One thing that became very apparent to me is how completely the Senate ignored people such as myself and Claire Elyse Brosseau.
The Senate seemed far more comfortable listening to people who believe suffering can always be managed, reframed, treated, or talked away than listening to people who have lived for decades with damage that did not heal.
They may have thought that by putting their fingers in their ears and refusing to listen to people asking for a dignified death, they could make us disappear.
But ignoring us does not make us disappear.
It only ensures that our suffering remains private, unmanaged, and invisible until it becomes someone else’s problem.
This is not a problem that can be solved by sending me back to another professional to talk about what happened. I have done that. The issue is not that I never tried. The issue is that the damage was created, ignored, and then left for me to carry.
What Military Family Trauma Actually Looked Like
As I’ve said before in other blog posts, I suffered immensely as a kid.
Growing up in a dysfunctional military family destroys a kid.
When you’re living in a dysfunctional military household, the other serving parents are well aware of the issues in your PMQ, and they don’t want their kids playing with you.
When you grow up in a dysfunctional military household, your parent’s untreated illness does not stay inside them. It becomes the weather system of the entire home.
Everyone talks about the suicides of members of the Canadian Armed Forces; no one ever talks about the suicides of military dependents. And just as the suicides of military dependents are of no concern to anyone, especially not the Canadian Armed Forces, the mental trauma endured by military dependents living on base in dysfunctional households is also of no interest to the Canadian Armed Forces.
I was a frequent flyer at the IWK children’s hospital in Halifax, Nova Scotia while my father was stationed at CFB Shearwater. My medical records indicated that my father had been returned to port early due to “emotional issues.”
I was kept in the IWK for close to a month as a boarder due to issues with my parents.
Just before my father was posted to CFB Summerside, there were notes in my medical records in which the doctors were wondering if my frequent visits to the hospital were due to social issues in my home and whether they should get social services involved.
Even at CFB Namao, home life was anything but peaceful.
My grandmother was living with us on base in our PMQ, raising my brother and me, as our mother had left in 1977 and my father was frequently absent from the home due to training exercises.
My grandmother had her own demons. She had been through Holy Angels Indian Residential School. She was authoritarian, often angry, and severely alcoholic. None of that made her evil. It simply meant the damage in our home had already been passed down before it reached my brother and me. Her issues were no doubt the reason behind my father having piss-poor parenting skills himself.
In fact, it was my grandmother’s alcoholism that led to my brother and me requiring the babysitter in the first place.
What Happened After CFB Namao
Growing up on base as a sexually abused male child was not an easy task. The isolation was strict. On CFB Namao it was the beatings and the teasing from the other kids that was the driving factor behind my family being moved from CFB Namao to CFB Griesbach in October of 1980.
CFB Namao and CFB Griesbach both comprised CFB Edmonton, and they were only about 10 kilometres apart from each other.
After 1-1/2 years of sexual abuse at the hands of Captain Father Angus McRae’s altar boy, as well as the various visits to the chapel to visit with the Father where alcohol was given to me, the behaviours of my brother and me were of great concern to our teachers at Major General Griesbach School.
Major General Griesbach School was the school operated by the Department of National Defence for the children of military families. It was our teachers at that school who called in a man named Terry.
From reading my social service records, it became apparent that my mental health at that point in my life was failing.
It was so bad that by the spring of 1982 I was supposed to have been institutionalized in a psychiatric facility for children. Unfortunately, it would appear from reading my social service reports that other things were afoot, and that my mental health and well-being were down the list of priorities for the “brass” on CFB Edmonton.
In October of 1980, I was diagnosed as having major depression, severe anxiety, an intense fear of men, a fear that my father wanted to kill me, and a fear of being touched. In fact, the depression was so bad that the psychologist had noted that she wondered if I had gone past depression and was well into despair.
I wouldn’t discover until the summer of 2011 who Terry was, but suffice to say I wasn’t surprised when I read my social service paperwork and discovered that Terry was Canadian Armed Forces officer Captain Terry Totzke.
This explains why my father, Master Corporal Richard Gill, would follow Totzke’s instructions to a “t” and why he wouldn’t question Totzke.
The Help I Never Received
The sad thing is that I never received meaningful help for the trauma caused by the abuse on Canadian Forces Base Namao.
Nor did I receive meaningful help for what was happening inside my father’s household.
Some people may ask why the Canadian Armed Forces would have had any responsibility for either issue.
The answer is simple.
