At military college, a whole new world opened up to me. It had been founded on the site of old Fort St-Jean, where in 1775 Major Charles Preston and his band of French-Canadian militia, Indians, and a few British regulars resisted the American general, Richard Montgomery. They wiped out enough of Montgomery’s men and delayed him so long that he was ultimately defeated in a blinding snowstorm on New Year’s Eve at the gates of Quebec. The fort had been continuously occupied by soldiers since it was built in 1666. The site was alive with the ghosts of battles past, and it thrilled me to walk the halls.
On the weekends, my classmates and I would go into Montreal, where I experienced a totally different city from the narrow east-end parish in which I’d grown up. Montreal in the sixties was vibrating with theatre, bistros and music, the gitane atmosphere created by a wave of young French-Canadian artists and intellectuals fiercely proud of their distinct heritage and culture. We would go dancing at the many disco-bars, wearing wigs over our military haircuts to get by the bouncers, who often mistook us for vice cops or members of the RCMP. Of course, we would run into Quebec nationalists, who would engage us in heated debate about joining that bastion of anglophonie, the Canadian Armed Forces, and we’d meet peaceniks, who were against anything military because of what was going on in Vietnam and the nuclear buildup of the Cold War. Sometimes we were hounded out of the more bohemian clubs and bistros, and at other times the opposition would make a particularly cogent argument and we would almost be persuaded to change our minds. Of course, there were times when we chose to compromise, heavily influenced by drink, beautiful young women and the pungent aroma of certain illicit substances floating in the air. Every possible moment of leave was used to escape the regimented, all-male campus, to plunge into the rich youth culture so alive in the streets of Montreal at the time.
My three years at CMR were happy ones, even though I lagged behind academically. To be truthful, I graduated at the absolute bottom of my class. I had arrived as a virgin in every sense of the word and was determined to remedy that lack of experience in the shortest possible time. I lost (or found) myself in varsity sports, political debates, sex, booze and rock ’n’ roll, my work ethic shot to hell.
My classmates and I were a mixed bag. Some of us were serious about a military career, but many were not. And there were even some closet hippies among us who struggled to keep their hair long and cut class to spend time in smoke-filled coffee houses, listening to Gilles Vigneault or Tex Lecor, the francophone equivalents of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. These guys were as much a part of the gang that I ran around with as the more macho science-and-engineering types like myself It was stimulating to rub up against people who came from totally different milieux, people who loved art and literature and who held antithetical political views to mine.
The student population at CMR was 70 per cent francophone and 30 per cent anglophone, but I moved as easily between the groups as I had in my old neighbourhood. Familiar with the insecurities that plagued the two solitudes, particularly when anglophones were forced into a largely francophone environment and suddenly found themselves a minority, I would defend each group to the other. I never fully belonged to either gang. I wasn’t sitting on the fence, but I was always a little apart. There were often times when I’d lose arguments and be furious with myself because I hadn’t been able to make the words come out right in either French or English. But by not limiting myself to one side or the other I was often able to pick up nuances missed by my more hardline classmates.
Over a hundred of us, out of an original class of 183, graduated and made our way to the Royal Military College (RMC) in Kingston, Ontario, for two more years of education. There we encountered a very different and not always sympathetic environment. In Kingston you touched the heart of Upper Canada, still very much tied to its British colonial past. Though our education was supposed to be bilingual, there was a deep divide between anglophones and francophones. The Quebeckers formed a tight clique and socialized amongst ourselves, often escaping the strict Protestant Orange of Kingston and the continual ragging of our English comrades for the familiar vibrancy of a weekend in Montreal.
Still, we were probably among the most confident French Canadians that the extremely conservative institution had ever encountered. We did not back down and become assimilated. Seized by the spirit of the times, we fought the sometimes petty battles required to achieve equity.
