two

School of Hard Knuckles

My father sat on the edge of our black leather couch with his clenched fists held out so that his knuckles leaned up against my own. His smiling crow’s feet betrayed his serious attempt to stare me into giving up this game, Knuckles, which we had been playing for some time. My two younger sisters were stretched out on the opposite couch, and the oldest was lounging on the red shaggy carpet, all three watching Saturday morning cartoons.

It was my dad’s turn to strike, and at lightning speed he tried to hit the top of my small knuckles with his larger ones. I narrowly dodged his attempt. It was my turn to try to hit his. I nervously tried to flip one of my braids behind my head before realizing that I no longer had any locks to flip back. The previous week, my mother had lost patience trying keep her four daughters’ hair properly untangled and combed. She called us into the house one by one, while the others played outside unsuspectingly, and cut off the two thick braids each of us sported. She placed these in a keepsake envelope and sent us back outside to continue playing with a loving pat, as if nothing had happened. The neighbours must have thought she’d gone mad, but we laughed at each other’s outrageously short and crooked haircuts — until we got a glimpse of our own heads in the mirror as we brushed our teeth before bedtime. The giggles stopped abruptly. We all looked like boys.

I laughed and my father grinned back at me, his emerald green eyes staring intently at mine, daring me to be bold. I twitched my knuckles, feigning a few times to lure him into a false sense of security. His eyes did not leave mine. Then, at the precise moment I felt he wouldn’t be expecting a full-blown attack, I went for the kill. My knuckles sailed through the air with no resistance. He laughed, but this time his comeback was immediate. His knuckles made swift contact with mine. I felt the sharp pain of bone on bone. I inhaled sharply, and one of my sisters winced on my behalf. I laughed as I returned my fists to their on-guard position, ready for the next wave of strikes. I stood in front of him, my skinny ten-year-old body putting me at the perfect height to pound his knuckles when it was my turn to attack, but unfortunately I hadn’t yet honed the reflexes I needed to be very good at this game.

To the reader, this game between a grown man and a ten-year-old girl probably seems unfair. But to us, it was nothing of the sort. With three sisters who competed for his attention, it was no easy task to score time with him, apart from when I sat on the toilet seat lid early in the morning to watch him shave before going to work. I had him all to myself then. He would slap on his aftershave, then gently pat my face with what was left on his hands, and I would go back to bed with the smell of him lingering on my face.

Bloody knuckles was a ritual shared between my father and me; it connected me to him in an unexplainable, yet powerful way. It was our thing.

“Give up!” he would plead, to which my answer was always “Never!”

I knew that in a matter of minutes, seemingly always at the precise moment when I approached the limits of endurance, my mother would charge into our living room and yell at my father for playing this game with me, even though she knew it was my begging that he responded to. I heard her puttering in the kitchen, preparing breakfast. Despite being only five feet two inches and barely a hundred pounds, my mom would shove my dad aside so that he had to stop playing with me. My mother, a hiking-booted, French-Canadian version of a southern belle, has the energy of a battalion. If she decides to make something happen, it is best to get out of her way. My dad would growl, capture her affectionately in his arms, and wrestle her to the ground until she giggled so hard she had to keep her legs crossed so as not to pee. Although I would pretend to be hugely disappointed at the interruption, this enabled me to rub my aching knuckles discreetly, and blink away my tears.

My father was an ambitious young military firefighter, often away on courses, training, and exercises, sometimes for months at a time. When he’d joined the Canadian Forces in 1959, his first section commander had been an anglophone sergeant who couldn’t pronounce his French-Canadian name: Gaëtan (Gay-tan). The sergeant had told my father that from that day forward his name would be Guy. Knowing that we would be moving across the country on multiple postings, he and my mother had consciously decided to give all four of their daughters bilingual names: Line, Sandra, Nathaly, and Nancy. Both my parents had struggled to learn English as adults, and so made a pact that their children would be bilingual, attending anglophone school but speaking French at home. It was one of the most precious gifts they gave us as we moved from province to province.

My father had bought a tape recorder that he always carried when he was away for longer periods; he recorded lengthy letters to us, sharing stories of his training, his daily military life, and how he missed “his girls.” When we received one of his tapes, my mother would call us to the kitchen table in the evening after supper and we’d huddle over the tape recorder as if we could get closer to him somehow, his voice transported thousands of miles through the small machine. I could almost see his strong jutting chin and the military buzz cut. Sometimes later at night I’d hear my mom alone in their bedroom, listening to parts of the tape only she was allowed to hear. I never heard her cry. She’d accepted long ago that being a military wife meant being a single parent for long periods of time and that, in turn, meant she had very little energy to dwell on what she was missing.

My mother’s anticipation and excitement was contagious on the days leading up to my dad’s return from his trips. When he arrived, often in the early evening, my three sisters and I had already been bathed, prettied up, and lined up on the couch like picture-perfect daughters who’d been little angels while he was gone. In the early years, we played “ride the train” in the afternoon. My mother would line four kitchen chairs one behind the other and all four of us, ranging from two to seven, would have to sit on board the “train,” with our virtual tickets ready for check-in. While she swept and washed the floors, she’d talk us through a long voyage around the world, injecting the occasional “choo-chooooo!” and “keep your feet and hands inside the train!” If we stayed in our seats the entire time, we’d be served a snack. By the time my father finally walked through the front door of our pmq (Private Military Quarters), it had been cleaned from top to bottom, with only the neon light from the stove on, a sure sign we’d be shooed off to bed as soon as we got a few hugs and a piece of warm apple pie à la mode, his favourite dessert.

