McEachern is a former member of 1 Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, based in Edmonton. He was diagnosed with PTSD in 1997 after serving in peacekeeping missions in Croatia and Uganda. He left the military in July 2001. Shortly afterward, he enrolled in the eco-tourism and outdoor leadership program at Mount Royal College. In 2006, he was inspired to create a non-profit charity, the Canadian Veteran Adventure Foundation (CVAF), to help traumatized veterans regain a “lust for life” by rafting, hiking and riding horses in the Alberta foothills and Rocky Mountains. 

“We’re just getting started,” he says of the foundation. “It’s been four years of hard work and obstacles, government bureaucracy, that kind of crap. But we had our first program last summer, a raft trip, and a couple of guys came up to me in tears after that. They said ‘thanks, man, that’s the best thing that’s happened to me in a long time.’ ” 

He stares out the window. Three horses forage near a wooden fence at the edge of the ten-acre property. “The guys that I’m going for are probably slipping through the cracks of the system,” he says. “A lot of the guys, they don’t trust anybody anymore. I want to give them a second chance, convince them they’re good people still, that yeah, you can have nightmares, intimacy issues, but you can still have a good time.” 

“Like with me,” he adds, “the PTSD hasn’t gone away. But I’m doing way better than I was. I don’t think about blowing my head off. It’s nothing like that now.” A thin, dark-haired woman appears at the living room door: Monica Culic, McEachern’s partner and the communications director for CVAF. She says the foundation is vital. “If we come out of Afghanistan in the next couple of years,” she says, “we’ll see a vast increase in the number of veterans with psychological injuries.” 

McEachern nods. In the past decade, the Canadian Forces have made great strides in treating PTSD. But, as a federal standing committee noted in 2009, the treatment and prevention of the illness is a work in progress. There’s a lot of room for improvement, and charitable programs such as the CVAF could fill a gap, helping to ease the symptoms of what can be a lifelong disorder. “When you come back from a mission it can be hard to reintegrate into civilian life,” says McEachern. “If you don’t get any support, it’s like someone helped push you over the edge.” He shakes his head, his voice trailing off. “If I can make somebody’s life worth living again…”

“When you’re standing in the cereal aisle, having a severe panic attack, it starts to mess with your confidence.”

PTSD is a complex brain disorder caused by exposure to extreme stress and trauma. Simply put, traumatic images, sights and smells are “burned into” the brain. Weeks, months, even years later, the trauma can reappear in nightmares and flashbacks. A person can become hypervigilant and view harmless situations as threatening. They can suffer insomnia and a lack of focus, and avoid situations that trigger further symptoms and traumatic memories. If not treated, PTSD can lead to major depression, substance abuse, even suicide. While anyone can get the disorder—the Canadian Mental Health Association says PTSD will affect nearly 1 in 10 Canadians in their lifetime—members of the military are significantly more likely to develop the disorder. And they are developing it: in 2003, Veterans Affairs had 1,800 clients diagnosed with PTSD. Today they have 9,000. PTSD is now the number one pensioned psychiatric disorder in the military.

Historically, the disorder has been easier to diagnose than treat. And even the diagnosis took a long time to emerge. Amid the carnage of the First World War, traumatized soldiers were said to have “shell shock.” Afflicted soldiers were often accused of cowardice. Treatment included solitary confinement and electric shock. In the Second World War, doctors recognized “combat trauma,” but little treatment was offered to veterans suffering psychological stress after the war. As a diagnosis, PTSD did not officially exist until 1980, when the American Psychiatric Association recognized it as a combat-related illness.  

In the Canadian Forces, the stigma around PTSD has been hard to shake. Dr. Greg Passey, a psychiatrist and veteran who spent 22 years in the Canadian military, much of it at CFB Edmonton, did the first large-scale study of PTSD rates among returning peacekeeping soldiers in 1993. “At the time, in the general population we had a baseline PTSD rate of about 2.7 per cent, because of car accidents, sexual assault, crime,” he says. “But when these guys came home the PTSD rate was 15.5 per cent. What we found is that one out of five people had PTSD or major depression or a combination of those coming home from the tours. The military at that time thought that was ridiculous. They said my statistics were flawed.”