In the summer of 1967, when some of my friends had chosen to do their summer training in Montreal so they could soak up the life of the city and the excitement of Expo, I found myself in Shilo, Manitoba, smack in the middle of the Prairies. Shilo was where I first confirmed my vocation as a combat arms officer and a gunner. During my first time there, in the summer of 1965, they had us sit on the side of a hill to watch a live firing exercise. It was a splendid setting, with the white sand dunes of the Carberry Desert (the only one in Canada) glistening under a clear blue sky. A young officer, who had graduated from RMC only the previous year, explained his duties to us. He was responsible for the live firing of heavy artillery guns and had about ninety people reporting directly to him in the field. He was just glowing, imbued with the deep inner excitement and concentration that comes with command. He had his gunners demonstrate a fast-action deployment. We watched the guns come in from behind a hill to our left to take aim at the simulated Warsaw Pact target, about three kilometres away. The young officer stood on a truck in the middle of it all, like a conductor on his podium, and ordered the immediate disposition of the guns, the ammunition vehicles, the survey teams and the heavy, mounted machine guns for self-defence. When all was in place, he bellowed, “Fire!” There was a colossal bang as the gun spat out a projectile that exploded in a huge plume of dust just to the right of the target. He immediately yelled, “Left 200. Fire!” and the gunners went about their tasks fluidly and efficiently, barely making a sound, firing to his command again and again. I became consumed by the noise and the awesome destruction, intoxicated by the smell of burnt cordite. Seeing all that raw power under the command of one young officer, I decided then and there that this was the branch of the army I would join.
So when my friends went home to Montreal for the summers, I went back to Shilo, even though any failure there would have resulted in me being dismissed from the military college. Each summer, I survived the milieu only because of the help my classmates gave me with the finer elements of the artillery fire discipline jargon. The summer of 1967 was particularly difficult as I was the only French Canadian in a class of forty. To make matters worse, our course officer, a rotund artillery pilot who disliked the “smart-ass” RMC gang, decided to make my life miserable. He paraded me in front of the chief instructor, where he upbraided me for being “flippant,” among other failings. I acknowledged his criticism, saluted and returned to my quarters, certain that I was destined to flunk. I had no idea what he meant. Only at the insistence of my roommate did I decide not to cave in to the pressure. I even finally asked my instructor the meaning of flippant. “Cocky,” he said. Bewildered, I carried on.
Then, on the evening of July 24, things got a whole lot worse. I arrived at the mess a little late and found a place not far from the door in the TV room. The supper-hour news came on. The top story of the day was Charles de Gaulle, the president of France, saluting massive crowds from the balcony of the Montreal city hall with “Vive le Québec. Vive le Québec libre!” The crowd on TV roared with obvious delight while the mess went dead silent—except for muffled scraping as people shifted in their seats to stare at the only Quebecker in the room. It seemed to me that the clip was repeated twenty times during that newscast, and each time I could feel more daggers coming at me. When the newscast was over, the room emptied slowly. Nobody came up to me, nobody talked to me. I was part of the evil empire that was threatening to tear the country apart. The silence lasted for about two days. I was shunned not for who I was but for who I was assumed to be, and that experience remains burnt into my memory.
When I returned to RMC that fall, my future was in serious doubt. My poor mark from summer training and my even poorer academic performance at the college made failure seem inevitable. But at the last minute I locked into my old habit of creating a bubble of concentration and slowly and steadily pulled myself out of the hole.
In the fall of 1968, with the election of Pierre Trudeau and the publishing of the preliminary report of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, the language issue became more and more significant at RMC. In November, four of my francophone classmates convened a bilingualism committee and drafted a memorandum outlining the problems that francophones encountered at the college. They presented it to the commandant, which caused a minor explosion. The committee members were paraded in front of the commandant and asked to explain themselves—a frightening experience for the young officer cadets, who were being accused of harbouring nationalistic tendencies. But their quiet logic and commitment to their principles won the day, and they succeeded in forcing some small changes. Those of us who stayed in the Canadian Forces resolved to continue to monitor and defend French rights within the army. We were one of the first classes of French Canadians at RMC who were comfortable with our cultural identity; even so, only 58 of the 130 French-speaking cadets who had begun military college with me actually graduated in the spring of 1969.