My knuckles were aching now. I could tell he was torn between wanting me to stop the game and his pride and amusement at watching me tough it out. I craved the admiration I saw in his eyes, even as tears swelled up in mine. I would later think that this was stubbornness school and that, contrary to popular belief, I hadn’t inherited the gene or been born pigheaded. I had learned it here, playing knuckles with my just-as-stubborn father.

“Come on, give up!” he said, grinning handsomely. “Give up, ma p’tite tête de cochon!”

•••

i turned fourteen in 1979 and joined the 2551 Canadian Airborne Cadets Corps in Edmonton, where my family was posted at the time. Actually, it was my father who was posted there, but when one of your parents is in the Canadian Forces, the entire family becomes part of the posting as well. Military spouses get “promoted” alongside their spouse and children become base brats who barely balk at the idea of giving up all their friends to move to a new base every two or three years. Occasionally they attend schools on the military base with the other kids, and go to military church for Sunday service led by a military padre. It is a disciplined, hierarchical way of life that seeps into everyday activities almost unconsciously. I enjoyed it enough to push it further by joining cadets and it was transformative in every area of my life. So much so, that after I put on the dark green cadet uniform with the maroon beret that year, I never felt like a civilian again. A skinny teenager who was neither a girlie girl nor a brainy student, athletic only in individual sports, I had felt like an outcast until I became part of the Airborne family; learning to climb mountains, manoeuvre a canoe, navigate with a map and compass, fire rifles, and rappel from helicopters. I was finally good at something. In addition to being imbued with self-confidence from leaders who continually inspired me, I learned to lead and teach, to coach and mentor. I became best friends with Valerie, another airborne cadet, with whom I could share my dreams of joining the army and becoming a paratrooper. She used to call me “balcony jumper” (my last name in French means porch or patio), and I’d call her Walerie in reference to how an Asian receptionist at her dentist’s office had pronounced her name: “Next please, Walerie Wochester.” In her parents’ old lime-green Ford pickup truck, she was brave enough to teach me how to drive. Together we ventured out to take on our teenage years with curiosity and boldness. We discovered boys. We fell in and out of love. We were going to join the army together, become paratroopers in the same battalion and the godmothers of each other’s daughters who would be born on exactly the same day and would grow up to be best friends and paratroopers too.

But life had other plans. Valerie chose not to become an officer in the Canadian Forces, but rather to become a non-commissioned member, a supply technician, right after high school, and she was posted to Calgary. I wanted to attend university and to become an officer.

When I went to the Edmonton recruiting office in December of 1983 to apply to join the Canadian Forces and was asked which “classification” I wanted to work in after graduating basic training if I was accepted, the answer had been in the making for four years. I smiled at the recruiting officer sitting behind a laminate wood desk and responded enthusiastically.

“I want to be a commando, sir. Airborne!” I stood at attention in the man’s office, staring at the stack of personnel file folders piled high in his in-basket. The young captain made a sound that resembled something between a chuckle and a snort, replying that I couldn’t be Airborne since I needed to have paratrooper wings for that. I eagerly advised him that I did have wings. I’d graduated from Basic Parachutist last summer with army cadets, I told him. His eyebrows lifted and he pursed his lips in disbelief. I could tell he was skeptical and there was a good reason for it. The three-week Basic Para Course is one of the toughest courses offered to military personnel, designed to mould soldiers into paratroopers who can be dropped deep into enemy territory. Exceptionally, the summer course would open its roster to allow a few of Canada’s top cadets to attend the training after completing an additional three-week pre-Para indoctrination in Valcartier, Quebec. I had not only graduated from the course but had been chosen as top cadet. The following year I had pinned the same parachutist wings on my father, who had been goaded by his firefighters into completing the course even though he was air force and thought it was ridiculous to jump out of a perfectly functional airplane.

Sitting behind his desk and barely glancing up, the recruiter continued his rebuttal, telling me that Airborne was not a classification, but rather an elite assignment to a specialist unit. He told me I would have to be in the infantry to go Airborne, and since there were no women in the infantry, I could never be in the Airborne Regiment. I considered this obstacle. I could be posted to the Airborne Regiment if I followed Valerie’s footsteps and became a supply technician. One of the potential postings for a supply technician was to become a “packer rigger” for the Airborne — those who pack their parachutes — but then I couldn’t go to university because supply technician was an enlisted position, a non-commissioned trade. So I enquired about the other combat professions of the military.

“What about the artillery?” I asked, but got the same response, this time with an exasperated sigh.

“Armoured?” I persisted, determined to be in a field unit.

He rolled his eyes and told me there were no women in combat arms, and there never would be.

Disappointed, I asked which classification was closest to the infantry, and he replied that nothing came close to the infantry. He suggested I become a nurse, an administration officer, or perhaps a nutritionist. None of these professions called out to me, but when he described the activities of an army logistics officer, I became encouraged that at least I could have a field job. If accepted into the Canadian Forces, that’s the classification I would choose. I had no idea what being in the logistics entailed, only that I could lead a platoon of truckers in the field.