In the 1990s, Canadian forces served in multiple crisis zones, including Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. In 1994, corporal Christian McEachern deployed from Edmonton to Croatia. He had no idea the UN peacekeeping mission was the beginning of a journey that would lead through the Canadian courts and trigger a national review of PTSD in the military. At the time he was simply gung-ho for the mission. It was what he’d always wanted to do. “I joined the cadets when I was 12,” he says. “The helicopters and the armoured vehicles, it was like playing guns. I just took to it. I had no aspirations of doing anything else.”

In the Balkans, the former Yugoslavia was torn apart by warring factions. UN forces had no mandate to intervene. “We had to stand there and watch things happen and we had no power to prevent it,” says McEachern. As he tells stories from the war, he speaks faster, energetically waving his hands to punctuate the tales. “One night we were playing cards, Go Fish, the Serbs and Croats were fighting, and we were in the middle, with rounds screaming around us.” He saw a Canadian engineer blown up by a landmine. A sniper shot his friend, “a good buddy.” One evening a Serbian soldier led McEachern and others into a minefield. They wore night-vision goggles, but an electrical storm short-circuited the goggles, and McEachern stood blind in the middle of a minefield in a bombed-out part of town. 

On a second mission, to Uganda, McEachern saw a woman raped and a man beaten to death, but was ordered not to intervene. He saw birds pecking at a dead child. “It’s like a negative image that’s permanently imprinted into your brain,” he says. “You remember smells, colours. You’ll never forget those situations.” 

Back in Alberta in 1996, though still in peak physical shape—a high-end infantryman—he began to withdraw, and felt headed for a breakdown. “I started getting panic attacks,” he says. “I’d wake up completely soaked, freaked out, I didn’t know where I was. I had crying spells where I didn’t know why I was crying. I didn’t know what was going on.”

At CFB Edmonton, Dr. Passey diagnosed McEachern with PTSD. McEachern went on sick leave. He was treated with medications and therapy, but his symptoms got worse and he felt stigmatized by his peers. “I probably stared at the noose in the garage 10–15 times,” he says. “I wanted to die.” At a cadet base, he chanced upon a picture of himself on a wall. “I was 16 years old, all done up in dress uniform,” he says. “And here I was now, a vet of 14 years, a couple of tours [behind me], and at that moment I knew I was done.”

On March 14, 2001, McEachern was told that due to a policy change, in which sick leave would be counted as holiday time, some $25,000 of his paid leave would be revoked. That same day, he received a service medal in the mail rather than with his unit. He felt humiliated, and went home to drink beer. The next thing McEachern remembers is a knock on the door of his Nissan Xterra, which was now inside the garrison headquarters at CFB Edmonton. In the early morning hours he had rammed his SUV through the front doors of the garrison and driven around an empty office, toppling desks and computers. But, as he says, “most of what happened that night I heard for the first time in the courtroom.” 

Before his trial, McEachern filed a complaint with the military ombudsman, André Marin, about the Canadian Forces’ lack of support, training and treatment for soldiers afflicted with PTSD. Marin found the complaints justified. His 229-page report was blunt. “Post-traumatic stress disorders in the Canadian military are pervasive and system-wide,” wrote Marin. “We found a disturbingly high incidence of soldiers returning from missions who were burnt out and broken. Those who reported their illness felt stigmatized and abandoned while many others had not disclosed their symptoms for fear of being ostracized by their leadership and peers.”

