and Wainwright, Alberta. And the German luck began with a slightly embarrassing incident in Calgary in 1962. The first year of service with my regiment in Calgary was on fast forward seven days a week. We trained hard and played hard. Most of the senior leaders of the battalion, including the senior non-commissioned members, were veterans of the Second World War, and many had also seen action in the Korean War. They were confident and relaxed because they had nothing to prove. Those of us who were young and inexperienced lived under their imposing shadows and did our best to live up to their expectations. Though we realized our limits during training, on most weekends we tended to go overboard and tried to outdo the vets’ wild behaviour during their times out of the front line—or at least the stories they’d told us about their exploits. A combination of fast cars, alcohol, live ammunition and the opposite sex soon brought us into a collision course with the authorities outside our regimental family. Three of us— Dennis Murphy, who had met me at the train station in Calgary, Second Lieutenant Bill Minnis and I—partied together. Bill was a year senior to me; he had been commissioned in 1959 and also had the advantage of having served in Germany with the battalion immediately after his commissioning. He was tough, talented and very much respected by his soldiers and NCOs.

  We three created our own brewery in a bathtub on the second floor of the Officers’ Mess, near our rooms. Since all of our last names began with the letter M, we made up labels reading “Triple M Brewery—bottled under the supervision of government employees.” As the brew was fermenting in the tub, I recalled (incorrectly, as it turned out) that my dad would add some raisins to his homebrew a week or so before bottling. Then we received word that our commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Dan Osborne, would be inspecting our single officers’ quarters in forty-eight hours. We moved the desired bottling date ahead a week and stacked the fifty or so bottles in a closet in the hallway.

  The colonel arrived on a Friday morning. Halfway through his inspection, the dignity and relative silence was broken by a machine-gun-like staccato. I can only assume that the raisins were not done with their fermenting when we bottled the brew. The sound of beer bottles exploding in a confined space filled our ears. A dark fluid appeared beneath the door just as the colonel was passing by. Colonel Dan, being the type of soldier he was, just looked at us and shook his head. Fortunately, he didn’t look behind the closet door. The bottles that survived were opened that evening and the brew consumed by the dozen living-in officers. I did my best to look puzzled as everyone complained about the raisins and wondered who’d had that dumb idea.

  The brewery incident, combined with a good deal of live ammunition being fired in and around the Officers’ Mess on the weekends and our speeding through the camp in our three sports cars, convinced the colonel that he needed to split up the Triple M Brewery for our own good. We were called to his office on a Monday morning and told in no uncertain terms that our future in the army was threatened unless we cleaned up our act. He went on to say, “Our sister battalion in Germany, which replaced us last year, needs two reinforcement officers. Minnis, you had a year in Germany, so you’re staying here. Murphy and MacKenzie, I’m sending you to Germany to join 1 QOR of C. Now get out of here and behave yourselves. Wait a minute, MacKenzie. You stay behind.” I was petrified, fearing what was coming next. Colonel Dan stared at me for a good minute and then said, “Lewis MacKenzie, some day in the future I would like you to invite me to be a member of your mess. That’s all, dismissed.”

  I was so junior and so inexperienced that I didn’t immediately comprehend what my commanding officer had just said. The penny dropped after I left his office: by saying “your mess,” he meant that he foresaw the day when I would be a lieutenant colonel battalion commanding officer, with my own battalion officers’ mess and in a position to invite outsiders to be associate or honorary members. Making this comment to a twenty-year-old second lieutenant certainly indicated a degree of confidence in my potential not displayed by anyone else, including me. It was with immense pleasure, sixteen years later, when I returned to Calgary as the commanding officer of the 1st Battalion Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry (1 PPCLI), that my first call was to Colonel (retired) Dan Osborne, offering him honorary membership in “my” mess. He accepted, providing the odour of stale beer in the upstairs hallway had dissipated in the past sixteen years.

  When Dennis Murphy and I arrived at 1 QOR of C in northern Germany, just outside the village of Deilinghofen, the battalion had been there for a year and had completed an annual training cycle. The other two Canadian infantry battalions in the brigade had been there two and three years, so our new unit was the rookie group. Competitions within the brigade were intense, with the annual track and field meet giving bragging rights to the winning unit for a year. Close behind in prestige was the annual platoon patrol and defence competition. Under supervision from the brigade, each unit would pick two of its platoon commanders’ names out of a hat—one for the patrol, and the other for the defence competition. Each infantry unit, including ours, had about twenty platoon commanders. Never having won anything before, I was surprised to hear the results of the draw: “Defence, Mr. Murphy. Patrol, Mr. MacKenzie.” To this day, I think it was a setup, and that somehow the draw had been rigged to give the two new guys their baptism by fire.