Three months later, standing in our kitchen and staring at the Canadian Forces logo on the brown envelope I held in my hands, my heart pounded so hard I felt its reverberations in my temples. I tilted my head towards the ceiling, closed my eyes, and prayed before tearing the envelope open. The first word I saw was “congratulations.” I kissed the letter. Tears formed in my eyes. My candidacy to become an officer in the Canadian Forces had been accepted. I grabbed the phone and dialled my father’s office number.

He answered.

“Dad! Dad! Guess what! I got accepted into the army!” I jumped around the kitchen getting tangled in the long phone cord. “I’m leaving on June 28!” There was a pause on the other end of the line. “Dad?”

“That’s great,” he said with the enthusiasm of someone opening bills after Christmas. I waited for more but nothing came. There was an odd silence on the line.

“Okay, well, I’ll talk to you later then.” I untangled the long beige coil and hung up. Sitting down on one of the cushioned dining chairs, I crossed my arms and sulked. My father had just ruined my happy moment. I couldn’t bring myself to jump for joy without having him rejoice with me.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. My father was old-fashioned: he wanted his daughters to get married, have children, become good wives and mothers. I understood that. But the thought of succumbing to the model set by my parents’ example, and further drilled into my sisters and me every time one of us ventured outside the “proper boundaries for a young woman,” terrified me. I did want a husband and children, but I had so much life to live first. Pursuing a career in the army and having a family were incompatible in my mind, especially if I wanted to be all in. I’d been so gung-ho since my early teens, I figured my father would know that a different path was in the cards for me. I certainly hadn’t expected him to be so disappointed with my choice of an army career. He knew I had applied and had even encouraged me to follow my heart.

I sat at the kitchen table for the longest time, brooding. Eventually I built myself up to an impressive level of anger. As soon as he got home, I would let him know what an unbearable, chauvinistic man he was.

I stomped up the curved stairs to my bedroom, but halfway up the telephone rang. I ran back down to answer it. Maybe he’d had a change of heart?

“Hello,” I said abruptly. I heard the familiar voice of my father’s brother, Uncle Marcellin, on the other end. He congratulated me on the news of my acceptance into the Canadian Forces, saying he was proud of me and that I would do well. We talked a few minutes and then I hung up, perplexed. I had not told anyone else about my letter of acceptance. Before I could head back upstairs, the phone rang again, and then the calls kept coming for the next few hours; one after another, my aunts, my parents’ friends, my grandparents, and the padre of our church all called to congratulate me. It became obvious that my father had spread the news like royalty announcing the birth of an heir. I realized that his silence on the phone with me had not been disappointment at all.

•••

in mid-june of 1984, my father proudly swore me into the Canadian Forces. When a journalist from the local paper interviewed him, asking what he thought of his daughter joining the army, he said, “She belongs to them now.” You could hear the relief in his voice. It wasn’t that he was happy to get rid of me. It was more that he felt his job was done, and he could now safely hand over the reins of whatever was left of my upbringing to the army. He had been relieved of his duties as if this were a change of command parade. It was a recurring theme that would be repeated when each of my three sisters married.

Without looking back, I left behind my friends from high school, my first teenage love, and the safety of home to be enrolled in the Regular Officer Training Program (rotp) and to begin basic training in Chilliwack, British Columbia. I’d been slotted to attend Royal Roads Military College in Victoria, British Columbia, as part of the first class of female cadets. Because the cf wanted to ensure that officers who failed basic training had a backup plan, applicants to the rotp process had to prove they’d been accepted at a civilian university even if they were slotted for military college. Since my parents were posted to Winnipeg that summer, I had applied and been accepted at the University of Winnipeg. My friend Valerie was already posted to Calgary; if everything went well with my training, I was hopeful of joining her there for my first posting after graduation. I was so primed for this new adventure that I barely noticed what I was leaving behind: close bonds with friends from my cadet corps, my sisters, a boy with whom I had just begun a meaningful relationship. I knew I was spreading my wings.

In late June, 1984, the thirty or so officer cadets who were to be my platoon colleagues for the next eleven weeks flew in to Vancouver from all over Canada, then were bussed to Canadian Forces Base Chilliwack to start basic training. For most of them, aged seventeen to twenty, basic training was their first taste of military culture. I arrived on base dressed as a civilian, but given my prior cadet training for the past four years, I’d already been somewhat indoctrinated. While most of my teammates learned to polish boots, stand at attention, and salute, I was already perfecting the hospital corners of my bed and shaping my new beret so that it would look like it belonged to a seasoned soldier, despite the cookie cutter cap badge (la badge de pouf) that identified all of us as new recruits.

On the second day of this new life, our course commander, an infantry captain with a long handlebar moustache, greeted his platoon with a poker face as we stood in three very crooked ranks on the parade square. Nearly a third of us were women. Behind him, snow-capped Mount Cheam and its three sister peaks formed the Skagit Range of the Canadian Cascades creating the Fraser Valley, with Chilliwack, “the Green Heart of the Province,” nestled in its centre. Mount Cheam was the first mountain I ever climbed. My family had been posted here for one year when I was thirteen, and my father had taken my sister Line and me to climb the southwest face to the 2,100 metre summit. The panoramic view of Mount Baker to the south had been breathtaking. I immediately fell in love with mountain climbing.

