I BECAME A member of the Lorne Scots regiment of the militia in Brampton, Ontario, on May 1, 1994. I was seventeen years old and I’d just spent three years in high school. School to me felt like an obstacle to the only two things I was interested in—getting in the army or becoming a cop. My teachers didn’t seem to understand me, and except for a few, they had nothing to offer me.
I joined the Lorne Scots hoping to find something I was missing. Enrolled in the reserves, I was volunteering to live part of my life as a soldier and the rest as a civilian. If ever there was a threat and Canada needed soldiers, the militia would be called on for active duty.
Before joining, I had long hair like Mel Gibson’s character in Lethal Weapon 2. I went to the barber with a photo of a U.S. Marine in hand.
“Make me look like this,” I said, showing him a photo of the high-and-tight Marine jarhead cut I wanted.
The barber nodded. “You’re the customer,” he said, grabbed his clippers and gave me my very first army-style cut. Militia guys worked or went to school. They lived as civilians most of the time and trained as soldiers only once a week and on weekends, so they didn’t usually keep their hair army-short.
Once the barber was done, I studied myself in his mirror. I barely recognized the young man staring back at me. The eyes were the same, but everything else was different. I wasn’t Jody Mitic, layabout loner, high school good-for-nothing, another floundering adolescent with no ambition and no life plan. That kid was lying under a pile of hair on the floor. Looking back at me was Jody Mitic, soldier in training.
My friends teased me about my new look and so did the guys in the militia. My family was blown away. I remember coming home from the swearing-in ceremony in uniform. Once we walked through the door, Mom said, “Jody, I’m so proud of you.” I didn’t know what to say. She continued: “You stuck by your goal, Jody. You went after this. You went to the recruitment office for information, you gathered all the right paperwork. Then you filled out all the forms and delivered them. You convinced me and your dad that this was the right thing for you, even when we had our doubts. You never gave up on what you wanted. You never quit. And look at you now.” Making Mom proud felt really good. Even though I never said it at the time, that was an important moment for me.
A few weeks later, school was out, and I took a Greyhound bus from Brampton right to the Canadian Forces base at Petawawa, Ontario, where I would spend the summer. On that bus were a whole bunch of young kids who looked just like me, but also older guys who’d decided to sign up. We stepped off the bus and suddenly we were in a totally foreign landscape. We were completely stunned. Tents were set up around the area, but there wasn’t much else besides a few dirt roads.
As recruits, we had no idea what we’d just stepped into.
“What now?” a kid next to me said under his breath.
“Fuck if I know,” I answered.
“Why the fuck are you all standing around!” We turned around and saw some hard-looking non-commissioned officers—or NCOs—who minutes earlier hadn’t been paying us any mind. Now they turned into demons as they walked our way. “There’s work to do! See this truck? It’s got your barrack boxes and kit bags on it. I want everything off that truck in five minutes. Let’s GO!”
We had arrived that morning as high school kids going to what we thought of as summer camp. Within moments, we were deep into the shit. The next four hours were a whirlwind of organized chaos, with everyone being yelled at, fingers being pointed and equipment being thrown around. Deficiencies were pointed out that had not been deficiencies five minutes earlier. Some kids were crying. Two or three instructors would gang up on one kid in the group and give him or her hell. So much for the Welcome Wagon! I remember thinking to myself, “What have I gotten myself into?” I was just a wide-eyed teen with no idea about the inner workings of the Armed Forces except for what I’d learned from my uncle and from movies.
Once all the dust had settled and everyone seemed to have yelled themselves out, the instructors broke us into groups and platoons. We got a basic introduction to military rank structure and organizational format before being ordered to our bunk space in the barracks. We were actually living in a tent, but as we learned then, whether a soldier is on the ground in a tent or in a high-rise condo, that space is his or her barracks, and it must be kept clean and organized.
Before we went to bed, we were given a talking to by a large, red-headed sergeant with a thick moustache. To us, he looked like a veteran of a hundred wars. “Each section will have a master corporal who’s in charge and a corporal who’s 2IC—second in command. There are four sections to this platoon and four platoons to this company. I am your platoon warrant officer, and this”—he pointed to a lean, iron-hard man with a stern look and (of course) a moustache—“is your platoon commander. You will sweep your barracks every day. You will keep your kit clean and dry. You will learn the rank structure and address everybody by rank. You will know your place, and it is at the bottom. Understood?”
