One Thousand Words

By: The Regimental Adjutant, reproduced from Pro Patria 2006

The Regiment is working on a new Regimental History, and the newest section of our shared story will be the period of the Cold War after 1966 and the more recent peace-making era since the early 1990s. It is also an important opportunity to gather new personal observations on regimental life going as far back as our veterans' service reaches. This is an opportunity that every Royal Canadian should accept as a personal challenge to contribute.

Only those who were there can record the details of everyday regimental life. There's always enough written about the big picture; unit movements and operational activities, but the small details that bring the past to life are the personal experiences. Only a soldier who was trained by the Regimental Depot can describe the working and living conditions new soldiers experienced.

"Joining The RCR in the 1960s was like entering a different world. 'Three hots and a cot' sounded like a good idea at the time, and my uncle's stories of the Second World War filled my head with images of adventure and the chance to see the world. The Depot, however, had its ways of making a recruit wonder if he had made the right decision. Looking back now, after a full career, I know it was exactly the right decision, but those days . . ..."

Such a story provides today's soldiers with information that lets them understand both the similarities and differences between the training of infantry soldiers years before they were born and the training they experience today.

Who, what, where, when, how . . .. a good story can have all the elements of news article. Putting the reader into the time and place of the writer by sharing not only the facts, but the sense of the experience. Fellow soldiers will always understand the context that the stories of other soldiers express.

"REFORGER, the largest land exercise conducted by NATO. Tens of thousands of troops, thousands of vehicles, and me in the middle. West Germany in the 1970s was an amazing place to live for a young Canadian soldier who had never been more than a hundred miles from his hometown before joining the Army. We were on the front lines against the Warsaw Pact, and we understood the importance of that when we loaded up our carriers in a full-strength battalion that suffered no effects of attrition or taskings like the units in Canada . . . "

Deployments, operations, tours . . .. preparatory training, six months or more away from home, deployments in rotation with all of the Army's infantry Battalions, or to unique places that were only visited once by Canadians, including soldiers of The RCR. The Regiment has seen Battalions, Companies and Platoons deploy to dozens of operational missions. An understanding of the conditions of those missions and the experiences of soldiers far from home, working under UN and NATO mandates, can only be shared by those who were there.

"The heat and the dust struck us the moment we stepped off the plane. All of the training in Canada prepared us for the mission, but nothing could prepare us for the drastic change of weather and environment after the clean crisp air of home. It didn't take long to acclimatize, but that sense of eating sand with every bite of a ration pack, and the need to constantly re-hydrate, was clear evidence that we might never fully adjust to the conditions. The handover was a whirlwind time of new places, routines and details . . .."

Competition is never far from the surface as a soldier, whether it be inter-company sports, pursuing the top candidate's position on course, or being selected for a foreign training course or competition. Competition in a soldier's life was seldom isolated from teamwork, and competing at the team level went far beyond sports, sometimes the most important competitions were those competed by formed sections and platoons because they strengthened the bonds that would be relied upon when the situation got serious.

"The Cambrian Patrol was a challenge I'll never forget. We competed for positions on the team, even before we really understood what it would take to get there, and to succeed. Months of practice paid off in the end, and achieving that gold standard was one of the best experiences of my brief career to that point. Our training started in Petawawa and covered . . ."

The life of a soldier has some enduring themes, the tough training NCO, the RSM who earned soldiers' respect through his every action on their behalf, the Company Commander that would be followed anywhere because he had proven that he will always do his best to bring everyone back. But there was also the food (terrible once it gets monotonous in any situation), the inspections (tiresome demands of attention to detail) and the repetitive training (that only makes sense once you realized you did it right when you most needed it without even thinking about the actions).

"I'll never forget him. He made demands on all of us in training that we didn't understand at the time. So we bitched, but only when he couldn't hear us. But we respected him enough to give him everything when he expected it, and we learned the lessons he wanted us to know. It was easy to talk tough and feel it was unnecessary until we knew the next rounds we heard might not be friendly. At that moment we knew, he had been right and everything he taught us meant something. It all came together then, and I could only hope that I would be as firm when I'm in his position . . ."

One thousand words. If one thousand Royal Canadians each wrote one thousand words on one event in their career or regimental history, those thousand Royal Canadians would add one millions words of text to our history, the history of the Royal Canadian Regiment.

One thousand words isn't much, it's only about the length of this article.

(Editor's note: Sources for the quoted passages will be published as soon as someone writes them.)