I was posted to one of the brand new French-Canadian artillery units, the 5ième Régiment d’artillerie légère du Canada in Valcartier. It had been stood up in the winter of 1968 by General Allard and Prime Minister Trudeau, and had caused considerable acrimony as older English-speaking regiments were disbanded to make way for the francophone units. We were starting from scratch, actually building the regiment, which was housed in borrowed offices with little equipment or clerical help. Out of the four thousand gunners in the Canadian Forces at the time, fewer than a hundred spoke French. We ended up with a lot of English-Canadian soldiers with French surnames but zero French language skills, and French Canadians who had worked outside of Quebec and had operated in English for so long that they had forgotten their French almost entirely. It was often frustrating, because I was forced to spend so much time translating all kinds of English paperwork into French. But there in Valcartier I had a taste of actually participating in regimental history.
By 1969 the mood in Quebec had begun to darken, fuelled by strikes and student protests, some of them pretty violent. A sudden wave of anger ripped through the province, setting hearts and minds on fire. Extremist separatist factions recast the complex struggle for cultural and linguistic identity into a fight against the anglo bosses. It seemed like the province was hovering on the brink of insurrection as Quebeckers—everyone from taxi drivers to medical workers—took to the streets in a series of crippling strikes and mass demonstrations.
Then there were the terrorists. The Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) had been active in the province since 1963, calling for the violent overthrow of the capitalist system and the establishment of an independent French socialist nation. The FLQ announced itself by conducting a serious bombing campaign, which targeted three Montreal-area armouries and included a thwarted attack on former Prime Minister John Diefenbaker’s train. Another attack resulted in the maiming of a soldier, working as a bomb expert. The scale and violence of the assaults increased throughout 1969 and into 1970.
In Valcartier we were quietly training to withstand armed revolt. We all knew there was a strong possibility that we would be called in to help the civilian authorities quell riots, but just how serious the situation would get, nobody could guess. During my first year with the 5ième Régiment, we conducted exercises in crowd control and VIP and vital point protection. We were called out several times to restore order in prisons when guards walked out on strike, and we helped disperse crowds at some of the bigger demonstrations, including the Murray Hill bus drivers’ strike where shots were fired. When three thousand members of the Montreal police force walked off the job in October 1969, we were called in to keep the peace. The strike lasted five days. Later that month we were put on alert when forty thousand demonstrators marched on the National Assembly in Quebec City. We spent many nights and weekends camped out in our gun sheds standing guard over our weapons. A current of nervous excitement ran through the troops; we felt we would be tested sooner or later.
On October 5, 1970, the British trade commissioner to Quebec, James Cross, was kidnapped from his home in Westmount. The FLQ demanded that their manifesto be read in French and English live on the CBC, and the government acquiesced in order to save Cross’s life. The manifesto talked of “total independence of all Québécois” and the release of “political prisoners.” General Allard, the former Chief of Defence Staff, and his family were stalked by an FLQ cell, and there were rumours of a plot to assassinate Trudeau. It was hard to believe this was happening in Canada. No one could tell if the FLQ were just a bunch of hotheads causing trouble or if they represented something more sinister. Then, on October 10, Pierre Laporte was kidnapped. It was as if the other shoe had dropped.
It was Thanksgiving and bitterly cold in Montreal. I was at home with my family for the long weekend. On Monday, my father said we’d probably be called out. At that point, I still couldn’t believe the situation was so serious. I drove back to Quebec City that evening, arriving at my little basement apartment at about eleven-thirty. I had just settled in when the phone rang. We were being called out. I struggled into my combat gear and rushed upstairs to tell my landlord and his wife that I’d be away for a while and to hold my mail. I can only imagine what ran through the minds of that respectable, middle-aged couple when they woke in the middle of the night to find me on their doorstep, fully suited and wearing my helmet. The woman screamed and almost fainted, sure that civil war had broken out in Quebec. I hastened to reassure them.