“Yes, sir!” Loud and clear. Pond scum we were until we proved otherwise, until we earned our right to be soldiers.
We were a fairly diverse group in the militia that summer—mostly white guys like me, but also some Indians, Asians and blacks. And there were several young women in our platoons, too, in the same tents alongside the men. This was shortly after the Canadian government allowed women to perform military combat roles on the front.
“There will be no separation between males and females in platoons. Deal with it,” we were told. So we did. After a couple of weeks, I didn’t even notice when a girl was changing in front of me. None of us had the energy or the time to notice each other anyway. The only difference between girls and the rest of us was that some of them had long hair, which they had to wear in a single braid. As guys, if our hair ever grew past the tops of our ears, we were reamed out pretty fast. We were expected to stay clean-shaven, too, which for a kid with bad acne was not my favourite rule. But I quickly learned that my personal preferences meant nothing here.
Not only was our hair inspected and our uniforms and our barracks, but also our feet, underarms and crotches. Medics came by every couple of days looking for signs of rashes and fungus. Medics in the army are kind of like your mommy, and that’s true even if they happen to be men. They are the ones who make sure you’re physically well and hold you accountable if you don’t take care of yourself. Small injuries can become big injuries in a hurry, and medics make sure soldiers consider their physical well-being. Later, when I became a combat soldier, I saw just how important medics were. In the infantry, we are trained to be tough, and because of that we often ignore or downplay injuries, which can lead to problems later. Without that objective third-person review, small things can turn a soldier into a casualty, and I saw that for the first time with monkey bum in the militia.
“Make sure you powder your ass and balls, troops! Ladies, you do the same with your bits. We are going for a long march and you don’t want to get monkey bum.”
“What the hell is that?” I asked.
The master corporal smiled. He was about to instill some “veteran’s wisdom.” “If you neglect your personal hygiene and ignore my instructions to powder yourselves, you will get chafed from all the drills and from running in wet gear. You will get a rash. And you will start walking like a monkey because your ass crack is itching so bad. There you have it, troops. Monkey bum.” I immediately pulled out my foot powder and dumped a generous amount into the front and back of my underwear before we set out on the day’s march. I got monkey bum anyway. And of course, the medic noticed. He let me suffer for the day before silently handing me some Penaten baby cream. What a relief!
There was a system for everything in the army, a way to stand and a way to sit, a way to dress and a way to sleep. There was also a system for how to properly eat at the mess hall. We would line up for food with a plate, cup and KFS—knife, fork and spoon—and the cooks would dish out the food onto our plates. It was pretty basic but overall good food, considering these guys were literally feeding an army—meat and potatoes, some milk and maybe a cookie for dessert. One thing you learn quickly is never to piss off the army cook or the army clerk. The clerk pays you and the cook feeds you. As Napoleon said, “An army marches on its stomach.”
At the mess hall, one master corporal in particular watched over us like a hawk. He seemed to enjoy making everything as difficult as possible, especially mealtimes. As soon as we were in formation awaiting dismissal so we could go eat, he would stand there staring at his watch, his bushy moustache twitching, “You . . . people . . . have . . . eight . . . minutes . . . to . . . eat!” He yelled just like that, with giant pauses between each word and pivoting higher and higher on his tippy toes with each word. We would run around like headless chickens, trying to get our food, find a place to sit and eat our meals within this eight-minute deadline.
All the while, he’d be barking at us, “You better hurry up and get your fucking food! Don’t miss your timings! Miss your timing and people die!”
Once, early in the summer, we stopped to eat in a field while we were learning to navigate. We were served a “hay box” meal from a truck. I got my food, found a spot to sit and put my plate down. I jumped up to grab something from the food line, and when I ran back to my spot, my plate was covered in baby grasshoppers.
“What the fuck is this?” I said under my breath. The guys around me shrugged. I flicked the insects off my plate and out of my cup of soup. Then I ate the food anyhow. This is what happened to those who left their plates unattended. But within a few weeks of arriving, we were so tired that when grasshoppers jumped into our gravy and mashed potatoes, we didn’t bother picking them out. We just ate them.
Meanwhile, our instructors revelled in the show. Every once in a while, I’d catch the satisfied smirk of our officers and some of our NCOs as they watched us eat bugs without even flinching. No one was being mean or sadistic to us; this was just part of training, and we were toughening up well. We were learning to be soldiers.