The course commander’s second-in-command, a tall warrant officer who sported the engineering cap badge, inched his way towards me for inspection. He had just spent an hour yelling at each officer cadet. I braced for the onslaught of insults. My uniform was impeccable. My boots had a mirror shine, sharp creases lined my dark green dress pants, and my mint-green short-sleeved shirt didn’t have a wrinkle on it. Parachutist wings were proudly pinned above the top of my left breast pocket and my name tag, straight and level, adorned the other. Not one flyaway hair escaped from under my beret. The warrant officer stared at me, not noticing my perfect uniform. His eyes focused on my wings.

In such a calm voice that I thought he was going to be my new best friend, the warrant officer asked me why I was wearing paratrooper wings.

Innocently, I mirrored his calm demeanour and told him that I was a parachutist, flashing him a smile. His tone changed dramatically and through gritted teeth, he told me to take them “the fuck off,” or that he would do it for me. Stupidly, I asked the question that is forbidden from new, wet-behind-the-ears recruits: Why? He answered that I had three seconds and started counting. With a sense of urgency, I removed the three pins holding my wings in place, took off the offending decoration, and slipped it in my pocket. He shook his head, turned around, and reported to the course commandant that his platoon was ready.

The captain looked from one end of the platoon to the other but, given that we had not learned any drill yet, he did not instruct us to stand at ease. We stood at attention, waiting anxiously for the captain to utter the first inspirational words we would hear from an officer.

He told us that every single one of us Bloggins, Aardvarks, and Hoseheads smelled like diaper rash ointment. I made a mental note to ask some of my colleagues what that meant.

He paced in front of the platoon, stopping every few seconds to stare at one of us, all the while explaining that those of us still standing here in eleven weeks would grow up to become young officers capable of leading troops into battle, commanding platoons and squadrons. A few might eventually progress into unit commanding officers, ship captains, flight squadron commanders. But until the very last day of the course, we were to have no illusions: we belonged to him. For the next eleven weeks, he said, our lives would be miserable.

She belongs to them now, I heard my father concur.

•••

within a few short days of the start of the course, I was called into the commandant’s office without being told why. That morning during inspection, I had received a red chit for accidentally ironing railroad tracks, a double crease, in my CF dress pants, but I didn’t think it warranted a special meeting with the course officer. Terrified, I entered his office, saluted, and stood at attention. He was reading a report. I stole a glance down at his desk where a miniature flag of his regiment, the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry (PPCLI), was perched beside a plastic desk cover. Underneath the clear sheet was a picture of what was probably his wife, in a nurse’s uniform. He had a gold band on his left hand. He wore parachutist wings, but instead of the red maple leaf in the centre of his, it was a white one, indicating that he’d served in the Airborne Regiment. I felt intimidated and lifted my head to stare at the wall.

He told me to stand at ease, and then asked a series of questions about the incident concerning the parachutist wings without giving me a chance to answer. Was it true that I had para wings? What was my course number? How many jumps had I completed? Had I done a night jump? Who had been my course commander? And then he waited.

“My course number was 8312, sir. Six jumps from a cc-130, one from a Chinook helicopter and one night jump, sir. Captain Moo Sang, Warrant Officer Hubert Martineau. Wings pinned by General Pitts, sir.” And now that I had given him the information, I relaxed, knowing that I would be allowed to wear the wings. “I even named my cat after him.” When he stared at me, I continued, “You know, the colonel-in-chief of the Airborne Regiment, Pitts. It was a gift from my best friend for my sixteenth birthday.” I laughed, forgetting protocol, assuming we could connect on a deeper level as we were both paratroopers. I blush as I write this, remembering how innocent I was.

My course commander told me to zip it. Then he admitted having never heard of a woman with para wings. I looked at him and saw the crease in his brow, his scowl showing me he was still skeptical. He asked me for proof: a jump record logbook or a graduation certificate.

I had these at home, not considering the possibility I would need them, certain that others had shown up with parachutist wings in the past. Many cadets went on to have military careers, but I realized very few of them were women with para wings. I didn’t recognize this first taste of gender discrimination. At the cadet corps I’d been treated as an equal, given the same opportunities as my peers. I’d been lauded by my officers. I was oblivious to discrimination.

I shook my head. He advised me that he never wanted to see me wear the wings until I had proof. He told me to leave his office.

“Yes, sir.” I saluted and returned to the barracks.

The course progressed well over the summer. We started each day with a run at six a.m. and ended it with cleaning, ironing, and studying late at night. The schedule was packed tightly with a mixture of classroom lessons, drills on the parade square, field exercises, and spit-polishing boots. The morning inspections always revealed a new spot we’d forgotten to dust, sweep, or wash. Instructors yelled at us relentlessly for dull creases in our dress pants, invisible drops of water on the bathroom floor, the impossible-to-see-with-the-naked-eye lint on our tunics. We were never good enough. That was the point. This was meant to strengthen our characters, hone our survival skills, and force us to work as a team. It also made us proficient at doing push-ups.