At Valcartier, we trained hard for three days and then got the order to move; the government had invoked the War Measures Act, suspending civil law for the duration of the crisis. Our rules of engagement included the use of live ammunition to prevent acts of insurrection, which meant that opening fire and shooting to kill were real possibilities. This situation presented me, at the age of twenty-four, with one of the most difficult ethical and moral dilemmas of my military career. Members of my own extended family, as well as friends from my old neighbourhood, were supporting the separatist movement. At any time I might see faces I knew in the hostile crowds that I was ordered to control. How would I react? Could I open fire on members of my own family?
As a young lieutenant, I had forty-one soldiers under my command. If I gave the order to shoot, I could not let my men sense the slightest shiver of doubt in my belief in the rightness of that order. Any uncertainty on my part would communicate itself to my men; any hesitation on their part could result in chaos and innocent casualties. In a nanosecond I had to be able to set aside deep personal loyalties and put the mission first. I spent many hours wrestling this issue before I could put aside my loyalty to my roots and wholeheartedly embrace my loyalty to my nation. I had to connect to a deeper commitment, past friendship, kinship or ethnicity, to absolutely believe in the rightness and justness of my path.
On October 17, the whole of the Canadian Army was deployed. Troops moved into the Ottawa-Hull area from out west; units from Petawawa moved into Montreal; the Airborne Regiment flew from Edmonton and was held in reserve at the military college in Saint-Jean. The bulk of our brigade was deployed to Quebec City. My regiment was posted to protect the National Assembly and other government buildings, as well as provincial politicians. There were huge convoys of troops entering Montreal, dozens upon dozens of Hercules transports thundering into Ottawa. We travelled from Valcartier in long columns, taking several routes into the heart of the city. I remember driving at the head of my column while people either honked their car horns and waved, or watched us pass in shocked disbelief that this was happening in Canada.
Later that day, the Quebec cabinet m
inister Pierre Laporte was found murdered, his body stuffed into the trunk of a car that had been abandoned in Montreal—the FLQ had answered our massive show of force unequivocally and violently.
Once deployed, we established our routine. For three months we worked constantly, six hours on post, six hours off, with a day off every three weeks. We “hot-bedded” it, that is, we hauled out our sleeping bags to crash in the cots just vacated by the soldiers who relieved us. My troop rotated between standing guard outside the National Assembly and the main courthouse near the Château Frontenac in the heart of the old town. Through the bone-chilling cold of a Quebec fall and winter, we did six-hour shifts with only one twenty-minute break inside to warm up. We used to joke that if anyone wanted to start shooting, we wouldn’t be able to handle the extra work. We took a fair amount of flak from separatist supporters who jeered and hassled us. A number of English-speaking troops in the regiment had families who lived off base and had no real protection from the mischief-makers who tracked them down and subjected them to harassment. The troops were allowed very little leave time, and they worried about their families. Their anxiety often boiled over in nasty scenes between them and the young French Canadians who served alongside them. The francophone soldiers were getting hostility from both sides. Some of them came from pro-separatist families who viewed them as traitors; at the same time, they were being branded by some of their comrades as untrustworthy “frogs.”
I would do my rounds with a crusty old sergeant, Roy Chiasson, a veteran from the Korean War. Because there was no action whatsoever, the troops needed constant reminders of the nature of the operation. They also needed a sounding board to talk over their difficulties. The sergeant and I spent countless hours out in the cold reinforcing and encouraging them. I have often been criticized for being an “emotional” leader, for not being macho enough, but even during this early stage in my career, I believed that the magic of command lies in openness, in being both sympathetic to the troops and at the same time being apart, in always projecting supreme confidence in my own ability and in theirs to accomplish whatever task is set for us.