Sleeping arrangements were about as deluxe as the food. We slept in sleeping bags on top of canvas folding cots with wooden shipping pallets underneath them. And it’s not like we had pillows to make our beds softer. Tough was the lesson, and we toughed it out, day and night.
Our routine was an endless, monotonous cycle. We woke up. We made up our cots, folding our sleeping bags in the exact way we’d been taught. We swept off our shipping pallets. Even the shipping pallets had to be treated like priceless equipment, wiped off every day so they were free of mud. The guy who decided to let that slide was in for an earful from the inspecting NCO.
Once the tent was in shape, it was on to barrack boxes. We had to lay them out as instructed, with everything in its proper place, whether that made sense or not. We had to stand beside our kit and cots, everyone perfectly still as the officer did inspection. At the time, I thought that so much of this discipline was overkill. Why did we have to stand at attention when the officer was on the other side of the tent looking at some other dude’s cot and kit? Why did our barrack boxes have to be identical? It took me a couple years to figure out that the skills they were drilling into us then are actually really important for a combat leader. If you can’t stand still long enough for morning inspection, how can your commanders trust you to hold your post during a mortar barrage? How will a leader know he can count on you to be a useful soldier if you can’t even follow through on an order meant to keep you and your comrades safe, even if you don’t know it at the time? All these drills were training me to put self-discipline above my instinct to flee or flinch. When everything in me told me to break my posture, to stand down, I learned to obey a different order instead. It was basic training, but I was assimilating some important skills that later would make me a better sniper.
Beyond keeping order in our tents and in the mess hall, those first few weeks were spent on other basic military skills—marching and parading, saluting, identifying enemy (as in Russian) aircraft and vehicles . . . and rifle drill.
“These are your weapons,” the master corporal told us, giving out our rifles. Finally I was holding an actual rifle. I couldn’t quite believe it. It was awesome, the coolest thing ever. Because I didn’t know any better at the time, this simple rifle looked like an M16 I’d seen in movies about Vietnam. It was actually a C7, the Canadian Forces’ standard issue, with a carrying handle on top, composite foreguards and a solid rifle butt. I’d only ever seen guns like this one on TV, and here I was holding one in my hands.
The master corporal began his lesson. “First,” he said, “this isn’t a gun, it’s a rifle. And you should know that this rifle can be used for all sorts of things beyond just shooting. It’s exactly one metre long, which means you can use it to measure both objects and distances.” He went on to explain that when we built fighting trenches, which had to be three metres by one metre, we were to measure the correct dimensions using our rifles. “You are going to learn how to use this rifle, and you will use it how we tell you to. And as I said, it’s not just about shooting. First, you need to learn how to care for your weapon, how to keep it clean, how to store it, how to carry it, and how not to do something stupid with it that could hurt yourself or one of your fellow soldiers. After you get all of that, you might be lucky enough to learn how to shoot it. Got it?”
The master corporal demonstrated how to lay a rifle down in the right position. Then he walked the line. When he came to me, he paused.
“What are you, a fucking individual?” he said, flipping my rifle onto the other side.
“Sorry, I—”
“Don’t apologize! Just do things right the first time.” He explained why we always lay the rifle on its right side to prevent dirt from getting into the ejector slot, which can jam your gun.
“Got it? Watch. And learn, recruit.”
The word “individual” is one of the biggest insults you can have thrown at you in the military world. The military runs on teamwork. Individuals can’t be counted on.
We were taught the basic principles of marksmanship—like how to position and hold the rifle firmly, how to naturally align it with the target without physical effort, and how to release and follow through without disturbance of position. I picked a spot. I grounded myself the way I’d been told to. I aimed. I fired. And I learned that I was a natural shooter.
We also learned how to zero our rifles. Every rifle has sights that need to be carefully adjusted to fit the shooter. To zero a rifle, you line up on the target and shoot five times. Then you check where the bullets hit compared with where you were aiming. If you’re four inches left and low, you’ve got to compensate four inches right and high. To do this, you adjust the front and back sights and try again, until you meet the target. Once you’ve done that, your weapon is yours and yours alone. Sure, you can pick up any rifle and hit a target roughly from a hundred metres, but to shoot from longer distances with any accuracy, you’re going to need your own zeroed rifle.
