fourteen

Phase 4

I started phase 4 in pitiful shape.

In the three days between the Phase 3 and Phase 4 infantry training, Kevin and I had attended a friend’s wedding on the Saturday, a family brunch on Sunday, and then had tried to catch up on yard work around the house. But all I wanted to do was sleep.

The jaunt in the swamp at the end of Phase 3 had been too much for my exhausted body to fight and now it was letting me know it. Probably as a result of both prisoner exercises, I had come down with a cold, and I urgently needed to regain some strength prior to going back to Gagetown.

That Sunday evening, my little sister, Nathaly, called from Victoria, British Columbia, to wish me good luck on Phase 4, but also because she needed to talk to me. Nathaly had moved to British Columbia with her new husband three years before and her daughter Courtney had been born two years after that. Nathaly’s world revolved around her family life, her husband’s career, and planning for the next move every two to three years. Ron, now an air navigation and electronic warfare officer on board ships, was gone for extended periods of time and Nathaly was the “rear support party”: she adapted every aspect of her life to enable Ron to have his rewarding career. She was exactly the type of wife I wished I had!

“Hi, Sis, Ron and I have a favour to ask you,” she said very cheerily over the phone. I was getting ready for bed, but it was three hours earlier for her and she had just finished giving Courtney a bath.

“Yes, I would love to babysit Courtney, it’s just that I’m four thousand miles away.” I laughed and coughed at the same time.

“Ha ha! No, I’m not calling you to ask you to babysit. Well, not short term, anyway. Sandie, Ron and I are going to have a baby boy and we would like you to be his godmother.” I paused and tears welled up in my eyes. A baby boy! And only a few months after I would have had mine … Her request was salve on the poorly healed wound around my heart.

“Oh my God, yes! Yes! Yes! Of course! Thank you!” She couldn’t possibly understand the importance of the priceless gift she and Ron had given me. I was also the godmother of Line’s third child, Bobby. It was as if both my sisters had conspired to give me what I was missing: the chance to be important in a child’s life in one form or another. I felt blessed that they had both, perhaps unknowingly and subconsciously, filled a void in my life that had been created by the choices I had made. I wouldn’t be left with “nothing to show for it” even I chose a military career, I’d have them. They weren’t just godsons, they were godsends.

On Monday morning, I left for Gagetown with a pair of Kevin’s size nine combat boots in my army duffle bag, my feet still too swollen to fit in my own. They ached, but the pain was eclipsed by my persistent cough and I was spitting out phlegm like a ninety-year-old lifelong smoker.

Despite the onset of a nasty cold, I was excited to start this final phase, to see all the boys again, and to hear about what they had done over the long weekend. I was also anxious to find out who would be in my section for this course, knowing full well that colleagues can make or break the success of a training phase. This summer’s phase would welcome officer cadets who had been completing their fourth or fifth year at the Royal Military College and had graduated from Phase 3 last summer. They would be joining my teammates and me to form a new, bigger class for Phase 4 infantry training.

During this last stage of basic infantry training, we were going to learn how to lead a mechanized infantry platoon equipped with armoured personnel carriers (apcs) and concentrate on more advanced tactics, including the techniques of co-operating with the other combat arms (engineers, artillery, and armoured) in fast-paced, skill-testing field exercises.

The members of my section, all new except for Campeau who’d been with me on Phase 3, were for the most part from the Royal Military College. They’d completed basic training as well as Phase 2 and 3 together, which was evident by the cohesion they’d developed over the summers and the years spent together at the college. It became obvious immediately that I was the outsider, and they let me know it every chance they had, greeting me with faintly veiled disgust and disdain. Campeau instinctively lay low, making sure he himself would not be targeted for harassment. The words of Mike Rainville echoed in my mind. “Keep your feet and knees together, soldier …”

The first week of Phase 4 set the pace for the challenges I would face throughout the course. Plagued with a cold that seemed to grow worse and not better, I struggled to stay alert in class and to complete assigned tasks each and every night. I started skipping lunch most days to catch a nap in the women’s restroom of the Combat School. I tried my best to camouflage the wheezing and the coughing, but I was a mess.

On Thursday morning of the second week, one of the senior instructors, Captain Klein, who had been particularly hostile to my presence on the course, pulled me aside and in no uncertain terms told me he wanted to see a chit from the doctor by the end of the day informing him that I could continue the phase or else I would be re-coursed or rtued (returned to unit). I panicked. My cough was getting worse and I was exhausting myself fighting whatever it was that ailed me. I asked to be excused, and went to the Medical Inspection Room (mir) at the base hospital.