The report did not affect the trial’s outcome. Charged with impaired driving, assaulting a peace officer, mischief and dangerous driving, McEachern was convicted on four charges and given a 14-month conditional sentence and a $2,000 fine. The decision in R. v. McEachern, according to lawyer Benjamin J. Kormos, hinged on whether or not McEachern was aware of his actions and knew right from wrong at the time of the incident. In a 2008 article on PTSD and Canadian law for Criminal Law Quarterly, Kormos noted that Dr. Passey testified McEachern had been in a PTSD-related dissociative state, in which he could perform complex actions but “would not be aware of thoughts, emotions, morals, ethics or even laws at that point.” Conversely, the prosecution’s expert, military psychiatrist Colonel Randy Boddam, testified McEachern had been aware of his actions. Yet Boddam admitted he had never interviewed McEachern or read his medical files. Kormos wrote that since Colonel Boddam had “barely a scintilla of foundation for his opinion… it was unreasonable to prefer the Crown’s expert.” The case, Kormos concluded, was “wrongly decided.” 

The Canadian Veteran Adventure Foundation helps soldiers “reclaim their lust for life.” Here, participants navigate the Kananaskis River. (Christian McEachern)

“A slew of [PTSD-related] cases have been reported,” says Kormos, who I met in his 28th-floor office in downtown Calgary. “So there’s a bunch that you can safely assume are not in the case reports.” Out the window we can see people walking on the streets far below. In his article, Kormos wrote that until the military takes steps to treat and prevent PTSD, “soldiers will continue to bring home landmines in their rucksacks.” I ask what he meant. “By definition this disease can take years to appear,” he says. “It’s like a landmine because a landmine is sort of planted and forgotten about. If you don’t prevent this disease, if you don’t treat it, someone is going to step on that landmine and a lot of these cases are going to end up in court. This is an issue that needs to be dealt with.” 

CFB Edmonton, the home base for 6,600 Canadian Forces members, is situated on 2,550 hectares along the northeast border of the city. On a cloudy winter day, I drove north up Highway 28, past strip malls and gas stations, through a gate in the chain-link fence topped with razor wire that surrounds the base, and met Greg Prodaniuk, the western regional coordinator for the operational stress injury social support program. It’s a peer support network that connects soldiers, veterans and their families to treatment options for Operational Stress Injuries (OSI), a military term for post-deployment psychological difficulties such as anxiety, major depression, substance abuse and PTSD. 

“I really have a reaction to people that characterize the injured population as so unstable that they’re a risk to the security of their communities,” says Prodaniuk, who was himself diagnosed with PTSD after serving in Croatia. “That’s not the case. The vast majority of them suffer in silence and in their basements, and they don’t hurt people.” He leans forward in his chair, a tall, hefty man with an eye-to-eye gaze. “But they do destroy relationships,” he says. “They have difficulty controlling their emotions. They have reactions they’re not in control of. I tell them if you have PTSD, your life is simply not compatible with booze. It’s like throwing gasoline on the fire.” 

Prodaniuk’s clear and frank talk is part of an evolving culture within the military. Since the blunt Marin report in 2002, the Canadian Forces have worked to minimize stress injuries through screening and improved treatment. Education programs now train soldiers in the factors that cause OSIs, including trauma, fatigue, grief and moral injury, defined as “a disruption in trust in moral values.” New stress injury clinics have opened across the country. “Raising awareness and overcoming stigma about mental health is a top priority,” said general Walter Natynczyk a few months before the latest OSI clinic opened in Edmonton, in December 2009. 

The effort has paid dividends. Currently, the PTSD rate in Canadian soldiers returning from Afghanistan is about 5 per cent, down significantly from the high rates in the 1990s. Still, about 11,000 people in the military are believed to be suffering from a stress injury such as PTSD, and the exact numbers are unknown. In 2008, a follow-up ombudsman report on PTSD lamented that a database to track psychological injury levels within the military would not be online until 2011, the year the current commitment to Afghanistan is supposed to end. Even then, the data will likely be incomplete. With the delayed onset of many OSIs, veterans who develop symptoms after leaving the military may not be counted. 

