This is an easy one.
None.
Seriously.
None.
Never received anything that I would consider a “gift” from my father. Any thing that he “gave” to me was always an obligation to keep social services at bay.
My mother was never around. Sure, wasn’t her fault, but that doesn’t change things.
My grandmother gave me the gift of PTSD and alcoholism from the Indian Residential Schools.
Any “gift” that I ever received from anyone else always seemed to come with an extremely high price.
I don’t hate people.
I don’t despise people.
I just don’t make it a habit to hang out with people.
I like to be on my own.
I grew up not having anyone to depend on. I had no one in my family that was dependable to rely on.
I can share laughs with people.
But I really really don’t like small talk or talking about personal “feelings” or things.
I hate the idea of having to form political alliances at work, but that’s the way it actually works.
There’s nothing better at triggering “shields-up” than small talk or asking me about my feelings.
I like to be out and about, just walking around or riding around on my scooter. The crowds and the traffic are distracting that keep my mind off things.
I go to concerts, but I keep to myself. I don’t like “meeting” people.
When people get to know me they start to not like me.
So I just avoid all of that drama and I just keep to myself.
What advice would I give to my teenage self?
Where oh where to start?
I don’t know.
If I knew in my teenage years what I know now I’d probably just suggest to myself the best and most humane ways in which to end my life.
I would tell my teenage self that justice is what rich people get and that dogs like me just get a rolled up newspaper on the snout if we ask for a little bit of justice.
I really wish that things could run along the lines of sappiness that this prompt is trying elicit. You know like “I’d tell myself to tell my granny I loved her before she died”, or ” I’d tell my daddy that I loved him and that I knew how hard military life was on him”.
But what the fuck could I tell my teenage self that wouldn’t be fucking devastating.
“Hey Bob, your father actually knew the truth about CFB Namao but he sold your mental health for some favours from the chain of command”.
“Hey Bob, you actually weren’t to blame for yourself, your brother, and the other kids being abused. This is just something that Captain Totzke concocted to shame you into silence so that you wouldn’t tell any civilians about what happened”
“Hey Bob, you mother didn’t abandon the family, your father had your mother thrown off the base by the military police because the Defence Establishment Trespass Regulations allowed for this to happen”
“Hey Bob, your father knew exactly how damaged your grandmother was and that she was an alcoholic and that she was extremely cruel to you and your brother”
So, what exactly could I tell my teenage self that wouldn’t have led me to having an extreme mental breakdown?
My father was 54 in the year 2000.
He had already been retired from the Canadian Armed Forces for seven years at this point after serving in the military for 30 years.
Not too shabby for a guy who joined the Royal Canadian Navy in 1963 with a grade 8 education and a drinking habit that would make a longshoreman blush.
Me?
Because the baby boomers insisted on hauling up the ladder after they had their climb, I will have to work for at least 12 more years if I want to even think of retiring.
Hopefully I can avail myself to M.A.i.D. in 2027 so that I no longer have to live with the daemons that my father gave to me.
My mother would have also been 54 in the year 2000.
I have absolutely no idea what the fuck she was up to. The last time I had spoken with her at that point in my life was in the spring of 1992, when after moving to Vancouver she told me to “never fucking call her again”. I honoured this command until 2013 when I had to call her to discuss with her some of the answers that my father had given to me for federal court. When I met her in 2013 she was a fucking dead zombie. She already had a bunch of aneurysms. And she was nothing more than the walking dead waiting for her death.
I don’t know if she ever retired from a job that had a pension.
What would my dream home be like?
I don’t know.
I never lived in a place that I would call a “home”.
And I never lived in any place that I would call a “dream home”.
The houses I lived in were all fucking traumatizing nightmares, and I don’t mean that they all had the same fucking paint scheme no matter which base they were located on. Living in an abusive dysfunctional family in military housing on military bases was the traumatizing nightmare.
I grew up living in Private Married Quarters on Canadian Forces Bases.
And with my rage prone alcohol fuelled father, these weren’t homes.
They were houses.
It’s where I kept my shit.
It’s where I slept at night.
It’s where I was absolutely terrified to ask my father for help with school homework as that would launch him into a rage and fury.
From the time my mother left in 1977 until September of 1985, I never had a birthday. In 1985, no doubt due to my father’s rampage in the PMQ during the summer of 1985, I had a “birthday” of sorts. A small cake and a $20 bill. And a promise that he would never forget my birthday again. That was the last birthday of mine that he ever acknowledged. I guess once he realized that the base military police were not going to inform the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto about his massive meltdown in the PMQ in the summer of ’85 he didn’t have to pretend to give a shit about me any longer.
My alcoholic grandmother living in the PMQs and raising my brother and I didn’t make things any easier. If I had to take a wild guess, I think that my father got his mental issues from her. As much as he would claim that she was an alcoholic that was cruel to his children, he was the exact same.