Captain Father Angus McRae, Captain Terry Totzke, and Master Corporal Richard Gill were all members of the Regular Force. I lived in housing provided by the Canadian Armed Forces, on Defence Establishment property, inside a military community where the institution controlled the housing, the schools, the police, the social relationships, and much of the information flow.
This was not some private family matter that happened far away from the military.
It happened inside the world the military built and controlled.
Instead, the explanation placed on me was that I was suffering from a supposed mental illness called “homosexuality.”
That was supposedly why “I had sex” with the babysitter for 1-1/2 years, as if I seduced the babysitter and initiated the sex. That was supposedly why I didn’t report the abuse. That was supposedly why I stood by and allowed the babysitter to molest my younger brother.
Totzke’s helpful hints for my father were to pull my bedroom door off its hinges so that I couldn’t sneak boys into my bedroom, and that I shouldn’t be allowed to play hockey or go swimming as there might be other naked boys in the change room.
And yes, my father used that on me once when he declined to allow me to go on a swimming trip.
Totzke’s advice to me was that he had the military police watching me, and that if I ever tried to kiss or touch another boy, the MPs would tell him and then I’d be sent off to the Alberta Hospital.
Alberta Social Services became involved with my family in November of 1981 when our teachers called them in to deal with me and my brother, as Captain Totzke wasn’t having much success.
Whenever my brother, my father, and I would go to counselling sessions, Terry would always remind me to watch what I said to Pat and Wayne, as they’d twist my words and make it sound as if I had said something that I didn’t mean to say.
There were also the warnings from my father to keep my mouth shut.
Without wasting too much time, I never did get help with the trauma I was carrying from the 1-1/2 years of abuse on CFB Namao.
Even when my father was posted from CFB Griesbach to CFB Downsview in Ontario, both he and Captain Totzke promised Alberta Social Services that I would be placed in a psychiatric program at the SickKids hospital in Toronto.
When I filed an ATI with SickKids in Toronto, they hadn’t heard of me or my father.
In fact, my paperwork from the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto showed that the Canadian Armed Forces were less than helpful with trying to connect with my father. When asked about the problems with my brother and me, my father told CAST that our involvement with Alberta Social Services was both unwarranted and unhelpful.
It would be another couple of months before our teachers and principal at Sheppard Public School started raising concerns about my brother and me.
But by then it was too late.
Another couple of years and I would be out of the house and living on my own just after my sixteenth birthday, trying to make my way in a world with my untreated mental illnesses.
My younger years were spent jumping from job to job and collecting welfare in three different provinces before I was 25.
I’d go to the doctor periodically with complaints about constant tiredness, no desire to live, overwhelming feelings of failure, and panic attacks. Most of these walk-in doctors would diagnose me as just not getting enough sleep and prescribe melatonin.
The Canadian Armed Forces Knew More Than They Wanted To Admit
And then throw on top of this the pleasure of dealing with the Canadian Armed Forces in 2011, and then again from 2015 to 2018.
It wasn’t so much that charges weren’t brought against the babysitter.
It was the fact that the CFNIS in 2011, and again from 2015 through 2018, knew the full fucking truth about how big the child sexual abuse scandal was on Canadian Forces Base Namao, and yet they seemed hellbent and determined to portray me as the “societal malcontent with an axe to grind against the military.”
And it’s not like I haven’t tried therapy.
I had therapy from 2011 onwards. Mostly just talk. I had to be very careful about what I said, because shit like that can end employment opportunities.
I even went to counselling for male victims of sexual assault, but a lot of my mental health issues aren’t from the sexual abuse itself.
I’ve always said that what I considered more damaging was the abuse that I endured at the hands of my father and Terry in the aftermath of CFB Namao.
The Senate Did Not Listen
So here I am at 55.
The Senate of Canada appears to believe that all I have to do is think happy thoughts and everything will be better.
I am so fucking tired and burnt out.
I have the babysitter, my father, Captain Totzke, my grandmother, and a host of others living inside of my skull, reminding me of just exactly how much of a failure I am.
There is no happy ending.
Right now my lawyer has made a settlement offer to Canada’s lawyer.
I want to stay long enough to see myself, and the other children from CFB Namao who were swept up in the Captain Father Angus McRae child sexual abuse scandal, receive some measure of recognition for what was done to us and what was ignored afterward.
I do not know what comes after that.
I only know that I am tired of carrying damage that other people created, other people minimized, and other people walked away from.
There will be no happy ending here.
But there should at least be an honest record.