A few weeks into the course, I was in the base library doing some homework with some of my classmates; we were researching administrative policies in the Queen’s Regulations and Orders (qr&os). Three big binders were spread out on the table and two colleagues were flipping pages back and forth to find the necessary information. Another teammate joined us; in his hand he held a copy of The Sealandair, the local Edmonton military newspaper. He pointed to the large headline that covered the top right half of the front page. LIKE DAUGHTER — LIKE FATHER.

I stared at the publication. Framed in the centre was a photo of my father proudly having his parachutist wings pinned on him by his daughter. The caption below read:

Top jumper on last year’s basic parachutist course pins wings on her father

How serendipitous! I laughed and asked if I could have the paper. That night, I removed the front page, folded it before placing it in an envelope, and walked over to the course officer’s office. I slipped it underneath the door.

I didn’t hear back from the captain or the staff for the rest of the course.

The Fraser Valley graced us with beautiful sunny days on the firing range and on the parade square, while typical British Columbia downpours during field exercises enabled us to learn, albeit the hard way, the importance of digging trenches around our lean-tos to evacuate water. That summer we were taught to navigate with a compass, fire the gas-operated, air-cooled, magazine-fed fnc1a1 rifle, and march in slow formation or run as a platoon. Informally, we learned much more valuable lessons: how to sleep anywhere (sometimes even standing up), how to eat faster than Kobayashi at a hot dog–eating competition, and how to faint without letting your rifle fall to the ground. You could never let your rifle fall to the ground.

I hated and loved every moment. I hated getting up before the break of dawn, but felt exhilarated during the morning runs. I hated cleaning my rifle, but loved the feel of it nestled into my shoulder when I fired on the range. Some of my peers were not suited for military life and left voluntarily or were shown the way out. The women on my course generally did quite well with only a few of them failing within the very first couple of weeks, mostly for physical fitness reasons. One of my favourite male colleagues, a young cadet named Hakim, showed so much promise I was sure he would graduate top of the course, despite the disproportionate badgering from the instructors who relentlessly laughed at his name. I often asked him how he could tolerate such abuse from the instructors and he responded that it was all a game. He would exercise patience and strength. Three quarters into the course, we lined up in three ranks for pt early one morning and he didn’t show up. We never saw him again.

During the last week of the course, I was advised by my course captain that for some reason I would be attending civilian university as an officer cadet instead of military college. My disappointment was profound, as I wanted to shed all vestiges of my civilian life. I didn’t care that much about my studies; I wanted to be in uniform full-time, start my career, and dive right into training. I harboured little enthusiasm towards the education part of becoming an officer, yet as fate would have it, education would now be front and centre as I would have to attend a civilian university.

The day before graduation, we were doing a dress rehearsal for our final parade when the warrant officer yelled at me that I was improperly dressed. I looked myself up and down. Rifle, bayonet, and scabbard, boots highly polished, ugly bowler hat sitting on top of my head. I looked at my flanking comrades, thinking I’d missed some directive, but nothing seemed to be amiss. I looked at the warrant officer questioningly as his glance moved to the blank space above my left breast pocket where my wings should have been and he smiled. I smiled back.

“Officer Cadet Perron, if you want to graduate this course you better be wearing all the proper accoutrements for final parade.” And I did.

•••

following basic training i attended the University of Winnipeg. I moved into Winnipeg’s military row housing, known as the chicken coops, where all young officers on military training are lodged. I lived in a townhouse with three other women: a nurse, a dietician, and a finance officer. I completed logistics training during the summers, at the same time as my counterparts attending the Royal Military Colleges. There were four cliques of officer cadets during those summers: the “Mil Col” students, already a tight-knit team from the military colleges; the deos, direct entry officers, who had joined the military after graduation from university and had just finished basic training together; a few lieutenants who had been promoted from the ranks; and finally my category, “Civy U” cadets from civilian universities across the country. Theoretically, I should have known a few of them from basic training, but I didn’t. I was already an anomaly.

The summer between first and second year of university is usually reserved for second language training and, as per procedures, in May prior to that summer, my University Liaison Officer called me into his office at Canadian Forces Base Winnipeg to tell me I’d be going to St-Jean, Quebec, for the English Second Language Course. But then he paused. He asked me what my mother tongue was.

“French, sir,” I responded, standing at attention in his small office on the second floor of the Winnipeg Base Headquarters.

He was relieved when he saw that French was my first language since I was scheduled to learn English. Why that made sense to him baffled me. Here I stood in front of him speaking perfect English. So if I understood this correctly, I asked, I was being sent to La Belle Province to learn English, the language in which I was currently completing my degree? He confirmed my query hesitantly, probably realizing as he said it that the logic of this situation was flawed. I’d be evaluated first, he admitted, to see if I was functional. Didn’t I sound functional? If I was deemed functional in English, he told me, I’d be transferred to French Second Language training. I responded to him in French, assuring him that I was fully functional en français as well. He shooed me out of his office, saying they would cross that bridge when they got to it.

When I arrived in St-Jean that June and met up with my colleagues from the previous summer’s basic training, I relaxed, anticipating the easiest summer of my life. I actually considered practising a very heavy French accent so I could fail the English test and stay with my peers for the summer, but I inadvertently engaged in a long conversation, in English, with the man who I later found out was going to be assessing my English language skills. I had blown my cover. I was thus rapidly sent to Borden, Ontario, for logistics training, a year ahead of schedule, and was forced to introduce myself to a whole new team.

