I don't know whether it was the prospect of serving my country or if it was the really cool crossed lightening-bolts on the communications specialists recruitment posters. Either way, I was in the army. Well, only for the summer...but I made damn sure to check the paper just to confirm that there hadn't been any wars declared lately.
As I filled out the form asking whether I had ever worked for the KGB or if I had ever known anyone who had ever knowingly advocated world peace, I contemplated the up coming adventures. This summer would be spent talking on radios, fixing radios, unfixing radios and, with a bit of luck, guest hosting "Morningside" with a confused Peter Gzowski. Yes, it was going to be fun, and the fact that the uniform matched my eyes was an extra bonus.
By mid-June we were in the classroom to learn all of the essential things a radio operator must know, and I felt pretty confident with my ability to hook up a stereo under any given situation. I had planned to wow the class with my extensive knowledge of capacitors, resistors and those little things that look like tiny cold capsules on wires. However, my expectations were crushed when Corporal Spencer marched into the room and, with military precision, wrote a list of the other regiments on the backboard. "The Queen's Own Horse Guards," "Royal Corps of Engineers," the "Governor General's Own Light Infantry," and, of course, the "88th Landscaping and Snow Removal Battalion." Beside each one he continued to write down snide epithets.
So this is how we spent the rest of the first week: learning the derogatory names of other regiments in the armoury. The second week was dedicated to mastering contemptuous adjectives for other countries, nationalities, and sexes and the third week we were taught that we were at war with the Soviet Union. I, for one, was pretty miffed that the Globe failed to cover what I thought might have been considered to be something of a scoop. I subsequently learned that we weren't really at war, but that we should pretend that we were.
Pretending is a big thing with the army. We talked back and forth with each other on the radios as if we were communicating important information, we played war, we went camping and we frolicked with explosives -- I was a kid again!
We continued to learn all about rifles and how to clean and care for them. The manuals were classified as "restricted," meaning that we were not to tell anyone about how these thirty-year-old rifles worked for fear that the Soviets might figure out where the bullets go and use them against us. We learned radio talk, we learned how to march, we learned to speak in acronyms and we learned that officers have no sense of humour when you back into their Volvos with a five tonne truck.
We also got to try on these rain coats that were supposed to protect us from nuclear fallout. I was a little puzzled since the day earlier we were taught that nuclear fallout was quite safe and anyone who said otherwise was acting under orders from Moscow. We had to be vigilant for violators of national security. Such risks included short guys who wore black trench coats and fedoras pulled low and used phrases like "we make beeg trouble," "bah-ha," and "Da, my leetle Potempkin." Other hazards to democracy consisted of people who used the metric system, social workers, Volvo
drivers, and anyone without a brush cut.
Eventually, we went to Base Borden (I think it was named after the guy who invented the hundred-dollar bill and became the Prime Minister with the big moustache.) We were to complete our basic training here and learn even more acronyms. There were all sorts of soldiers from other regiments for whom we had no adjectives. We just used the generic term "grunt." This name applied mostly to those in infantry regiments -- those who know how to use a gun, but precious little else. At first, I thought that the term "grunt" was kind of cruel. By the day's end I had decided that it was too effusive.
As I stood there with soldiers marching by, helicopters flying overhead and howitzers firing off into the distance, it hit me: these guys were taking the whole thing seriously. And it didn't help matters when the next morning, while enjoying, to the best of my ability, my boil-in-the-bag scrambled eggs and sausages, Corporal Spencer, using his concealed fourteen-inch hunting knife "Russell," showed me how to cut a man up into little pieces. He then continued on to say how angry he was that he hadn't been invited to Vietnam and that "someone was going to pay." Being a little short on cash, I decided it wasn't going to be me. With an assuring smile, I briskly excused myself to go into hiding somewhere on the relatively safety of the artillery range.
By the end of that summer we were requested to visit the commanding officer, who gave us the spiel to make the army a career. He neglected to note that we had just done and seen it and that the thrill of marching up and down the armoury while some
psychopath yelled at us had dissipated. While most of us smirked at the idea of playing war as a permanent hobby, some were enthralled at the prospect of defending Canada against the encroaching Red Army.
In retrospect I realize that these people -- the ones who bought into the A-bomb proof rain coats and war games; the ones who actually enjoyed marching around in the mud; and the ones who were convinced that anyone drinking vodka or enjoying a Tchaikovsky piano concerto was conspiring to turn the Senate chambers into the Che Guevara Child-Care Centre -- are the same people that our government is training to use an array of lethal weapons.