When my father received his final posting in June of 1990 to go back to CFB Edmonton in anticipation of his retirement, he and my stepmother bought a house in Morinville, AB.
I lived in an actual house for the first time in my entire life. Not a military PMQ. Not a rooming house where I rented a room after I moved out of the PMQ on CFB Downsview when I was 16. An actual house, with walls that you could hang pictures on without fear of pissing off the base construction engineers.
Yeah, my stepmother had me booted out within a week of us moving from CFB Griesbach to Morinville.
She apparently did the same with my brother when he finished his sentence at the St. John’s Training School for Boys in Uxbridge, Ontario and moved to AB to stay with our father as Scott was still only 16 when he was released.
So yeah, never really did live in a real home as a kid.
I’m happy with my bachelor apartment.
It’s not too big.
Growing up in my father’s house it was either “go the fuck outside and stay the fuck outside until the lights come on” or ” get the fuck up to your bedroom and stay there” or “get the fuck to school”. There were no weekend nights playing boardgames or watching Disney on TV or any other family style of activities.
And that’s why I like my apartment.
I’m either sleeping all day, or I’m at work, or I’m out and about trying to keep my brain from ruminating over and over about what I could have done differently in life.
My apartment, just like the PMQs, is just a place where I store my shit, and go to sleep.
The one thing that I will never get over is how the Canadian Armed Forces wrote me off as an insignificant patsy of absolutely no consequence.
When Petty Officer Steve Morris of the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service called me on November 4th, 2011 and told me that “the investigation couldn’t find any evidence to indicate that the babysitter was capable of doing what I accused him of”. He did this with a laugh in his voice. A laugh that was meant to convey a not too subtle “fuck you”.
I think that’s the one thing that’s driven me so fucking hard to keep digging and digging.
The other thing that has driven me so fucking hard was the telephone call I had with Master Corporal Christian Cyr on May 3rd and May 4th 2011 when he let slip that the CFNIS knew about the connection between my babysitter and Captain McRae
In the August 1985 Edmonton Journal article about my babysitter, the crown prosecutor mentioned to the judge that my babysitter was already serving 2 years of probation for molesting a young child in Manitoba.
I had dealings with an RCMP constable in 2012. This constable ran a CPIC check on my babysitter based upon the information presented in the Edmonton Journal newspaper article. The constable didn’t give me any details save for that unlike what the Steve Morris told me on November 4th, 2011 the babysitter had a very extensive record of child molestation running from 1982 until beyond 1990 with many charges and convictions with many more charges withdrawn or stayed. The RCMP constable confirmed that the babysitter had been charged and convicted in Manitoba for molesting a young boy.
It was also this constable that laid to waste the lies uttered by Master Corporal Christian Cyr to me on May 3rd, 2011 when he insisted to me that the babysitter was only 12 or 13 years old in the spring of 1980. The babysitter turned 15 in June of 1980.
Anyways, last week I was as sick as a dog. So I spent time at home in bed with my laptop and my Newspapers.com subscription.
One of the many searches that I had done yielded information about the military social worker that I was in the care of from age 9 to age 11, Captain Terry Totzke.
But, I also hit upon a jackpot with the babysitter.
A newspaper article from 1985 centred on a woman who was trying to get stiffer sentences for child molesters in Manitoba. The woman, speaking under a pseudonym, mentioned that her two boys, one 2 years old and the other 4 years old at the time of the abuse, had been molested by their male babysitter who was only 17 years old at the time he abused the two boys.
She also mentioned that a 6 year old girl had been molested by the same babysitter that had molested her children and that this girl had been forced to watch the babysitter abusing other kids and was having all sorts of psychological issues because of that.
A quick bit of math shows that 1985 – 3 =1982. 1982 – 1965 =17.
What the fuck are the odds?
Oh, it gets fucking better.
The sexual abuse happened in St. James, Manitoba.
Wanna guess where St. James, Manitoba is located?
What the fuck are the odds?
It just keeps getting better and better the more time rolls onwards.
I’m doing a little bit of research right now and I’m just waiting for some information gel before being able to 100% link this 17 year old babysitter to my babysitter who would have also been 17 years of age in 1982.
And this really makes me wonder just how many times did the Canadian Armed Force move child molesters from one jurisdiction in Canada to another.
From the bit of research that I’ve done on pedophiles (people with sexual attractions to prepubescent children) and hebephiles (people with sexual attractions to children ages 11 – 14), these people tend to develop their attractions in their teen age years.
So let’s say that someone develops their attractions while they 12 or 13 years old.
A military dependent living with their serving parent could possibly have 2 or 3 moves with their serving parent between their 13th and 19th birthday. How intense this predator’s urges are will determine how many instances of abuse that they could cause.