Once in the doctor’s office, I was instructed by the nurse to strip off all my clothes and put on the paper gown. I knew that if the doctor saw my feet I’d probably be taken off the course immediately, so ignoring the nurse’s request, I removed only my combat shirt and my t-shirt. The doctor entered the room a few minutes later, stuck a popsicle stick in my throat, then, removing it, asked how long I’d been sick.

“Only a few days,” I lied. He put his cold stethoscope on my chest, told me to take a deep breath, then repeated the procedure on my back. He shook his head. He felt the swollen thyroid glands at my neck and frowned. Without further scrutiny, he instructed me to get dressed while he wrote his comments in my medical file. He then scribbled on a small piece of paper.

He turned towards me and said I probably had the beginnings of pneumonia. He handed me the scribbled note, saying it was a prescription for antibiotics and five days of rest.

Five days! That would get me sent home! Again, I panicked.

The voices of all those naysayers were screaming in my head: “See, you can’t do this. Women are too weak for combat. You’re not physically capable of toughing it out, go find yourself an apron instead and …”

“Please, Doctor, just give me the medication to get through this,” I begged, trying to give him my most desperate look. “I’m on infantry training and if I get taken off this course, it will be the end of me. The guys on the course, as well as the instructors, just want to see me fail — they’ll say that women are too weak to handle the infantry and I’ll never live it down.” I let the desperation in my voice try to convince him, and begged him to please just give me antibiotics and to let me go back to training. I promised him I would do whatever it took to take care of myself and recover. “I’m usually very healthy and really strong. Please, sir, I’m begging you.”

The doctor, a middle-aged man with beautiful blue compassionate eyes, was reluctant. “You have the beginnings of pneumonia, you absolutely need sleep — and a lot of it. You need to stay indoors and in bed.”

“No,” I yelled a little too loudly. “Please, you don’t understand! I can’t go through this again. Those assholes will graduate a year ahead of me and by the time I get to the regiment it will be hell!” I told him to please just trust me. If I couldn’t make it or if I saw that it was getting worse, I’d quit, I promised. I lied again, knowing full well that not even an act of God would make me abandon this course.

He hesitated, but in the end wrote me a prescription for medication, and scribbled another chit that allowed me back into training.

He told me that he wanted to see me back in his office the following Saturday morning or he’d hunt me down and confine me to bed himself. He’d been overly serious, but his crow’s feet betrayed him and he reminded me of my father. “Give up, tête de cochon …” I could almost hear him say. My resolve only got stronger.

“Yes, sir. Oh, thank you so much!” I saluted and ran out of the office before he could hear me cough up my entire insides.

Prior to returning to class, I went to the pharmacy to get my prescription filled, loaded up on cough drops, then with the precious chit giving me the green light to get back to training in hand, I went to see Captain Klein in his office. He smiled when I entered his office, seeing I had a note from the doctor. However, upon reading the doctor’s scribbles, he shook his head and told me that there was no way I’d be going back “out there.” He ordered me to wait outside his office, and I heard him dial what I suspected to be the medical unit to talk to the doctor.

“I think she should be rtued, sir” I heard him say. “No, I know I’m not a doctor but —” and his sentence was abruptly cut off because there was a long pause, then he thanked the doctor and hung up. “Perron, get in here!” he yelled, standing up and moving around his desk to tower over me. “I’m watching you. This isn’t over.”

“No, it’s not,” I said, and he motioned for me to get back to class and I did, but not before giving him my sweetest better-luck-next-time-asshole smile.

For once I appreciated having my own room, and I slept the entire weekend, getting up only to shower and pee, drinking a gallon of water every time and crashing back into bed again. By the time Monday came, the antibiotics were slowly starting to kick in and I could feel myself gaining some much-needed strength, but I still felt terribly weak. I would need every ounce of it as we were deploying for five days of mechanized assaults and manoeuvres.

I longed so badly for my team from Phase 3 with whom I could let down my guard and just enjoy being out in the field. Now I was surrounded by hostile men who wanted nothing but my demise. Their contempt for me was flagrant. I was called une fente à seins, a French play on words which turned the word infantryman into a “slit with breasts.” They made sexist jokes and derogatory comments every chance they got or simply refused to co-operate when I was in command. Now I understood what the three women of my Phase 2 training had endured.

