three

Mother Trucker

There was nothing about being out in the field that I didn’t enjoy: replenishing the battalions, organizing airlifts and rail transport for all the brigade’s equipment and personnel. I got along well with the other officers from the battalion and some of them became my lifelong friends. We trained together, enjoyed barbecues and the occasional night on the town. We pulled pranks on each other, then grew wiser and colluded to pull pranks on our superiors. It was hard for the battalion commander to punish all of his young lieutenants when his newly painted pink jeep was hoisted with two cranes above the officers’ mess for the annual mess dinner. There was definitely strength in numbers!

From my driver-soldiers (Mobile Support Equipment operators) I learned about the intricacies of night driving, camouflaging a deuce and a half (two-and-a-half-ton truck) without totally deforesting the lush Gagetown landscape, and how cotter pins were about as indispensable as ammunition (and no, I couldn’t replace them with bobby pins if I lost one of them). I was a twenty-two-year-old lieutenant, leading a platoon of thirty-five truckers, seven of whom were women. Almost all of my soldiers were older than me. My warrant officer was in his early forties, and like most good seconds-in-command, he gently mentored me on how to be an officer. I wanted to participate in everything: helping to raise the modular tents, operating the radios in the command post, helping to dig the latrine areas. I craved being with my platoon every minute of each day. I was crazy happy.

I must have been such a pain in the ass.

Over time, and with much diplomacy and gentleness, my warrant officer tried to make me understand that I was not one of the troops. I was meant to lead them, not help them pound tent pegs into the ground for hours on end. It was acceptable to help out when needed, but my role was to coordinate, plan, forecast, and strategize. Lead. And hang out with the other officers. He was trying to tell me to stop breathing down his neck, but I was painfully slow to understand. That is, until one day while I was helping out my driver camouflage the jeep, the warrant officer came over to me, pulled me to the side and asked me how I would feel if my company commander was always helping me do my job? I liked my company commander, but felt nervous when he was around. The message finally hit home. I wasn’t helping, I was choking them with my enthusiasm.

I took some distance from my troops, but I still enjoyed driving my platoon’s vehicles, which was prohibited for officers. I drove everything from tractor-trailers to snowplows, buses to fuel tankers. I was desperate to get my hands on anything I could drive or operate, and even flew a British Gazelle helicopter on one occasion. All my spare time was spent learning to handle vehicles: back up a trailer, change gears flawlessly with a double clutch, activate the power takeoff or the Jacobs brakes. It fascinated me, but it also got me into serious trouble my second summer at the battalion when I decided to learn how to drive a five-ton cargo truck from my own platoon.

One of my section commanders and I had gone out for a routine training session on a cloudy July morning during a six-week exercise in Gagetown. Most of the battalion had gone back to Valcartier for a one-week leave, but I had volunteered to stay behind to guard the camp and prepare for the final exercise. I had plans to reorganize my command post, explore the expanse of piney woods and wide grassy meadows of the Gagetown training grounds and get to know the few soldiers who’d stayed behind as well. I was going to play with my trucks.

I was driving along at a fairly good pace on a dirt road, probably chatting with my master corporal about some of the soldiers in his section, when my cargo truck hit a perpendicular rut that had been dug from repetitive tracked vehicles turning onto the road. The vehicle flew in the air, and when it landed back on its wheels a fraction of a second later, the driveshaft must have been dislodged. I lost control of the truck. It veered precariously towards the ditch. My section commander tried to help me steer it back onto the road but it was impossible. Even as I slammed on the brakes, the truck swerved into the ditch and ended up on its side. Pitched nearly upside down in the vehicle, my master corporal and I quickly made sure we were both unhurt, and wiggled out of the safety belts to climb out the top door of the truck. We looked each other over again and I apologized profusely. As soon as I walked around the damaged vehicle with its oil spewed all over the ground, I knew a court martial was a definite possibility, maybe even a certainty. Not because I’d had an accident but because I’d been driving without a permit with very little regard for safety and regulations. I had put the life of one of my soldiers in danger.