 “If you understand the soldiering culture,” says Prodaniuk, “if you understand the [nature] of these injuries, you’ll understand that the vast majority of people will not face them while still in uniform. The stigma still exists. There’s a lot of self-imposed stigma.” 

I ask if he thinks there’s a need for alternative treatment options, such as outdoor recreation. He nods. “I would like to see the government fund more outside-the-box therapies and care,” he says. “Maybe guys just need to get out of their home environment for a while to readjust. So yeah, places where they could go and engage in sports and enjoy the outdoors, I think there’s something incredibly therapeutic about that. Does it fit within the rigid treatment model the government may sign off on Probably not.”

He walks me outside to my car. “There are a lot of soldiers here in Alberta,” he says. “A lot of veterans. Should they be treated special I think they probably should. They’ve put themselves in harm’s way, and a lot of them suffer from mental health impacts that they would not have suffered if they had not volunteered to go over there on our behalf.” Prodaniuk points: the flags are at half-mast, honouring Canadian soldiers who recently died in Afghanistan. “Unfortunately,” he says, “that happens a lot these days.” 

Before driving to Priddis to see Christian McEachern again, I speak on the phone with Dr. Passey in his current office at a PTSD clinic in a Vancouver hospital. In a clinical setting, he says, PTSD patients are treated with medications and therapy. While the majority of cases settle down in the first year, “anywhere from 30 per cent to 47 per cent of people will continue to have significant symptoms even 10 years down the line.” In Canada, the Canadian Veteran Adventure Foundation was the first to offer free outdoor programs to help minimize the symptoms of PTSD. Passey went on the CVAF’s first raft trip, in August 2009. “The beauty of Christian’s program,” he says, “is it brings together people struggling with similar symptoms. It gives them a chance to be in nature without the danger and fear they may have been exposed to on their tour. It has a lot of potential.”

McEachern with Sozo, near Priddis, 2010. (Tadzio Richards)

At McEachern’s place, the sky overhead is blue, blown clear by an incoming chinook, and the Rockies to the west shimmer in the sun. McEachern and Monica Culic are standing by the barn that holds their three horses. McEachern is unshaven, dark circles under his eyes. He says the CVAF is in trouble. It needs funding. Not only that, it has competition: Outward Bound, funded by the Royal Canadian Legion, is launching a similar program to help veterans readjust to civilian life. Their first expedition is in the spring, a one-week ice-climbing trip in the mountains west of Calgary. 

“I’m happy,” says McEachern. “More vets are going to get programming, and that’s what we wanted.” He shakes his head. “But by the same token we’ve let the opportunity slide away.” He looks at Culic. “I still think there’s a stigma attached to the garrison incident,” he says, talking about the slow trickle of donations to the CVAF. “I’m still ashamed by it. It wasn’t a conscious choice, but, boy, I wish I could take it back. I mean, it’s part of the story, but at what point can the story switch?”

“The clients are there,” says Culic. “They’re still hanging out in their basements, they’re still struggling. Maybe the story for you is that you got a second chance. That’s the story that the guys who came here in August liked. You said, ‘we don’t care what you look like, what kind of shape you’re in, what people are saying about you, we accept where you’re at, warts and all.’ We’re not looking for the guy that can climb Yamnuska; he’s not our client.” McEachern nods, and enters the barn. 

“He’s a pretty crusty hard dude on the outside,” says Culic. “But the care he has for those people and those horses is deeper than the average Joe.” We stroll into the barn. McEachern is in a stall, kneeling on straw beside his 17-year-old ex-racehorse. He and Culic rescued it from a slaughterhouse. When they got the thoroughbred, they were told its name was “Sozo,” which in Hebrew means “to heal.” Months ago, Sozo tried to leap a fence, and the gash on the horse’s foreleg has been slow to close. We watch as McEachern wraps gauze around the torn skin. 