When we sat in a circle for lunch or for breaks, the members of my team would wedge themselves tightly close to one another so that I couldn’t squeeze in. Some of them would cross their eyes at me, as if we were all in first grade. (When I was one year old, I’d jumped down from a chair and my right eye had hit the corner of a table. Three operations later, they had saved my eye but I remained a little cross-eyed, especially when I was tired.)

In my section, I was often tasked by whoever was the appointed leader to fetch the ammunition and equipment to ready the team for the patrols. While the rest of the section was resting, I would be running around to prepare for the task ahead. I neither refused the assignment, nor complained, convincing myself that I could handle it. The lack of sleep and rest, however, was continuing to take its toll on my body.

Given that, in addition to our leadership skills, we were also being evaluated on our mechanized navigation skills, there were long rides in the armoured personnel carriers between actual attacks. Squeezed together with all our equipment, we sat facing one another in the semi-darkness of the apc, enveloped by its metal cage as it crossed ditches, fields, and valleys. It was the only time we could catch naps, as the evaluations were ongoing, twenty-four hours a day. I needed to seize every opportunity for sleep so as to recover from the pneumonia that had invaded my lungs, but the boys in my team would have it otherwise. Intuitively, they had figured out that I should not sleep, and they took turns keeping me awake. Sometimes it was by squeezing tubes of peanut butter or honey from the ration packs into my ears if I dozed off, or faking orders for the dismount. Occasionally, as the purring of the apc would lull us to sleep, one of them would start singing loudly in my ear, pretend to sneeze or cough and then they would all laugh. I needed to constantly be on my guard.

Ben was one of the worst bullies. Not a great leader by any means, Ben thought these pranks against me would gain him some popularity with the rest of the section, and so for hours on end, he’d amuse himself by throwing pine cone buds, acorns, remnants of sunflower seeds, or whatever he could get his hands on, at my chest and face. He’d sit across from me in the apc, and one by one, he’d place nature’s ammunition in the palm of one hand while snapping the index finger and thumb of the other, flinging the bits at me. I was pretty defenceless and he knew it. Reporting the offence to the course staff would be difficult. I could just imagine Captain Klein’s response when I complained that “Ben was throwing pine cones at me.”

I figured that if I didn’t react, he’d get bored and give up, but he was relentless. Had his tenacity been for any other endeavour, it would actually have to be admired. At some point during one of the dismounted assaults, I too had picked up a bunch of the same miniature pine cones and before getting back into the apc, I had approached Ben. With a look that was unmistakably defiant, I gave him the pine cones, my stare letting him know that he would tire of this game before I ever would. It wasn’t true, of course. I was on the verge of cracking, but I would never let him know that. The only respite I had was when he occasionally paused from harassing me to pamper his khaki bush cap, otherwise known in the army as the funny hat, reshaping it so that it fit his head perfectly. He’d sewn his name, as well as the Van Doo badge, on the inside of it and proudly adjusted it to his head as if his standard army issue cap was worth more than a one-of-a-kind ball cap signed by Babe Ruth.

One late afternoon, we were given warning orders to prepare for dismount. We proceeded to grab our rifles and ammunition and to replace our funny hats with helmets for the attack. A few minutes later, we’d arrived upon the enemy and the ramp was lowered to let out our section for the assault. I had been in the far back, and so I was the last one out. As I prepared to exit the apc, I saw that Ben had left his funny hat on the middle bench. Without hesitation I grabbed it and slid it in the pocket of my combat shirt.

We advanced over the enemy, threw the standard hand grenades as per the drill, simulated bayoneting the enemy soldiers in the trenches and continued to advance past the defensive position to secure the area. Only, I went a bit farther. And when I was certain that I was relatively out of sight, I pulled out Ben’s funny hat, placed it nervously under a huge rock, kicked a bit of dirt on it, whispered a little “fuck you, asshole” and snuck back inconspicuously to the rendezvous point for the regroup. Once we’d redistributed the ammunition, completed a body count for wounded or dead team members, we received warning orders for the next patrol and mounted the apc to continue our manoeuvres.

It took at least twenty minutes after we’d driven away for Ben to realize that his funny hat was missing and he started, at first calmly, but then feverishly, to look for it. I figured that at some point he would suspect me, and I had my story all figured out, on standby waiting for him to consider me as the culprit.

“No, the last time I saw your hat it was on the floor … it must be underneath the benches or something,” I would say innocently, knowing full well that he’d never see it again. My passive-aggressive self didn’t, however, get to use its fabricated story … it never occurred to Ben that someone would take his hat intentionally. For the next two days, he tore the apc apart trying to find his ridiculous hat, and finally, as the attention veered away from me, I was able to get some much-needed sleep.