I enjoyed logistics training, although there was too much time in a stuffy classroom doing paperwork. The course was meant to give us a general overview of logistics, including supply chain management, finance, and transportation, before branching off into our respected classifications the following summer. Since all logisticians from the air force, army, and navy were being trained, there wasn’t very much fieldwork. Weekends were spent completing homework and hanging out at the officers’ mess in the evenings.

One morning as I ate breakfast at the dining hall, an officer who was a year ahead of me in training sat down in front of me. He told me he was going to be a transportation officer, the classification I was aiming for as well, and he offered to help me with some of the assignments that he’d done the previous year. He was smart, witty, and charming. We started dating and a couple of Saturday afternoons later we were reviewing one of my assignments in his room when we gave up on homework and started making out on his bed. I told him I didn’t want things to go too far given that I didn’t know him well enough. I admitted to him that I’d never had sex. He was in disbelief that I was still a virgin at nineteen, and tried to convince me that it was abnormal to hold out for so long. I knew he was right; all my friends had long passed that milestone in their lives but I just wasn’t ready. I replied that we could still have a lot of fun and we did. Then, he said what many men probably say to women before they are raped. “You can’t expect to go this far and then just stop. You want this, it’s obvious.” Pinned underneath him, I pleaded for him to stop and apologized for going too far, but it didn’t deter him. I told him I wasn’t protected, but he ignored me, holding me down so that it was impossible to escape. I wasn’t expecting him to continue without my consent and tried desperately to talk him into stopping. He decided that it was time for me to lose my virginity, despite my refusal to go any further.

I could have screamed, but I didn’t.

I could have fought harder to get away from him, but I didn’t.

I could have kicked or bitten or lashed out, but I didn’t.

I begged him to stop. And I cried. I let myself down and cried. It didn’t last long and before I knew it he rolled off me and sighed. I didn’t move. I stared at the ceiling, and kept crying. I felt cheap, soiled, and guilty that I had let this happen. I’d wanted my first time to be meaningful, loving, special. Consensual. It had been anything but that.

For the next few days, I sat on the floor of my bedroom and put myself on trial over and over again. Even if today I clearly recognize and can label what happened that day, my nineteen-year-old self was convinced that because I was in his bedroom, because I had removed some clothing, and because I tried to stop him “too late,” I bore the responsibility for what happened. I was guilty of inviting the advances of a man who couldn’t control himself. My actions had been taken as implied consent. Begging him to stop would be discounted as too little, too late. I was convinced that that’s how it would be viewed if I reported the incident to my course staff. I was well indoctrinated by the rhetoric around women’s responsibility to steer clear of situations where they put themselves at risk to be raped or abused.

But I wanted an apology. A week later I built up the courage to confront my aggressor and was just about to knock on the closed door of his bedroom when I heard the giggling of another female voice in his room as well as some amorous noises. Doubly betrayed, I walked back to my own room and promised myself that no man would ever lay a finger on me again without my permission.

In mid-September, the consequences of that single afternoon would make themselves known. I bought a pregnancy test on my way back from university. The odds of being pregnant after having sex only once were slim, but I had missed my period and felt nauseated. Within minutes I paled at the sight of the little blue plus sign on the pregnancy stick test.

The thought of becoming a single mother at twenty, while completing my studies at university, and then leaving for training in the summer shattered my world. In 1985, the military was “tolerant” of women getting pregnant, but the consequences to one’s career were significant. They would be even more devastating for a young officer cadet who hadn’t completed her studies yet. And who wasn’t married. I would probably be kicked out of the cf.

The thought of ending the pregnancy was more shattering. Coming from old-fashioned Catholic parents, with strong family values and clearly defined, traditional mother/father roles, I would carry guilt with me all my life if I decided to have an abortion. On the other hand, I hated the father of this baby. I raged every time I thought about that afternoon in his room. I did not want to have a reminder of him all my life.

Guilt or hate.

Or perhaps both, I thought gloomily.

I went to the base hospital the week after my test and nervously sat in the waiting room, on standby to see a doctor.

“Officer Cadet Perron,” said the clerk loudly behind the front desk of the waiting area. “Pregnancy test, room four.” I felt the eyes of everyone in the waiting area turn towards me. I cringed at the possibility of one of them knowing my father. He was the Air Command fire chief and worked on the same base. Airmen that worked for him could easily be within earshot. Damn military hospital, I thought. I felt the blood rise up to my face. I wished we were allowed to go to civilian clinics, but as cf members, we were forbidden to even have medical insurance cards. We had to use the facilities provided to us by the Canadian Forces.

The doctor confirmed that I was pregnant. When she asked what I wanted to do, I couldn’t say the word “abortion,” so I used a bunch of garbled words to describe what I thought I should do. She asked me if I had taken the time to think about it, to discuss it with friends or family. I responded that I had thought about nothing else for the last week. I couldn’t miss any more school, I had no option. I spoke with such conviction that it sounded like someone else was mouthing the words in my place. I had never been so unsure of any decision in my life, yet here I was telling the doctor in a most callous manner exactly what I needed to do without the slightest bit of wavering.