  My platoon consisted of thirty-three soldiers, an unbelievably large number by today’s standards. My platoon sergeant and second-in-command was Huey Graham, and that presented a problem. Huey was fairly young, in fact he was an acting sergeant, because he still needed an additional course to be confirmed in rank. The rules for the competition stated that to create a competitive level playing field, we could replace anyone who had an acting rank with someone who had a confirmed rank. The unit decided to replace Acting Sergeant Graham with a more experienced sergeant. If I knew anything about human nature at the time, I knew that anyone who is told he can’t do the job can’t wait to prove the skeptics wrong. Sergeant Graham and I got along well; he knew his job, and our soldiers trusted him. Through my company commander, Major John Probyn (John flew a glider into Arnhem during World War II’s Operation Market Garden) I asked to see the commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Hank Elliot (Hank went ashore at Normandy as a platoon commander on the June 6, 1944). Colonel Elliot heard my plea and said “OK,” and that was the end of the exchange. Graham would stay with the platoon.

  Patrolling is one of the most challenging and enjoyable tasks undertaken by the infantry. There are a number of types of patrols, all primarily carried out at night, and the more miserable the weather the better. On the small size are recce patrols, four or five soldiers using stealth to spy on the enemy and pinpointing their positions so that they can be dealt with by artillery fire, air strikes or a ground attack later. Fighting patrols can and have been up to battalion size (eight hundred soldiers) but are usually around thirty soldiers strong. In between are “snatch” patrols, dispatched to capture prisoners, and escort patrols, which accompany someone with a particular expertise, such as explosives, to a target.

  Fighting patrols are the ultimate test of essential infantry skills: stealth, navigation, initiative, endurance, camouflage and weapons discipline. If a unit can produce good patrollers, it’s undoubtedly a good unit. With a platoon of over thirty soldiers to be evaluated, there was little doubt that our competition task would be a fighting patrol. Having only a week to prepare for the competition, we focused on the basics. Everyone was extremely fit to begin with, but we increased the length of the daily runs and added extra weight to our packs. We spent a good deal of time in making all of our kit quiet. The ends of the straps on our webbing were taped down, as were any buckles, lest they make some noise when tapped by a rifle or other metal object. Water bottles presented a challenge: once you’d taken a drink, you could hear the water sloshing around
in the metal canteen. At night, with thirty of us sneaking through the German countryside, anyone would be able to hear us coming for miles.

  The solution rested with something I remembered from my first platoon a year earlier. Whenever we went to the field, more than a few of my soldiers would be inebriated within a few hours. They were mostly Korean War vets—outstanding, tough soldiers—and training exercises were a bit of a bore for men who’d killed Chinese communists. Although I carried out many inspections of them and their kit, I’d never found anything resembling alcohol. It was the smell of rum on their breath that ultimately gave them away. I recalled that when I tasted the contents of their canteens many of them were full of Coke, which was perfectly OK, because you could substitute pop for water if you wished. However, the next time I inspected I took a pencil and shoved it right to the bottom of one of the suspect canteens. Sure enough, the aggressive probe resulted in a strong pint of dark and dirty. A condom, filled with rum, had been tied off and placed in the canteen. Now we had a mixed drink!

  I had a brainstorm and decided to use the same technique to our advantage. The medical inspection room provided us with ten condoms per man. Every time one of us took a drink of water during a scheduled break, he would insert the condom through the neck of the canteen, inflate it enough to take up the empty space, tie it off, replace the cap and presto—no gurgling as we marched.

  When the day of the competition arrived, we mounted four three-quarter-ton trucks and reported to a location about thirty-five miles to the west. On arriving at 1500 hours, it seemed every senior officer in the brigade was there, including all the commanding officers of the units with platoons in the competition. I was directed into a large marquee tent set up in the woods. My platoon was told to relax outside. Three of the tent’s walls were covered with air photos. On rare earlier occasions, I had seen single air photos when they were dropped to us by an L-19 reconnaissance aircraft. What I now faced was a mosaic of, at a rough guess, one-hundred-plus photos, carefully spliced together and extending some thirty-five yards along the tent walls.

  I took my seat in front of a six-foot folding table and pulled out my message pad. A staff officer from brigade read me my orders. They were a bit long, presumably for effect, but hidden inside the mandatory order’s subheadings was the mission: “Proceed to Grid Reference 87143621 and destroy the enemy missile launcher located there by not later than 1200 hours Zulu tomorrow the 26 of September.” I was told I could have thirty minutes by myself to study the photos and my map, select our patrol route and prepare my orders. Following that, Sergeant Graham and our three corporal section commanders would be allowed into the tent so that we could study the air photos together for a maximum of fifteen minutes. For security reasons we wouldn’t be provided with our own copies of any air photos, so we would have to rely on our maps.

  The first thing that struck me was the distance involved. The objective was a good twenty miles away, of which at least fifteen were behind “enemy lines.” With less than twenty-four hours to get there, stealth would be a challenge. With a large enemy force provided by an entire eight-hundred-man battalion from the brigade, each and every one of them keen to capture us en route, we could move only during hours of darkness. We needed to reach an assault position by first light the following day, where we hoped to be able to observe the missile location and wait for the best time to attack the site before the deadline.