Tadzio Richards is a two-time National Magazine Award winner. He lives in Calgary and, as much as possible, the mountains.

The post Landmine in a Rucksack appeared first on Alberta Views.

Morinville’s evolution from agrarian centre to bedroom community accelerated in 1994, when the federal government decided to locate its westernmost army “super‑base” about 20 kilometres southeast of the town.  Since Grant’s family moved here in 1996, mottled‑green combat fatigues have become as common as the denim overalls of farmers on main street.  Long-time residents appreciate the sharp rise in the value of their homes and the increased pool of hockey coaches, as well as the new stores which serve the growing population.  But some old‑timers aren’t comfortable with all the changes wrought by the military’s increased presence in a town where every school remains Roman Catholic and Sunday’s 10:30 a.m. mass at St. Jean Baptiste parish is still celebrated in French.

Morinville is one of several Alberta communities with a deep military imprint.  The Department of National Defence spent $771‑million in Alberta for 2001/02 (the latest year DND itemized its budget by province), including $337‑million for its Edmonton garrison, which employs 4,500 regular force soldiers, 500 reservists and another 500 civilian employees.  Nearby Morinville feels the economic dividends – and a little tugging at its social fabric.  All those men in uniform change places like Morinville, Cold Lake and Wainwright, just as a mill or a mine would.  But while the military transforms its home communities, a deeper relationship with “civvies” has also changed the military.

Military outreach programs “recruited” small-town politicians in Alberta to muster community support.

Gone now is any tolerance for the “boys will be boys” culture.  Today’s military – stung by political fallout from wrongdoings of troops in the early 1990s and the ensuing media backlash – puts a premium on projecting a good image, which is why community service has become part of every soldier’s performance assessment.  And it’s why the stereotypical crusty old salts swearing a blue streak are a minority, replaced by men and women like Master Warrant Officer Grant, who speaks and acts more like a modern middle manager than a soldier.

The Namao Base near Morinville was built by Americans in 1941 to fly staff and supplies to Alaska and Russia.  “When it was an air base, they didn’t have much to do with outside communities,” says Gib Boddez, who dealt with the brass as the top administrator of the Municipal District of Sturgeon, which bounds the base on three sides.  “It was off‑limits and they looked after everything.  Most of the military lived on the base, not in outside communities.”  They pretty much kept to themselves, an attitude which prevailed 10 later when the Royal Canadian Air Force took over, opening the curtains only for occasional events like air shows and Pope John Paul II’s mass for 120,000 people in 1984.

That insular attitude was shed in the mid‑1990s when Namao switch from air force blue to army green as part of a massive federal restructuring.  Ottawa transferred about 1,000 air force personnel from Edmonton to Winnipeg, Manitoba and Trenton, Ontario, and announced that 3,000 troops stationed in Calgary and 500 in Chilliwack, B.C. would move to Alberta’s capital.  Namao’s land would become one of four army super‑bases along with Val Cartier (Quebec), Petawawa (Ontario) and Gagetown (New Brunswick).

The Military wasn’t getting much good press at the time, facing plenty of public outrage over the death of Shidane Arone at the hands of Canadian Airborne Regiment soldiers on peacekeeping duties in Somalia.  Bruised by images of out‑of‑control troops, political and military officials did some immediate damage control and disbanded the Airborne.  Then they got to work on the military’s blind eye toward trouble, which was creating public relations disasters.  They realized there was value in both transparency and greater ties to the outside community.

Rather than act unilaterally, outreach programs “recruited” small‑town politicians in Alberta and elsewhere to muster community support.  “Right from the start, they were great in keeping the towns informed about new developments,” says Brent Melville, a two‑term town councillor in Morinville.  Some municipal politicians began lobbying on behalf of the military in the media and in Ottawa (which proved useful during budget talks).  And then incoming soldiers came looking for off‑base housing.