With all the sweetness and sense of responsibility in the world, my section commander tried to insist that he take the blame, knowing full well that I wasn’t allowed to drive. I refused adamantly, chancing the consequences. When we called our platoon’s command post to ask that they send a wrecker (the military version of a tow truck), the corporal on duty, loyal and dedicated but who couldn’t possibly know the extent of the damage (which was later evaluated at $32,000), said, “Don’t worry, ma’am, we’ll fix it all ourselves and no one will have to know.”

I met with my deputy commanding officer (dco) that afternoon and was sure I would be charged, perhaps even demoted, although as a lieutenant there weren’t too many ladder rungs below me. I was properly scolded, berated, and admonished, but in the end, my dco covered for me, writing a predated permit giving me permission to “develop an awareness” of my platoon’s vehicles just in time for me to show it to the Military Police who would visit my tent that night. Nevertheless, he also assigned me to five extra-duty weekends, including Christmas and the New Year’s Levee, which was held in the Governor General’s residence at La Citadelle in Old Quebec every New Year’s Day. It was a fancy affair, that no one really wanted to attend. All the commandants of the 5e Brigade du Canada were tasked to go, escorted by their unit’s duty officer.

As far as I was concerned, I’d got off easy.

By early 1989 there were still no women in combat, but I started hearing rumours of trials being conducted to perhaps allow them to join or transfer to the infantry, artillery, and armour classifications. They were called Combat-Related Employment for Women (crew trials). I was hopeful I’d eventually be transferred to the infantry regiment. In the meantime, whenever I had the chance during major army training exercises, I’d hop along the resupply convoys with my troops to see them replenish the front lines where infantry forces prepared for their attacks. I would watch them with the envy of a four-year-old kid looking at a litter of puppies, just dying to jump in to play.

My interest in the infantry was common knowledge, and on one occasion during Rendez-Vous ’89, an army-wide exercise in Wainwright, Alberta, I was invited to follow along a mechanized infantry assault as they performed their lead-up, dismount, and attack. Although I tried to stay calm and professional, I was giddy with excitement when I told my driver to wait for me behind the staging area and then followed the infantry platoon warrant officer to where the sections were preparing to deploy. Sitting in the tracked m113 Armoured Personnel Carrier (apc), I watched the soldiers prepare for the attack: refresh their camouflage paint, load the ammunition in their magazines, and take a few last looks at the map. I too refreshed my camo, just in case they’d let me tag along like an unwanted little sister. I guess they succumbed to my best brown-eyed-please-take-me-along look because the next thing I knew I was given hand grenades and they were slipping extra pyrotechnics into the headband of my helmet. The pounding of my heart could have drowned out the artillery fire in the background. I felt like I’d been transported to the helicopter scene in Apocalypse Now’s Ride of the Valkyries. “Ta ta ta taaaa ta, ta ta ta taaaaa ta…”

We drove for maybe ten minutes, sitting in the semi-darkness of the apc, letting ourselves be rocked gently by the rolling terrain of the Wainwright prairies. The five soldiers facing me seemed calm in contrast to my excitement. One of them was actually trying to snooze, while I was almost at the point of needing defibrillation. Two of them were staring at me and laughing at the oddity before them: a girl, wanting to play war games. I didn’t smile back. This was war, after all.

The order was given to prepare for dismount just as the apc came to an abrupt halt. I could hear the yelling of orders outside the vehicle and the smell of the smoke grenades that had been launched to cover our advance was intoxicating. The ramp opened for our own dismount, but, in an unsuspected denouement, jammed about six inches from the top, forcing us to get out from the top hatch of the apc, and that put us directly in the enemy’s line of fire. One by one we urgently exited through the hatch, but when I attempted to jump down from the top of the apc my foot caught in the camouflage net and I went flying off the vehicle in a somersault worthy of a Nadia Comǎneci performance. I landed on my side and rolled like the recovery from a parachute jump. The muzzle of my fnc1 rifle gouged my cheek, but the adrenalin was so intense that I barely noticed the pain. I stood up and fell into pepper-podding, the tactical advance of half the platoon while the other half covers the movement, with the rest of the unit. Our section had fallen behind and we sprinted to catch up to the troops on our flanks. When we approached the trenches, one of the section commanders showed me how to light the grenade simulator and my heart skirted the edges of exploding with anticipation as I threw it just behind the trenches (so as not to hurt the soldiers role-playing the enemy). We jabbed our covered bayonets at the enemy, watched as they screamed, slithered down in the trench and pretended to die. I tasted the thrill of victory.