Let’s say that a 14 year old boy living in the military housing attached to Canadian Forces Base Esquimalt molests a 6 year old girl living in the City of Victoria.
Let’s say that it’s a year before the girl works up the courage to tell her parents.
Let’s say that the boy’s father had been posted to CFB Gagetown in New Brunswick.
How would the Victoria PD ever be able to make the connection?
Let’s say that this boy molests a few more kids in the small towns around CFB Gagetown in New Brunswick.
Let’s say that this boy’s father is posted out to CFB Borden in Ontario.
How are the New Brunswick police supposed to link this boy to the crimes in Victoria, BC.
Let’s say that the boy molests some children in Barrie, Ontario
Let’s say the boy moves out of the military housing a year after arriving at CFB Borden.
How is this boy ever going to be linked to any of his crimes?
Unlike in the civilian world, the Canadian Armed Forces were using taxpayer money to move this boy’s family due to the serving parent’s transfer.
But don’t worry. It’s not just the Canadian Armed Forces that have problems with military dependents sexually abusing other military dependents in the housing provided to military families on military bases. The US Military also has a substantial issue with this.
How bad is the problem?
The Canadian Armed Forces, the Department of National Defence, and even more tragically the Department of (anything but) Justice will circle the wagons, call me a loser, and carry on like nothing ever happened.
The problem comes down to the fact that the CAF, the DND, and the DOJ claim that children living on military bases have no right to expect to be safe and that the CAF and the employees of the CAF, including military police, are under no obligation to protect civilians living on defence establishments.
If that’s one thing that people have trouble wrapping their heads around is how did I have a military social worker.
But Bobbie, you weren’t a soldier. You weren’t in the military. How could you have a military social worker?
Back in my day, we couldn’t get medical care at the base infirmary. We couldn’t get dental care at the military dentist unless the base we lived on was far away from the nearest civilian dentist.
But when it came to social workers, especially in “sticky situations”, the Canadian Armed Forces had no problem with unleashing their employees onto the children of military service members.
I didn’t pay much attention to Totzke’s career after I was no longer involved with him in 1983.
I should have though.
He joined the Royal Canadian Navy in 1966. Seems to have been involved with the naval band when he first joined.
Sometime after 1983 the good captain became a lieutenant colonel.
By 1984 he was the Area Social Worker for Pacific Command.
He was involved with the Sea Cadet program on the west coast.
He didn’t seem to stay in the Canadian Forces for much longer as by 1989 he was working at Nanaimo Regional General Hospital’s Dufferin Place extended care unit as a social worker.
Nothing much more out of the ordinary with Terry Totzke. He seemed to have retired from social work in the ’90s and went on to play drums in a band.
The band had some religious connections.
The one thing that does stick out though as interesting is that one person that Totzke had direct involvement with committed suicide with a crossbow.
Not too much was publicized about the suicide other than it appears that the man who committed suicide was suffering from a mental illness and Totzke had been involved with denying this man the ability to see his mother in a nursing home as Totzke was concerned that the man’s mental illness would be upsetting to the mother.
Really, none of this is surprising.
The counselling that I received from Totzke from October of 1980 until April of 1983 had driven me to attempt suicide two times in that period of time.
Social work and military didn’t really work back then.
Social work in the military was more about control and contain.
Blame the victim.
Make sure the victim understood that they were just as guilty as the abuser.
I wasn’t a 7 or 8 year-old victim of the babysitter and captain McRae for a year-and-a-half.
No, I was a budding homosexual pervert that enjoyed being abused and enjoyed watching my brother be abused.
During our meetings or the school visits, Terry would often remind me that he had the base military police watching me to see if I ever tried to kiss or touch another boy.
Terry was the reason that I wasn’t allowed to play team sports anymore. Might be naked boys in the change room. I might lose control of myself and start having sex with these boys.
And don’t forget, as Captain Totzke’s affair, it was his responsibility to get me the treatment required for my major depression, my severe anxiety, and my haphephobia.
In fact, he just seemed to stand by and watch me deteriorate to the point that I was supposed to have been institutionalized.
Even when Alberta Social Services finally began to put the pieces together and realized that I was in danger the longer I stayed in my father’s house, Totzke appears to have been very instrumental in helping my father obtain a posting out of the jurisdiction of Alberta to avoid my apprehension.
And even at our new posting, the new military social worker, Captain Linda Tyrell, offered absolutely no assistance to the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto when CAST tried to contact my father.
What do you complain about the most?
Well, that’s a hard one.
When one suffers from major depression, severe anxiety, and trauma from untreated childhood sexual abuse one tends to have a lot of observations, but I wouldn’t necessarily call this complaining. Okay, maybe some of it is complaining, but fuck it.
It’s just that when one has to work so hard to get to a certain place in life while watching those who have never suffered a single bruise or blemish in their lives cruising through life and reaping all the rewards without the slightest in effort, it gets fucking annoying really quick.