Morinville and other Edmonton area communities set up booths at an exposition for soldiers in Chilliwack, where it caught the attention of Kim Grant, Richard’s wife.  Small‑town life appealed to Kim, who grew up in Okotoks in the 1960s and ‘70s.  The family found a roomy two‑storey house on a quiet cul‑de‑sac in Morinville for $124,000, a bargain compared to the B.C. lower mainland or Vancouver, where Richard had been raised.  “In Chilliwack, we lived on a busy street and the kids couldn’t even play in the front yard,” says Kim.  “Morinville was perfect for us”.

More soldiers arrived as talk of the town’s army‑friendly attitude and amenities spread through “rumour control” the grapevine employed by military families, who were impressed by the “Welcome Military” signs.  “We lived in Chilliwack for four years and knew only one of our neighbours,” says Kim.  “Here, within a week, everybody in the cul‑de‑sac had called to welcome us.”  Even Richard—who considered Chilliwack slow freight after postings in Calgary, Toronto and a two‑year embassy hitch in Beijing—now savours the small‑town rhythm.  “In Chilliwack, when we went on holidays, we always thought the house would be broken into when we got back,” he says.  “We have not heard a siren since we got here.”  When Richard spent six months as a peacekeeper in Bosnia last year, Kim would go outside to find their lawn mysteriously mowed or the driveway shoveled.

The Grants are other military families now make up about 10 per cent of Morinville’s population, an influx which has rapidly driven up housing prices.  “A lot of people in Morinville had a chance to sell an older house and build a new house,” says Boddez.  They also witnessed their francophone culture fading, and their town starting to look and feel like an anonymous suburb.  It’s understandable why locals drew a line in the sand and fought a traffic plan that would have ended angle parking downtown.  Stung by criticism from groups such as the Catholic Women’s League and the Nights of Columbus, town council agreed to retain one of the last symbols of small‑town grace.  But Melville believes Morinville won’t have a choice in the future.  “It’s inevitable that there will be parallel parking and lights on main street,” says Melville.  “The military may have accelerated the decisions that needed to be made around growth.  It is tough for people to go from a small town to a suburb, abut you can’t go back.”

Morinville, which largely houses the families of senior non‑commissioned officers, is not exactly a microcosm of the military’s footprint in Alberta.  Training bases such as Suffield and Wainwright host thousands of rotating, transient troops every year.  They too provide an economic injection, and an unexpected set of social concerns as well.

Residents of Wainwright, a farming community on Alberta’s eastern prairie, have been living with soldiers since 1940 when the DND tool over the 540‑km² Buffalo National Park.  Wainwright was a prisoner‑of‑war camp for Germans captured in the Second World War.  Now, roughly 8,000 Canadian and 2,000 British soldiers spend time at Wainwright’s Western Area Training Centre every year, mostly between April and September.  About 330 military staff and 240 civilian workers are posted permanently in the town of 5,300.  “Roughly 90 per cent of the people here that are married with children love Wainwright because it is a great family posting,” says Major Tim Isberg, the camp’s deputy commanding officer.  “You are five minutes from anywhere and the parking is always free.”

With a $137‑million expansion set to nearly double permanent staff to 600 by 2007, Isberg now spends a lot of time talking about the increased number of students with the Buffalo Trail School Division and about the local housing market with town planners.  Nothing in his 17‑year career could have prepared the artillery officer and father of two for his role in the construction of a skateboard park for teenagers, but Isberg has been quick to shoulder such tasks because of the symbiotic relationship between town and camp.  “In places like Edmonton and Cold Lake, they have everything on the base.  Here, we rely on the town for everything from a swimming pool to the hockey rinks, infrastructure we don’t have on the base,” says Isberg, who sits on the town’s economic development board and chamber of commerce.  “We are adding another 1,000 to 1,200 people to the town over the next two to three years.  That wouldn’t be noticed in Edmonton, but we have to help prepare the town.”