It was a glorious attack. Seeing the fighting unfold with seemingly little effort and perfect coordination of the battle group’s assault teams and their respective firepower … it fascinated me, it exhilarated me. The smoke began to clear as the teams regrouped, evacuated their wounded, caught their breath, and rallied in a circle for the debrief. There were soldiers everywhere, synchronized into a choreography that was unfamiliar to me: a scene that was chaotic, but graceful in its own way. Everyone but me seemed to know exactly where they needed to be, what they needed to do, and which way their rifle should be pointing. I, on the other hand, felt like Alice in Wonderland falling down the rabbit hole in slow motion. Not knowing exactly what I was supposed to do, I instinctively followed the section everywhere like a loyal puppy, fearing that I’d be left behind and hoping that they’d forget I wasn’t supposed to be there. Maybe I could participate in the next attack too. No such luck. I was the odd woman out. Within minutes, the young platoon commander came over to where his section was regrouped, stared at me incredulously and gave me a look that said Okay, you’ve had your fun, little girl, run along now …

The soldiers from my newly adopted team slapped my helmet in a respectful, congratulatory fashion and the people-pleaser in me did cartwheels of joy as I reluctantly headed across the dry, grassy field towards the main road to see if I could find a lift back to my own vehicle. There was no wind, not even a small breeze, and the remnants of the smokescreen lingered heavily on the flat prairie training ground. I took in a good, long, intoxicating whiff of it, trying to anchor that moment into my memory forever. Before getting to the main road, I stood, spent, in the middle of that field, blood dripping off my cheek, smoke grenades dangling off my webbing and flares still sticking out of my helmet like some bad Hollywood movie. I felt invigorated, sated. Dizzy-happy. I stood in that field and all I wanted to do was scream at the top of my lungs, “I am goddamn made for this!!! This is what I need to do!!! I have to be in the infantry!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

Reaching the main gravel road, I saw that my soft-skin cargo truck (which should have stayed well behind the front lines) was waiting not too far away, tucked as far as it could go into the gently sloping ditch on the side of the road. There were no places to hide on the prairies, especially for such a huge monster of a vehicle, but I was grateful that my driver had risked getting into trouble to come pick me up. Turning around, I glanced longingly at the infantry troops climbing back into their armoured personnel carriers and, for a fleeting second, considered the consequences of defecting to that combat unit, as if no one would notice me.

There wasn’t enough camouflage in the world to hide me in a battalion full of men.

I ran over to my cargo truck, climbed in, and grinned widely at my corporal, who sat staring at me from his driver’s seat. He pointed at my cheek and told me my face was bleeding.

Ignoring his comment, I leaned my head back against the wall of the truck and sighed. Then I responded with a matter-of-fact confirmation that one day I would be in the infantry.

Laughing, he just shook his head and steered the truck back onto the dirt road towards base camp. “With all due respect, ma’am,” he said, “you are fucking crazy.”

•••

less than six months later, in late 1989, the Human Rights Tribunal lifted all restrictions relating to the employment of women in combat. As soon as I got wind of it I submitted my request to transfer to the infantry. I had just received an early promotion to Captain and had also moved in with Kevin, who was himself an infantry officer.

Kevin and I had met in the officers’ mess six months after my arrival in Valcartier. I’d found him very attractive but had repeatedly refused his request for a date, partly because I wanted to concentrate on my career but mostly because I was intimidated and overwhelmed at the number of men around me. Even if there were a few women at the service battalion, the proportion of men to women was so unnaturally high that we each received much more than our share of attention. I was afraid of making a mistake, being tagged as a tease, or being easy if I changed my mind too often, and of working with ex-boyfriends. I didn’t like messy.

Kevin was from another unit, the Royal Canadian Regiment (rcr), the English-speaking infantry regiment affectionately known as the “Run Chicken Run” by their famed francophone counterparts from the Royal 22e Régiment, the Van Doos. Because Kevin was an exchange officer posted to Valcartier to learn French for a couple of years, I knew he’d eventually be going back to his regiment’s home in Gagetown, New Brunswick. Knowing that his time in Valcartier was limited had put him in my “safe category” and I’d allowed him to get past my defences. But I had not planned on falling in love.