I remember after we finished shooting for the first time, I stood at ease, putting the rifle butt next to my right baby toe and holding it by the front sight, called the iron sight. It’s a steel attachment fitted to the barrel. As well as being used to aim, it helps dissipate the heat of the bullet, which I discovered the second it touched the web of my hand so soon after firing. The sight was very hot, and I flinched when I touched it, but I didn’t yell or say anything. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a few other guys pulling away and shaking their hands at the burn. This was a typical rite of passage. Some of our instructors looked on, smiling, while others shook their heads at the guys who made a big deal out of it.
“Your rifle is a dangerous weapon. Don’t get burned. Lesson learned, recruits.”
There were some things they wanted us to figure out on our own, and our resolve was being tested and watched even then.
Soon enough, we learned to shoot at different ranges and targets. At the firing range, we practised a drill where we’d all be lined up in lanes. The range was 500 metres long, and every hundred metres, there’d be a mound where you would shoot from. We started at the 400 metre mound in a prone position on the ground. Range safety officers behind us kept us all moving at the same pace, more or less shoulder to shoulder, about five metres apart, for safety reasons. We were told to load, ready our rifles, then put the safety on. A target would pop up ahead and we’d have about forty-five seconds to run forward, catch our breath and shoot the target ten times. But you can’t just aim and shoot. You had to breathe in, hold it and then shoot. And you’d be doing this in the heat, while running. And let’s not forget that besides your rifle you had your helmet, your ammo and webbing and your water. By the time I made it to the 100 metre mound, my heart was racing. I could see I was hitting the target, because the wood splinters from the two-by-four it was nailed to were exploding out the back, which was always a good feeling. I loved those drills. It felt incredible. I had my own rifle, and I was shooting it in simulated combat situations.
Once we had learned to shoot our rifles, we moved on to pepper-potting. Why on earth it’s called that, I don’t know, but pepper-potting is the basic building block for movement in combat. Out in an open field in Petawawa, we practised a frontal attack on the enemy force, Cold War style.
“This is the way it works,” we were told. “First, I explain. Then, I demonstrate. Then, you guys do.” The master corporal and corporal showed us the technique of “up, he sees me, down.” It was fast, it was violent, it was aggressive. I was pumped.
In our pairs, one guy would move forward while the other guy would shoot to provide cover. The mover would yell “Moving!” and jump up and move forward about three steps, saying “up, he sees me, down” in his head while his partner covered him. At “down,” the mover would take cover going to ground, taking up a firing position and yelling “Covering!” once in position. Then his partner would move forward in the same way. The idea was to always have a foot on the ground, which means one soldier is covering while the other is moving.
It was time for my fire-team partner and me to give the technique a try. Off I went, jumping up and seeing the “enemy” (really a bush we had picked a hundred metres away). So far, so good. But when I dropped to the ground, I was in such a hurry trying to be aggressive that my momentum was too strong and I slammed into the ground so hard that I knocked the wind out of myself. I hit the bottom of my chin off my rifle butt. I was stunned. It felt as though I’d just been punched. My vision narrowed and my ears were ringing, faintly at first but then more loudly. I heard, “Mitic! Mitic, get fucking moving! On your feet! Speed and aggression!” I sprang up, more on instinct than anything else, and stumbled on to gloriously destroy the imaginary enemy next to the bush.
I eventually came to my senses, but later that day, when it was time to practise again, I dropped down and landed on a blank round casing with a crimped end. It felt like a nail had been hammered through my kneecap, but I kept moving. To this day, I still have a star-shaped scar. That was my first experience advancing to contact with the “enemy.”
All of this practice was a buildup to the PWT, or personal weapons test. We needed to pass that test to become infantry soldiers. It was the same drill that we’d done on the range, where we’d have to shoot from the mounds at targets that popped up, move forward to the next mound and shoot again. But this time, all our hits and misses would be calculated for a total score. Hit enough, pass. Miss too many, game over. I did the test just the way I had during the practice, hoping for the best.
Once it was over, our platoon warrant sat us down. “Okay, troops. You’ve all passed your PWT, so fuck you.” That was good to hear, because I sure didn’t want to have to do it again.
“Oh, and Mitic, you’re the best shot. Congratu-fuckin’-lations.”
“Yeah, you got the highest score, so . . . whatever. Good for you.” There wasn’t a trophy or any fanfare, but I was pretty happy with this outcome. I had no idea I’d done that well. This was the first real accolade I received in the military world.