Wainwright hasn’t always been prepared for incoming soldiers.  There were some memorable barroom brawls in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s, often when soldiers were celebrating the end of a major exercise.  In the age of transparency, however, those rites of passage have been smothered out, with military now policing its troops off base.  Some merchants say this puritanism is costing them money.  “Today, we are more likely to hear complains from the local business community when we don’t allow soldiers into the town,” says Isberg.  “Our standards for behaviour are higher.”

In the late 1980s, Wainwright’s Honeypot Eatery and Pub was deemed off‑limits to soldiers on course at the base.  Owner Alex Heath, a former British soldier who married a local woman, is still mad about the lost business.  “Through the summer, about 65 per cent of our clientele will be military,” he says.  “It’s about 35 per cent the rest of the year.  You don’t hear about how there was a big fight on the weekend.  That’s something that hasn’t happened in more then a decade.”  Indeed, military police and the Wainwright RCMP have forged a partnership to ensure soldiers stay out of trouble.  They’ve designated Wussy’s, a bar favoured by 18 and 19‑year‑old civvies, a no‑go zone for soldiers.  “We don’t see the old type of brawls or the locals waiting for a drunk soldier,” says Sergeant Steve Visnoski, who heads Wainwright’s 10‑man RCMP detachment.  “I’ve been here about 15 months and its actually been pretty good.”

Nothing in his 17-year career could have prepared the artillery officer for building a skateboard park for teens.

The approach is similar in Medicine Hat, where British military police ride along in civilian police cars to patrol the bars as thirsty British soldiers flock in from their training facility at Suffield, about 50 kilometres from the city of 53,000.  Locals no longer warn out‑of‑town civilians to avoid the “Sin Bin”—the Assiniboia Hotel—and other British Army hangouts.  Today, city police feel that indigenous groups—such noted pacifists as oilfield workers and cowboys—are more likely to break the peace.

“British soldiers are an easy target because they stand out,” says Inspector Gordon Earl, the Medicine Hat Police Service’s liaison with the British Army.  “In my experience, British soldiers do not act as instigators as much as some other people.  In any event, we have not had any major incidents in recent times, and if there is a problem with a particular soldier, the people on the base are excellent to deal with.”

The spirit of co‑operation goes beyond maintaining the law.  With 106 Canadian soldiers and 191 civilian employees at Defence Research and Development Canada, plus another 206 British soldiers and 228 full‑time civilians at British Army Training Unit Suffield, the base has become one of the region’s largest employers.  Civvies can tour the 2,690‑km² range, and local politicians, businesspeople and community groups see their share of military presentations.  Captain Sterling Cripps, Suffield’s public affairs officer, believes grassroots connections to Suffield have improved image problems.  “Just about everybody in Medicine Hat has some connection to the base,” he says, “whether it is a brother, sister, parent, a friend or neighbour working out here, whether they are a soldier, a civil servant or a contractor working out here.”  Many soldiers posted to Suffield wind up retiring in Medicine Hat.

Similarly, Richard Grant plans to retire near Morinville.  He expects to be sent to National Defence Headquarters in Ottawa first, but that didn’t stop the self‑described city boy from buying a four‑acre lot in Carbondale.  The Grants will come back and build a home when Richard finishes his final tour of duty.  “This place has become home,” he says, “even for a B.C. guy.”  Any that’s find with old‑timers like Gib Boddez, even if it means no more angle parking on main street.

Will Gibson’s work has appeared in Maclean’s and Canadian Business.  He spent four years as an army reservist.

The post Letting Down Their Guard appeared first on Alberta Views.