A few months after we met, I participated in a four-day operational simulation of a war room inside the base’s gymnasium with all the other units on base: the artillery, the armoured, the infantry, air defence, the medical unit, etc. Each battalion had an operations cell set up in a cubicle separated by five-foot divider walls, plastered in maps, organizational charts, lists of call sign frequencies, and shift schedules. Radios belted out orders as sections and platoons were virtually dispatched in accordance with the mission, twenty-four hours a day. It could be tense at times, with radios, telephones, and faxes all flaring up simultaneously. At other times, when the combat units forgot to order virtual replenishment from our service battalion, it was dreadfully boring.

One evening during the exercise, I was updating the marker flags on the tactical map while chatting with my company commander, when I heard a commotion behind me. Both my major and I turned around just as Kevin’s body, wrapped in duct tape from head to toe like a mummy, was dumped on the floor. He wriggled around and I could hear his buddies laughing their heads off behind the cubicle wall. Kevin had a note stuck to his chest and I bent over to read it.

 

go out with me or i will be sacrificed and

turned into fried chicken.

 

I was mortified! Even as a young lieutenant I was already more serious and intense than most young officers, and a war room was not the place for practical jokes. Embarrassed, I looked at my company commander and his gaze went from Kevin to me before he simply said, “I sure hope that’s for you.”

I apologized profusely and shot Kevin a look that clearly said I’m going to kill you

“For Christ’s sake, Lieutenant Perron,” my major responded, shaking his head at me as if I was the one misbehaving. “Lighten up already and go out with the guy.”

So I did.

Kevin and I hit it off immediately despite being total opposites; he was laid-back and easygoing, I was high-strung and overzealous. But we both loved the outdoors and spent most of our weekends hiking, mountain biking, and just getting to know each other. Kevin was a formidable biathlete and triathlete. During the summer, we’d travel all over New England so that he could compete in triathlons and in the winter he taught me how to shoot the Anschutz-Fortner Biathlon Rifle so that I could compete in biathlon races as well. We enjoyed each other’s company and planned on eventually building a solid foundation for a loving family.

We bought a house near the military base in Valcartier, adopted a kitten, and tried our best to arrange our schedules to spend time together. It proved to be nearly impossible: Kevin had been lent out to the Canadian National Biathlon Team to train for the 1994 Olympics and between training, World Championships, and my own battalion exercises and deployments, we rarely had a chance to see each other. It was always a race against time, trying to squeeze months of living into short weekends and long-distance calls. Jokingly, we used to refer to our reunions as change of command parades where we’d hand over the cat, the keys to the house, and exchange a situation report (sitrep) on bills and upcoming activities:

Sitrep: Twins next door, birthday party this Saturday. Your mother called to say your grandfather is not well. I need you to sign these cards, and we need a new vacuum cleaner. Oh, and by the way, I am going to be a Van Doo.

Kevin had certain reservations about my reclassification, as did my company and battalion commanders at the service battalion. Most transfers usually go the opposite way — from the combat arms to the Logistics Branch where the environment is less demanding, less gruelling.

Kevin knew I was tough. He was certain that physically I could take on the challenges of infantry training, but he’d had first-hand experience with the male-only culture of combat arms and wondered why I would want to throw myself into such a hardcore macho environment.

“They’ll eat you alive, Sand,” he said, perhaps recognizing years before I ever would that my visceral need to join the infantry was the equivalent of an adrenalin junkie wanting to jump off a cliff. He’d seen my softer side, my vulnerability to the pain of others, and suspected that my sensitivity would make working in a front-line environment, where this suffering would be so close, very challenging. Yet that was a big part of the attraction for me. I didn’t want to be in the infantry despite the fact that it was so far outside my comfort zone, I wanted to be in the infantry because of it.

Kevin also identified something else in me: a conflicting need to excel, but then flinching from the attention it ultimately attracted. He challenged me about it one day after a military biathlon competition. We had both won our competitions; he, because he was the fastest man on earth, and I, because there hadn’t been any other women in the competition. I had refused to go stand on the podium, finding an excuse for us to leave right after Kevin received his medal.