She made a phone call, scribbled on a notepad, hung up, and smiled compassionately at me. She told me to go to the Winnipeg General Hospital and handed me the note with a date and the name of a doctor on it. I’d have to pay, but at least it would not appear in any of my military medical records. Now that the wheels had been set in motion for me to go through with the abortion, a dark cloud of guilt settled over me. I felt I would die of shame. I started crying so hard that the doctor took me in her arms and told me it would all work itself out.

For the following months after ending the pregnancy, I kept myself overwhelmingly busy leading up to the holidays. I volunteered as an instructor with a local cadet corps, worked in a stationery store, tutored French, and became a teacher’s assistant. I ran and worked out at the base gym, and on weekends I’d mooch suppers at my parents’ house. The busier I stayed, the less my mind would wander back to that room in Borden, trying to undo the actions that had led me to get pregnant. Fight harder, push him away, don’t let him get that close. Those thoughts would rewind, and replay, over and over. Every time, I believed myself to be the guilty party.

That December 29, I turned twenty. I sat alone in the tiny bedroom of my military townhouse in Winnipeg and decided to make a list of twenty things I wanted to accomplish before I turned thirty. I called it Operation Vincent, meaning vingt-cent, the French translation for 20-100. I would complete one hundred per cent of those twenty things. It was the first of my decennial OP Vincents, and it included such trivial things as “buy a 1965 Mustang, watch kittens being born, do a triathlon,” and other more serious events such as “graduate, become a commissioned officer, and join the infantry.” I even dared to go one step further and wrote that I would be accepted into the Airborne Regiment. It was as if I couldn’t hear all the voices of those who said there would never be women in combat arms. Given that my thirtieth birthday was so far away, I ended my list with a commitment to get married and have children.

That following summer I completed Transportation Specialty training, and the summer after that was deployed to the service battalion in Calgary to complete on-the-job training since I was a year ahead of schedule. As soon as I arrived at the service battalion, I was sent on my first field exercise to the Suffield Training Area with a transport platoon. Given that I wanted to be a transport officer, I asked the corporal who had been assigned as my driver to let me drive the big deuce and a half, a two-and-a-half-ton truck for the last half hour before getting to Suffield. I’d never driven anything so big and found it challenging to steer, especially while trying to navigate around the multitude of prairie dogs who had all seemed to decide to cross the road during my turn at the wheel. I swerved left and right to avoid them as much as I could, but I couldn’t help flattening a few and I cringed. When we finally arrived at the rendezvous point, the guys who’d been in the truck behind me came over laughing and told me I had missed a few of the “gophers,” but not to worry, they had got them for me. Just then a warrant officer came barrelling between the vehicles and started yelling at both my co-driver and me.

“What the fuck were you doing all over the road? You could have got yourselves killed!” And he continued to rant about the weight and lack of manoeuvrability of the vehicle, and how goddamn gophers weren’t worth risking human lives. Embarrassed at my lack of judgment, I realized that I would need to grow up if I was going to lead troops.

There were very few women at the battalion then and only one other female officer. There were no women in the transport platoon I had been attached to for training. During this first exercise in the vast prairie training fields of Alberta, I was placed alone in a huge modular tent about a hundred metres from the main camp. I woke up in the middle of the first night to the sound of my tent zipper being opened and a very drunk soldier saying he had seen the way I looked at him and well, he had got the hint. I screamed at him to get the hell out, which to my surprise, he did immediately. Pumped with adrenalin, I stayed awake for a long time after that, terrified of not being heard if I needed to scream for help. I got dressed and paced back and forth in the tent for a while, then considered going to sleep in the officers’ mess, but I wasn’t sure I’d be any safer there. I eventually got back into my sleeping bag fully clothed and started drifting off when I was awoken again by the noise of someone trying to sneak into my tent, this time by pulling up the bottom of the canvas, which was pegged into the ground. Again, I screamed at him to get out and heard some scuffling, yelling, and grunting. I heard men talking outside my tent but didn’t dare go outside. I went around the tent with a flashlight to double-check that all the pegs were tightly dug in, that the zippers and the door laces were properly fastened. I slipped back into my sleeping bag, and stayed alert, waiting impatiently through the few hours before daylight.

Just before the break of dawn, I unzipped the front flap of my tent and almost tripped over my platoon warrant officer and a section commander sleeping in front of my tent on a tarp. Beads of morning dew covered their sleeping bags. My warrant sat up and looked at me sleepily, his thinning hair flipped out on the wrong side of his head and a dark shadow growing around his tightened jaw. I winced, suspecting the reason they were there.

I asked them why they’d camped there, despite not wanting to hear the answer. My worst thoughts were confirmed. They had bivouacked in front of my door after two soldiers “decided they wanted to move in.” They had heard me scream and had scared them off pretty effectively the second time, but didn’t want to take a chance that they’d be back. I hadn’t realized there was more than one. I thanked the two non-commissioned members but didn’t know what else to say. I never thought I’d need guards posted on my tent door. Embarrassed, I rushed to the latrines to wash up and gather my thoughts. Instead of being outraged I felt shame. “Men are men,” I had been told often, “and you have to make sure you don’t provoke them.” I knew that more than most by now.