  Thanks to Germany’s enviable obsession with maintaining its forests (well before the Green movement was popular), there was a good deal of cover for most of the twenty miles. I assumed that the enemy force looking for us would have infiltrated through our forward positions, so we would have to be as invisible as possible for the entire patrol. The four of us studied the air photos, picked a route that would take us to the south side of the missile location and marked it on our maps in pencil. We picked out rally points in case we were ambushed along the way, and then selected a location close to the objective where we would take up a defensive position while I and two others went forward to confirm the best route to attack the site and destroy the missile. We spent the next few hours inspecting our kit for anything that would make the slightest noise as we moved through the woods.

  The Canadian army had no proper rain gear in those days, and most soldiers purchased their own, usually at a U.S. Army surplus store. Unfortunately, some of these coats had a waterproof exterior that “sang” as the wearer brushed against branches while he sneaked through the woods. I decided that even though it was beginning to rain, we would leave our pathetic collection of international rain gear behind. As soldiers are wont to say, “God gave us the ultimate waterproof rain gear and called it skin.”

  The weather was turning in our favour. It was now raining harder, and a breeze was accompanying the front as it moved into our area. Windy, rainy weather is ideal for patrolling because enemy solders, particularly in a static position like a missile site, frequently bundle up to keep warm and turn their backs to the wind, thus increasing their chances of being caught by surprise. After an hour of rehearsing the way we as a group would move across the country, through the woods and around obstacles to finally assault the objective and get back to our lines, we were almost ready. After a final noise test, in which all of us jumped up and down like a bunch of drowned rats without making any sound except for the squishing of our boots in the mud, we were on our way.

  The air photos we had studied earlier were a great help. They showed individual treelines rather than the green glob on our maps that represented a forest. The penciled route we had inscribed on our maps proved to be extremely accurate. We would stop every five minutes or so, depending on the cover, and listen for about thirty seconds while holding our breath and listening for any strange noises. We spotted a few enemy groups in the open that were obviously given the task to find and capture us. This was not a competition for them, however, so they were not as keen, and the noise they made gave them away.

  The rain continued and got even heavier, so we made good time. My calculations suggested that we might not make our final patrol base less than a mile from the objective during the hours of darkness. Nevertheless, it was no good trying to move faster, because that would probably guarantee our detection and capture—read failure.

  Fortunately my timings were a bit off, as forty-five minutes before first light we arrived at our penultimate destination, the patrol base. By this time, everyone was saturated from head to toe and dog-tired. No one spoke, and hand signals were the language of the day. Three of us left the other thirty-one with Sergeant Graham in charge and started the agonizingly slow move forward to get as close to the missile site as possible. It took over an hour to get within a hundred yards of the site. We could see a lot of activity as breakfast was being prepared by the defenders. Since we had the wind to our backs, we couldn’t smell the eggs and bacon frying over an open flame, but we could imagine the heat from the fire—which, considering our condition, seemed even more desirable than the food. Fortunately there were quite a few Jeeps and trucks making their way to and from the site. When a vehicle arrived, there was a good deal of activity as numerous soldiers appeared to help with the offloading. If we could coordinate our attack with the arrival of a convoy, it would add to the element of surprise.

  At first we couldn’t detect the missile, but after cleaning the condensation from the eyepieces of my binoculars I spotted it under a poorly draped camouflage net, smack in the middle of the site. Thinking the competition organizers might have placed a dummy there to attract our attention and embarrass us when we blew up an elaborate piece of wood, we scanned the site for a few minutes more but could detect nothing suggesting that the missile we could see was not the real thing. We headed back to our patrol base.

  On the way in to the objective, the three of us had noticed a large area in a dense forest where a large culling operation was under way. A number of trees had been cut down, but most of the effort to date involved cutting about forty per cent
of the limbs from very tall spruce trees. The limbs were in good shape, thick with needles, and some of the larger ones were about six feet long. As we passed through the area on the way back to our patrol, an idea came to mind. As soon as we arrived at the base we gathered in a tight group, leaving two sentries on our perimeter, and I whispered, “Our plan is confirmed: proceed as we rehearsed, with one change. On the way from here, in about three hundred yards you’ll see hundreds of spruce tree limbs on the forest floor. Pick one your own size, one that would cover your entire body if you were lying down, and bring it with you. We will carry on to where we said our assault position was to be. If we are not detected by then, we’ll get down on our stomachs, pull the tree limbs over us and slowly crawl forward. As soon as we are detected we will assault, or if you hear me fire a shot because vehicles are arriving at the site, we start the assault. Any questions?” It was hard for me to tell the difference between those who were shaking from the cold and those whose head shaking meant no questions, so I assumed it was the latter. We moved off.

  Twenty minutes later we were in our assault position, a mere hundred yards from the edge of the site and another fifty from the missile. The defenders of the site, appearing to be about twenty strong, were going about their business as usual—but I suspected that it might be a trap. Nevertheless, deciding that we might as well get as close as possible, I got down on my stomach, pulled a branch over my head and started to crawl forward. Looking around as best I could, I saw the entire forest floor for thirty yards on each side of me undulating in the same direction, as if some underground monster were emerging. I kept waiting for the enemy to detect our presence; some of them were less than ten yards away, but they were busy washing up after breakfast and receiving orders for their day’s routine.