Kevin was furious when we got home, saying that he couldn’t understand why I pushed myself so hard during these races and then refused to pick up my medal. That, he said, was the whole point of winning!

I didn’t mind the congratulations, I insisted. I was lying and we both knew it. But I was the only woman in the competition; I couldn’t lose even if I crawled on my knees the whole way and shot blanks. It was embarrassing to receive first place when that was the only place there was.

He responded that this was bullshit, that even when there were other women, I was still hesitant to be in the spotlight. His comments were insightful and infuriatingly true. I didn’t like to be singled out or recognized individually. I didn’t like to be the centre of anything, except perhaps an empty room filled with books, a valley surrounded by mountains, a small canoe in the middle of a vast lake. I was as introverted as they come. Yet, here I was, wanting to join an infantry regiment of fifteen hundred men. I might as well jump into shark-infested waters and ask them not to take too much notice of me. Kevin knew there was a huge contradiction in what I dreamed of doing, the attention it would garner, and the aversion I had to that attention, whether it was good or bad.

I was scheduled to start infantry training in the summer of 1991. Both the commanding officer and my company commander of the 5e Bataillon des services congratulated me on the acceptance of my transfer during a meet-and-greet at the officers’ mess one Friday in April, but with a tone that told me they were convinced I’d be back at the battalion sooner rather than never. I would soon find out how wrong I’d been about that perception.

That spring, 1991, my youngest sister, Nancy, graduated with a Bachelor of Criminology from the University of Ottawa and decided to take six months to hike the 2,160 mile Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine. She was planning on hiking it alone. Without her invitation but much to the pleasure of our parents, I decided to accompany her for the first two weeks of the arduous hike as pre-training for my infantry courses. Together we set off in early May to begin her incredible adventure.

Loaded with backpacks weighing a little over fifty pounds, we hiked between twenty and twenty-five miles a day in the beautiful Appalachian Mountains of Georgia — me with blisters, she with bunions — until either exhaustion forced us to stop or the view was too breathtaking to consider sleeping anywhere else. With every mountain we climbed I told myself I was one step closer to being fit for combat. We pushed ourselves harder than necessary simply because we had inherited that gene from both our parents, and we didn’t know how to be any other way.

“I can’t believe you’re going to do this for the next five and a half months,” I said to Nancy one night when we were perched on Blue Ridge Gap in the North Georgia Mountains, watching the sun go down quickly and taking the last of the day’s heat with it. We crawled into our sleeping bags as the temperature dropped and huddled close to the campfire. “By the time you get back, your butt will be so hard it’ll make a knocking sound when you sit on the chairs in Mom’s dining room!” We giggled.

“Yeah, but first I’ll probably have to re-learn how to use Kleenexes or else Dad won’t even let me in the front door!” she replied. Nancy had learned how to blow her nose without using tissues. It always impressed me, not only because that talent contrasted so drastically with the thick lashes that adorned her baby-blue eyes and the long blond hair she wore in a cute ponytail, but also because I couldn’t do it. It was a trick that could come in handy in the infantry, but try as I might, I couldn’t imitate her without spraying snot all over myself. I wasn’t too good at spitting either.

“Are you nervous about your training?” she asked, extending her hands towards the fire to warm them up.

I was a little nervous, but I was confident I could complete the training and I told her so.

She asked if I would join the Airborne afterwards and I told her that was my ultimate goal. We talked about Kevin, and how he felt about me reclassifying to the Van Doos. He’d known I wanted to go infantry since the first day we’d met, so the news had not been a surprise. Still, he was worried that I would be harassed, that I’d get hurt, or that I wouldn’t know when to quit if it came down to that.

“But despite all that, he is my biggest fan and he wants me to go for it. He never says whether he believes women should be in the infantry or not. He just says that he believes I can be.”

Nancy reassured me that she believed in me too, but teasingly added a caveat. “As long as there are no spiders in Gagetown!”

“Probably aren’t,” I responded, goosebumps instantaneously popping up on my skin. “They’re all friggin’ here in Georgia!” And we laughed despite the pain in our sides from the heavy packs we’d carried up the mountains, despite the rhythmic throbbing in our feet, and despite the fact that we’d probably wake up to that pain and start adding to it all over again the next morning.