•
By the end of summer, I wasn’t an aimless teen anymore. I was strong and fit. I was orderly and organized. I could shoot a rifle. I could run with equipment on. I could camouflage myself in the woods. I could keep myself and my pack dry, even in damp conditions, which doesn’t sound like much, but it’s an essential combat skill. At the end of it all, I felt like a soldier.
I was one of the youngest guys there, not just in our platoon but in the four platoons that made up our company. I still had another year left of high school, but I wanted to join the regular Canadian Armed Forces right then and there. My parents had other ideas.
“Look, Jody,” my dad said. “There’s nothing stopping you from joining the army after high school, but why not stay in school now and see that through? If you still feel the same once you graduate, then fine. You can enlist then.”
I must say that the summer in Petawawa had a profound effect on my attitude in all kinds of ways. First, I was actually listening to what my parents had to say, something I hadn’t always done previous to that. Second, when I took their advice and went back to school in September, I was much more comfortable in the classroom.
Before militia training, I’d been so bored at school and found everything tedious and pointless. But after eight weeks of soldier training, school seemed like a breeze. I started arriving on time and paying attention to lessons. In the military, you can direct your career according to your aptitudes and interests, so I decided to do the same at school. Instead of taking classes I hated, I picked ones I knew I would enjoy. My grades improved because I was doing more of what I wanted to do. For the first time, I had discipline and self-direction, and instead of all that energy being repressed or coming out in the wrong way, I had focus.
I went from being a loner and keeping to myself to becoming more outgoing and popular at school. It helped that I was one of the few kids in high school who had wheels—my dad had bought me an ’86 Dodge Ram pickup truck with the legendary slant six engine and the ram’s-head hood emblem. I loved that truck.
By the time March break rolled around, I was eager to get back to military training. Our regiment flew down to Florida to participate in Southern Strike, a training session held at a U.S. National Guard base. Canadian regular forces—full-time military—trained with us, and it was one of the first times I worked with full-time soldiers. I got to ride in a C-130 Hercules military plane for the first time in some simulated combat exercises. The pilot took off with full power, pointing the nose straight up and doing circles high in the air while changing altitude every few seconds. I’d always had problems with amusement park rides that would spin you around, and this felt like that, except about ten times worse. I thought I was going to puke inside my helmet, but luckily I managed to keep my lunch down.
The week passed and it was back to school. I spent the next few months with renewed energy and focus. When the school year ended, I passed all my courses and got decent grades, a fact that both pleased and surprised my parents. It felt good to not be a source of concern to them as I had been in the past, and I knew they were proud of me now that my life was coming together. Of course, that didn’t mean I had carte blanche to join the military. They still had their reservations. That summer, my dad came up with a plan.
“Son, why don’t you work on the assembly line at the Lear auto parts plant in Oakville? It’s a great job, with great pay—eight hundred dollars a week.”
Eight hundred a week? For a teenager? It was hard to say no to that. Add to it that I was dating a girl who was still in high school. I could delay enlisting for a little while longer. And who knows, maybe my dad was right. Maybe I’d like working at a factory and making good money and buying cool things. Maybe that would be enough. Maybe that would be my life.
But as the year lingered on, I was dying a little bit inside every day. I hated working at the plant, the monotony of it, the lack of challenge. Sure, I had a cool car, cellphone and a ton of spending money and a great girlfriend, but something was missing.
The more I worked, the less time I devoted to the militia. And the less time I devoted to the militia, the more my ambition waned. My weekends were spent vegetating on the couch, when I wasn’t wasting time and brain cells at night clubs. I was slipping into an old pattern of restlessness and I didn’t like it. I needed to make a decision: was I going to be an assembly-line worker for the rest of my life or was I going to pursue my dream of being a real soldier?
One day, during a coffee break at the plant, I called the clerk at my unit, the Lorne Scots.
“I’m ready,” I said.
“For what?” she asked.
“I’m ready to make a career of this. I’m ready to put in my application to the regular forces.”
And with that, I went from earning $800 a week to $500 every two weeks. In 1997, the Armed Forces were still in the “decade of darkness,” which meant pay rates were frozen and Force Reduction Program (FRP) was in full effect. Just as the Canadian military was being downsized and senior soldiers were being offered buyouts, I was opting in. The second I hung up the phone, I started to feel a whole lot better.