I think one of the things that pisses me off the most is watching those who came from supportive families cruising through life with nary a want or a encountering an unfulfilled desire.
Did my father ever show an interest in school when I was a kid?
Nope.
Did my father ever get his drinking under control?
Nope.
Did my father ever protect my bother and I from his alcoholic mother, who in his own words to social services, was extremely cruel to his children?
Nope.
Did my father stand up to the chain of command in 1980 when the decision was made by the Canadian Armed Forces to minimize the number of charges brought against Captain McRae?
Nope.
Did my father help me with my first car?
Nope.
Did my father help me with my first apartment?
Nope.
Did my father help me when I ended up on the streets after one job prematurely ended and a promised job after relocation fell through?
Nope.
Did my father write me into his will?
Nope.
Did anyone help me with the last minute and completely unexpected travel expenses and cremations expenses to dispose of my younger brother’s body?
Nope.
So here I sit, at age 53, watching all those that came from good families, that never had a single unfulfilled want in life, go through with their happy fantasy lives while I get told to be happy because my life could have been so much worse that what it actually is.
And yes, I’ve known people who have been in the foster care system. A system that I could have been placed into had it not been for the actions of Canadian Armed Forces officer Captain Terry Totzke. These people seemed to enjoy the support of their foster families. All the while I keep getting told that I should be happy that I lived with my father.
Even though my grandmother went through the Indian residential school system, and her alcoholism that led to my brother and I being sexually molested by our babysitter and Captain McRae could rightfully be blamed on the trauma she endured at residential school, do I get any sort of support for this.
Nope
Let’s face it, my father’s anger, his alcoholism, his cruelty, his complete lack of concern for anybody but himself, and his inability to take responsibility no doubt originated with his mother. The fact that she was an alcoholic during her pregnancy with him probably explains a lot of his behavioural difficulties. Do I get any type of support for this?
Nope.
In fact, when I bring up what I believe to be the root of my family’s dysfunction, I get called a “pretendian”.
I also get told that I should be thankful that I had the opportunity to grow up in a safe environment like Canadian Forces Bases and that I had the opportunity to play with military toys that kids in the civilian world would have enjoyed.
So yeah, I guess I have a lot of gripes.
However, people telling me to get over the past and simply move on with my life are probably my biggest gripe.
Fuck I hate those assholes with every fibre of my being.
Why am I not surprised in the least.
At this point in time the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service needs to be shut the fuck down and the military should lose the right to operate their own justice system in times of peace.
These fucking clowns are beyond compromised.
They are soldiers first, police officers second, and they are beholden to the chain of command at all times.
Members of the CFNIS are nothing more than meat puppets on the end of marionette strings being pulled by the chain of command.
I have a bunch of alerts set up on Google that alert me to when anything involving specific topics hits the media. This is how I was able to locate my babysitter back in 2015.
But at least 2 or 3 times a month I get alerts about the Canadian Forces military police and the CFNIS.
It should be obvious to just about anyone who pays attention to current events that the Canadian Armed Forces and the military “justice system” have some very serious issues that need to be dealt with.
But there are still those in the public realm who for one odd reason or the other have an undying fire in their belly to protect the military police no matter what the cost.
Take this letter from a concerned citizen that believes that the Military Police Complaints Commission should stick to its very narrow mandate.
Yep, the military police don’t need any oversight from a pesky outside civilian agency that doesn’t understand the inner workings and traditions of the Canadian Armed Forces.
The chain of command should be left to deal with these matters internally and out of the public eye and without the need for external supervision to ensure that matters are actually dealt with and not filed away in the circular filing cabinet.
After all, look at how well the Canadian Armed Forces handled the Captain Father Angus McRae child sexual abuse scandal on Canadian Forces Base Namao.
What would you do if you won the lottery?
I don’t play the lottery. Never have, never will.
Lotteries are a tax on poverty.
But, let’s say that I did win the lottery, what would I do?
Depending on how much money I won, I would probably hire a PR firm and do my best to destroy the squeaky clean image that the Canadian Armed Forces have been able to build over the years with massive amounts of tax payer money poured into professional PR firms.
I would probably set up a foundation or a trust for military dependents who fell through the cracks while living on the bases pre-1998 and who have suffered with mental illness and trauma.
I would hire the best psychiatrists and psychologists to lobby on my behalf and on the behalf of other military dependents who wish to obtain Medical Assistance in Dying for Mental Illness as the Sole Underlying Medical Condition.
Buy a fancy luxury car? For what? Can’t use the fancy car to drive away from the past.
Buy a house or a condo? That’s not going to erase the past. And 2027 isn’t really that far away.
Go on fancy vacation? My idea of a vacation is just going somewhere and walking around off the beaten path. But besides, I don’t really have the desire to go anywhere. I go places out of necessity.
Beeshive 