nineteen

Odd Woman Out — Bosnia 1993

“Bonbon, bonbon!” cried a little girl in a dirty white-and-pink t-shirt, worn cut-off jeans and decrepit flip-flops, as she pressed her tiny body against the barbed wire fence protecting Camp Visoko, home to Canadian Battalion 2 (CanBat2) and mine for the next six months. She looked like any normal eight-year-old who might have been playing in the dirt except for the empty grenade casing she held in her hands, hoping to trade it for candy. The troops guarding the perimeter faced a dilemma: if they gave her candy in exchange for the grenade, it would encourage her to find more, and it could potentially kill her (and others) if she handled a live one. If they didn’t, she would not go away and she posed a threat to security, distracting the guards when they should be looking out for intruders. A local translator, who’d been hired to work with our battalion, was recruited to go tell her that she would not be getting candy in exchange for the explosive and that she had to go home. I watched him slip her a lollipop as he escorted her away from the camp.

We had arrived in Bosnia and Herzegovina in early April 1993, a little over a year after the breakup of Yugoslavia, which had resulted in the war that raged around us. Even after multiple intelligence briefings from Canadian and international forces, the complexities of the war between the Catholic Croats, supported by the Croatian Defence Council (hvo), the Muslim Bosniaks, supported by the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (arbih), and the Orthodox Serbs, supported by the Yugoslav People’s Army (jna) was difficult to understand.

Briefings from United Nations Protection Force (unprofor) Headquarters revealed that it was principally a territorial conflict, with elements of ethnic cleansing, mass rapes, and indiscriminate shelling of villages and cities. Prisoners had been taken on all sides and Sarajevo was under siege. In many areas, the front lines were blurred and various alliances had been struck between some of the belligerent forces, many of which were led by what seemed like thugs. Apart from a few discernable patches and different berets when they wore them, it was difficult for our troops to differentiate between the Croat hvo, Serb jna and Bosniak arbih unless they were encountered at clearly marked checkpoints or well behind what we thought were their front lines.

Our accommodations consisted of modular tents, which had been erected inside an abandoned dusty warehouse. It was referred to as the Crystal Palace by soldiers who lived outside the camp in rustic shelters and, although it was a far cry from offering any luxury, I suppose from their point of view it would have looked pretty snazzy, particularly with the hard roof which could shield us from incoming mortar rounds.

I shared a tent with eight other officers, most of whom were duty officers, intelligence staff, or administrative officers. A few were captains and the rest were lieutenants. All of them were men. The atmosphere in our tent was cold and unwelcoming when I was there but most days I escaped to the duty room for sixteen to eighteen hours a day and so I endured only small doses of it. Nevertheless, I remember the disdain some of them had for me as clearly as if it was yesterday. Their snide comments were directed at each other, but clearly intended for my ears: “We’re even stuck with a fuckin’ female prime minister who’s dumber than shit. She would never have been elected.” And they would all agree, the general consensus being that there was nothing sacred anymore; women were invading the workplace, not through merit, but because of political correctness.

The arrival of Kim Campbell as Canada’s first female prime minister in June 1993 should have been a giant step for womankind, but because she’d slipped into that position as a result of then-Prime Minister Brian Mulroney stepping down rather than being elected into it, her progress was not only dismissed, it actually caused backlash in the world I lived in. In the eyes of my colleagues, Prime Minister Campbell had not earned her stripes despite her popularity, her academic achievements, and her impressive career. She was one more example of how women were given unmerited promotions, unfairly raised to prominence despite their incompetence.

For the most part, I was ignored when I was in the tent. No one talked to me directly, apart from the young lieutenants who either complained about the duty officer schedule, or advised me that they had switched shifts for some reason or another. It was not a pleasant place to be, especially after a long, tense day in the operations room dealing with countless emergency requests for security escorts, evacuations, and rapid reaction teams. During the day, I worked tirelessly in the duty room, dispatching the necessary help to address emergencies: security escorts for emergency aid convoys, a wrecker for an overturned vehicle in Sniper Alley, engineers for land mine explosions, pioneers to rebuild a bridge on the main resupply route to Vitez, etc. I was little more than a 911 operator. The only difference was that there was never enough help to respond to all the requests, and I never got to go home at the end of the day to get comforted and reassured that life outside this mess was acceptable and perhaps even good. I never got to see “normal” at the end of my tiresome days. I never got to set my barometer back to zero. I got to go to a tent where the atmosphere was just as tense and contemptuous, full of more turmoil and resentment.

After a few weeks, I retired one night to find that my cot, with all my belongings and a small note with the initials SS written on it, had been placed outside the tent. (I found out years later that the duty officers referred to me as SS, short for Super Snatch.) The message was clear: I was not wanted in the tent. Just then the company commander in charge of the camp’s administration walked by, grasped the situation, and said with much compassion, “Let’s move your cot in with the nurses. It will be better there.”

I felt like a worm he needed to remove from an apple. Anger and hurt overwhelmed me. Even if I had hated being in that tent, I needed to be with my male colleagues so we could exchange information and develop cohesiveness. I knew full well that neither of those things was happening, but I had not been ready to give up on it yet. Now I was being forced out, in the most loathsome, offensive, and cowardly way. The major had handled it as if I were the problem, like I’d inadvertently been placed in the wrong tent and he was simply correcting an administrative mistake. What is sad to me today when I look back on that ousting is that I left believing that I was the problem as well.