Again, don’t get me wrong. Dad’s pilfering was commonplace in the PMQs (Personal Married Quarters, again for you civvies). In fact, dad’s borrowing of goods (I say borrowing because he returned much of the bedding, his uniform and that parachute when he retired) was extremely minor compared to what others did. One guy I knew had a special room in his basement, filled floor to ceiling with canned goods, like a miniature Costco warehouse. His dad was a cook. Compared to other families in the military, we were pretty lucky. In the first nine years of my life, we moved three times: Edmonton to Germany, back to Edmonton, and then to Calgary, where we stayed at the old Currie Barracks for nine more years until dad retired from the forces at the ripe old age of 46. Staying in one stop for such a long time was rare. Many of my friends moved every two or three years. Larry, Randy, Greg, Mike, Graham, Skeeter, Walter, Allan, Zurch—the names of best friends for year or two, and then one of us would be gone, never to be seen or heard from again.

While some fathers were gone for six months on peace-keeping missions to Cyprus, the Golan Heights and other exotic locales, dad was gone an average eight weeks out of every year. Sometimes, during a bugout, he left without warning. There would be a call in the middle of the night and he was dressed and gone in less than 15 minutes. Sometimes we never heard him leave. We’d come down for breakfast and dad wasn’t in his usual spot at the kitchen table, drinking his coffee and trying his combat boots. “Bugout,” was all mom had to say and we knew.

We were in Germany when Russia invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, and even though I was really young at the time I remember air raid sirens echoing in the night, a heavy knock on the door and dad gone without any contact for several days. There was another time, after dad came home from the FLQ crisis in Quebec, and we were looking at photos in a magazine. There was one shot of formidable looking soldiers, armed with semi-automatic weapons, on the roof of a church during Pierre Laporte’s funeral. The caption said the soldiers had shoot-to-kill orders for anyone they deemed a threat. “Hey that’s me,” dad said with a smile, pointing at one of the heavily armed soldiers. I realized then my father’s job had life and death consequences.

It was a company town, the army base. And even bases like Currie Barracks, surrounded by Calgary suburbs and only a 15 minute bus ride to downtown, had that small town feel. Everybody knew pretty much everything about everybody. If you got a new dog that barked too much, people knew. If you called the MPs because your neighbour’s dog barked too much, people knew. If somebody’s daughter got pregnant; people knew. And they usually knew who the father of the baby was. If your dad didn’t drive you to hockey because he was always drinking at the Mess, people knew. If your family was getting posted somewhere across the country, people knew. It was an insular place, rife with rumours and gossip, with a solid suspicion of outsiders.

Still, it created a tight-knit community, especially among us army brats. Bullies were rare because the father of the person being bullied could be the co (Commanding Officer) of the father of the bully. And the constant moving, or the constant threat of moving, ensured that cliques were few. You made friends quickly, even shy people like me, because you had to, or because the more gregarious kids forced you to be their new friends.

Only when we moved up into the city high school and mixed with civvie kids—a few of them believe we were trained in various military techniques and martial arts like our dads, and we did nothing to refute those beliefs—did we graduate into various clique. But there was a difference: a civvie jock would never, ever talk to a civvie geek on a friendly basis. Their lines of social demarcation had been drawn and supported for years. But an army brat jock would talk to an army brat geek because there was a bond, a connection that couldn’t be severed by the intensity of adolescent peer pressure.

Even now, more than 20 years after my dad left the forces, the bond remains. We’ve all grown up, moved to various parts of the country and worked in a variety of fields and occupations. Some followed their father’s footsteps and joined up, serving in Somalia, Bosnia, Afghanistan and other hot spots. Some still keep in contact with old friends. But others, like me, have lost touch with most of their old army base friends and have no dealings with anything military. But whenever I meet someone who grew up on an army base, there’s always that special smile, that look of recognition and the quick exchange of information: the bases we lived on and our father’s rank duties. And if we have time—and we usually make the time—we share out stories, those tales that tie us together, even though we may be perfect strangers. Because one thing always remains—once an army brat, always an army brat.

Wayne Arthurson is the author of Final Season, Thistledown Press, 2002, He lives and writes among the civvies in Edmonton.

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