We hiked well together, my little sister and I, but it felt like someone had pressed a fast-forward button on a time machine. We fuelled up on enough M&Ms to clean out a Walmart, eventually mastered the art of peeing without removing our backpacks, and discovered the simple beauty of other hikers of all ages who’d undertaken the same adventure. Too soon, my time was up and we parted ways in Fontana Dam at the foot of the Smoky Mountains. In addition to being the most enjoyable hiking trip ever (rivalled only when I hiked the eight-hundred-and-fifty kilometre Camino Del Norte in Spain with my seventy-two-year-old mother in 2012), it was the perfect workout to prepare for the infantry training that would begin in less than a month.

As Nancy continued on with her long trek to Mount Katahdin in Maine, I hitched a ride back down to Atlanta, Georgia, with some new friends, bought a 1965 convertible Mustang, and drove the twenty hours home, listening to the only cassette tape that came with the car: Johnny Cash’s Greatest Hits.

•••

prior to leaving for gagetown in June 1991 to begin infantry training, I went to see my deputy commanding officer (dco) to say goodbye and to thank him for supporting my request to reclassify. When I walked into his office, he stood up from behind his desk and motioned for me to sit in the leather chairs off to the side. He came around to join me. He asked if I was ready for Infantry School. I told him all about my recent hiking trip with Nancy, how I had driven back in an old Mustang, without crashing it. He laughed, remembering my previous summer’s escapade with the cargo truck.

“Sir, I know I probably could have been charged and demoted last summer when I rolled the five-ton, so I wanted to say thank you for saving my ass,” I said sheepishly. He smiled warmly. I asked him why he’d protected me, considering that he could have been in so much trouble himself.

He answered with a beautiful speech about intent. The reason officers weren’t given driving permits is because they need to let their soldiers do the driving. Officers have maps to read, orders to write, and reconnaissance patrols (recces) to plan. Shit like that, he said. But it didn’t mean officers shouldn’t get a taste of what their operators do. He looked at me and gave me a big smile.

“You’re the type of officer that needs to be hands-on, that needs to feel what her troops feel. You’re a true trucker, Sandra. You sit in that command post, assign tasks to your soldiers, and you know exactly what they’ll be going through because you’ve been behind every steering wheel of your platoon.” When he emphasized the word every, his eyebrows lifted. I wondered exactly how much he knew of my driving experiences. Once I’d been let loose with a legal permit, I had used it extensively, even abusively. He read my thoughts. “And don’t think I don’t know about the snowploughs, the Zoom Boom (forklift), or the tractor-trailer. And the Gazelle (helicopter)!” I smiled self-consciously and looked away at the silhouette of a buffalo head woven into the logistics flag on the wall of his office. “It’s okay, Sandra. Too many officers sit behind the desk and drive nothing but a pen. They never have accidents. They never get in shit. But it is also likely that they will never win their soldiers’ respect.”

“Thank you, sir.” I was humbled. “A court martial would have crushed me.”

“Yes, it would have, but being duty officer for the commandant’s New Year’s Levee is punishment enough.” He laughed and I appreciated his sympathy. “I heard you met Mr. L’Allier.”

I blushed. While at the Levee, I had found myself standing beside Mr. Jean-Paul L’Allier in the palatial hall of the Governor General’s residence at La Citadelle. While we both snacked on bite-sized hors d’oeuvres that looked like self-contained miniature gardens, I had introduced myself to him, and he to me.

“So what do you do?” I asked him, not too adept at making conversation with such a fancy crowd.

“Oh, not much,” he responded with a glint in his eye. “I’m the Mayor of Quebec City.” He had been the guest of honour, the royalty for whom we had all been gathered there to celebrate the New Year. I hadn’t recognized his name.

Now I could see that my dco had heard about it and found the incident very amusing.

“Yes, sir, I met Mr. L’Allier and he was very, well, let’s just say, gracious. I think next time I attend a Levee I’ll do my who’s who homework!” We both laughed and he shook my hand, wishing me well in the infantry.

“Je me souviens,” he recited the Van Doo motto, and it touched me deeply.

“Devoir avant tout,” I recited the service battalion’s motto as I saluted him, then left before I had second thoughts of departing this oh-so-comfortable world of logistics.