This was a pivotal moment of my integration into the world of military culture. Had this incident been taken seriously, it would have sent the message to all those concerned, me included, that this type of sexual harassment would not be tolerated. But I was never asked what I wanted done about the situation, the men were never charged and the officers got a good laugh over it in the mess the next few nights. The belief that situations of this kind were to be taken lightly was being ingrained into my cultural awareness of the military. I was being conditioned to accept these occurrences as harmless and inconsequential. So for the second time in my newly blossoming career in the army, the thought of putting in a formal complaint, or an informal one for that matter, never even crossed my mind. The first time, when I had been raped, I had no defence because the argument would be that I was guilty of provoking the actions of a man. This second time, I had done absolutely nothing to provoke the unwanted attention, but being a woman in a nearly all-male battalion was provocation enough. I had to accept the obvious risks of this environment.

I should have known that both offences were unacceptable, but I was too young, already too assimilated, and too willing to do whatever it took to avoid drawing negative attention to me, knowing full well that if I did, I’d be labeled a shit-disturber. I knew this instinctively. It was a foundational belief that would be reinforced over and over in my career to the point where I never thought to question, complain, or report any of the misconduct towards me or sadly, towards anyone else. I was programmed early on to submit to all these things as a normal part of the military environment if I wanted to progress and be accepted by my peers. It was not a paradigm I would challenge until long after I left the Canadian Forces. And even then, it wasn’t until I started writing this book in 2015 that I fully grasped the extent, to varying degrees, of the wrongness of all the transgressions.

After this incident, I asked my company commander to be moved to the male officers’ tent. I’d prepared a lengthy argument revolving around my need to fit in and be one of the boys. Yes, I actually used those words. Worse, I meant them. I told him it was dangerous for me to be segregated from the rest of the battalion, like a beacon to drunk soldiers who could profit from my isolation. He wholeheartedly agreed, and it took very little convincing for him to move me in with the male officers. They put up a dividing sheet at one end of the tent to give me, and themselves, just the right amount of privacy without closing me off entirely. It was an excellent solution.

Although I’d had a rough start to my summer, the rest of it was incredible. I spent the entire two months either in the field, deployed with the logistics battalion for training exercises in Wainwright and Suffield, or on adventure training, canoeing across the Bowron Lakes of British Columbia. I couldn’t get enough of this new career. I devoured everything I could learn about being an officer and in the process also forged good friendships with some of the battalion’s officers.

On weekends when I wasn’t deployed, Valerie and I would catch up, go to movies, and do a little shopping. She was engaged to a wonderful man she had met in the army, and soon they were planning to start a family. I couldn’t recognize then how our paths were subtly starting to veer off in different directions despite our youthful dreams and commitments. She was delicately weaving all the pieces of her future in order to balance her career, her relationship, and having a family. I admired her for it. I, on the other hand, was charging full speed ahead towards an army career, with very little consideration for things that I felt would slow me down. I dated only unavailable, catch-and-release men: those who I knew were in town only for a few weeks or those who, from the onset of the relationship, confirmed that they were not the long-term kind. Long-distance relationships were the best, because they provided me with periodic blips of fun, then left me to concentrate on my career, all the while feeling rather normal because I was in a relationship; a long-distance, intermittent, infrequent relationship, but a relationship nonetheless. It was only a smokescreen, but it suited me perfectly.

Near the end of the summer, I obtained a special permission from my battalion commander to go to the Airborne Centre in Edmonton to jump with my youngest sister, Nancy, who had followed in my footsteps as a cadet and was now graduating from Basic Parachutist’ Course. Knowing first-hand the difficulty of the course, I was the proudest woman in the crowd as I watched the reviewing officer pin the golden wings upon her chest. My oldest sister Line, who had married in Edmonton two years prior, also showed up for the graduation with her baby daughter, Chantal, in tow. Her second child was on the way. My younger sister, Nathaly, couldn’t make it to the graduation because she had just married an air navigator in Winnipeg and had followed her new husband to Comox, British Columbia, for his first posting.

Despite the distance that separated us, my sisters and I stayed close to one another, probably as a result of my mother’s quirky rotation schedule all through our childhood and into our teens. pmqs normally had only two children’s bedrooms for the four of us girls, and my mother decided that every six months we would rotate rooms with each other. Her reasons were twofold: first, it would ensure that we fought evenly with each other, and second, it would get us to clean and purge our rooms on a regular basis. We never knew exactly when the next rotation was coming, but it was often on a wet rainy weekend. She’d get us out of bed early Saturday morning and give us our new roommate assignments. For the special occasion, we were allowed to play music as loud as we wanted so long as we cleaned, packed, and moved. We thus learned to interfere with and annoy each other equally, especially in our teenage years, and the time we spent snarling, yelling, and ratting on each other eventually wove tight bonds and profound friendships that have never waned.

By 1988, I graduated with a Bachelor of Arts. Despite my request to be posted to Calgary, I was sent to the 5e Bataillon des services du Canada, in Valcartier, Quebec, to serve as a transportation officer in the Logistics Branch, preparing deployments of the 5th Brigade for major exercises to places such as Gagetown, New Brunswick or Wainwright, Alberta.

I had finally become a transport officer. Or as some of the officers called me: “Mother Trucker.”