Tag: Bees

Warrant Officer Richard Wayne Gill

Why was Richard Gill the way he was?
I don’t think that we’ll ever know.

So, I’m going to talk about my father for a bit.

Richard was my father. We weren’t ever close by any stretch of the imagination.

Richard died in January of 2017. I found out from my brother in 2019.

I didn’t feel anything at first.

I thought for sure that it was going to hit me eventually.

Not even when I held a certified copy of his death certificate in my hands.

It never did. And I honestly don’t think it will.

He wasn’t an evil man. He was just fucked up. And fucked up a lot more than average.

He had a lot of demons.

Growing up on Canadian Forces Bases probably caused his abusive behaviours to be downplayed as he wasn’t the only man in the Canadian Forces that used physical punishment to keep his spouse and his children in line.

I remember seeing other kid get swift kicks. I remember seeing other kids get back handed so hard that blood was drawn. I remember hearing the screams of beatings coming from bedroom windows and the utter indifference from anyone around as nobody in a company town sticks their nose into the business of others.

Growing up on Canadian Forces Bases also meant that his PTSD and depression was nothing out of the ordinary as other members of the Canadian Forces living in the PMQ patches also had issues with PTSD and depression.

No matter how prevalent domestic abuse was in the Canadian Forces, there were always the cheerleaders who would downplay military domestic abuse. Whether it be members of the Canadian Forces, or members of the media, there always has been a desire to ignore and hide the domestic abuse.

And it didn’t help that a majority of this domestic abuse was dealt “in house” by the military “justice” system.

Still, as a kid I didn’t really know to much about him, and he was my own father.

For example, I wouldn’t learn of his birthday until September of 2005 when I had to apply to get my birth certificate from the Nova Scotia government. Yeah, sure, the argument could be made that I didn’t know my mother’s birthday either until 2005, but she left when I was 5 years old.

All the time that we lived in Ontario on Canadian Forces Base Dowsview I had no idea that my father was born in Peterborough, Ontario.

Before age 9 I never really knew him all that well as he was rarely home.

And in those days, when he did come home you just stayed away from him.

On Canadian Forces Base Shearwater it was mainly my mother raising my brother and I.

On Canadian Forces Base Summerside it was my grandmother raising my brother and I from the summer of 1977 until the spring of 1978.

Grandma lived with us from the time we arrived on the base until the spring of 1981 when she moved out and got her own apartment on 111th St. and 107th Ave. On Canadian Forces Base Namao Richard didn’t start living with us again until August of 1980 when he moved back in. Even my foster care records mention this.

I remember when Richard started living with us again my uncle Doug had bought me a 45 RPM of Sam The Sham and the Pharaohs song “Wooly Bully”. Richard had a thing for wool sweaters at the time. And even uncle Doug didn’t like Richard’s temper.

As I said, Richard wasn’t evil. He just couldn’t control his anger or his temper.

Someone said something to me recently that has just started to kinda make sense.

I know that my grandmother was an alcoholic before my father was born.

I was told that Richard was a “brandy baby”. In the sense that he had to be given brandy as a baby to stop his crying. Not for teething, but to reduce his withdrawal symptoms. Apparently he was quite colicky as a baby due to the withdrawal.

Fetal Alcohol Syndrome didn’t become a thing until about the 1960. But people before this knew there was a connection to the mother’s drinking and the baby’s health.

Back in the ’40s, no one would have cared about an Indian woman drinking during her pregnancy.

Much as alcoholism has a spectrum, FAS also has a spectrum. Just because my grandmother drank, in no doubt to deal with her own demons, doesn’t mean that she was a “fall down piss drunk” alcoholic. Alcoholic just means that she couldn’t control her drinking.

Some of the stereotypical features of FAS are facial abnormalities, intellectual disability or low IQ, and low body weight. As I said though, FAS is a spectrum. A person doesn’t have to have all of the symptoms of FAS to have FAS.

Some of the other symptoms of FAS are:

  • Difficulty in school (especially with math)
  • Speech and language delays
  • Poor reasoning and judgement skills
  • Poor impulse control
  • Alcoholism

Richard only went as far as grade 8 in school. He had to take a grade 9 upgrade course to join the Royal Canadian Navy. This is how he met my uncle Al. Math was one of those matters that could throw him into a fury. If I ever had to ask him for help with my math homework, this would frustrate him and upset him.

He blew up once really good when we lived at 94 Sunfield Road in North York. He hit me fairly hard. The next day he was all teary-eyed and apologetic. He promised that he was going to take an upgrading course and learn the math so that he could help me with my homework.

He took the upgrading course. But the help with homework never came. He took a math upgrading course at York University in North York. But I’ve know for long time that these courses were never to help me wth my math homework. Because at the time Richard was stuck in administrative duties piloting a desk for the Canadian Forces, he could no longer hide his lack of understanding of mathematics behind his mechanical aptitude. I think these upgrade courses were mandated by the Canadian Forces in order for Richard to progress up the ranks now that he was a desk jockey and not a mechanic.

Richard could not speak French. Even his service files from the Canadian Forces indicate that he couldn’t speak French. Now, I have to admit that my French skills are very piss-poor, but I did learn French as a child.

Une, deux, trois, jaune, vert, rouge, bon jour, bon nuit……… you get the picture.

The only real phrase in French that I know is “Désolé, je ne parle pas français”. Which is still head and shoulders above what Richard would have known.

My father would often say that he refused to speak French because my mother had hurt him when she “walked out on him”. When I met my mother in 2013, I asked her how her French was. Considering that she was born in Hull, Quebec and had the maiden name of Dagenais she could speak French fairly well even though she hadn’t used it since she was a kid.

Richard’s reasoning skills were very iffy. He had absolutely no compunction about letting me and my brother wander around aimlessly downtown with no money and no way to get back home other than walking. He’d drop my brother and I off unsupervised at major attractions in the city. And no, Toronto at the time wasn’t some little bucolic town like Mayberry.

Richard did have very poor impulse control. He would take really bad risks. He rear-ended a Jaguar in Toronto because the Jaguar was slowing down for an amber light but Richard though that if he sped up he could swerve around the Jag and make it through the intersection. He rear-ended a Metropolitan Toronto Police car in North York, again because he was trying to speed through traffic. He drove drunk on more than one occasion that caused damage to his cars and injuries to me. When Richard would lose his temper and start spanking either my brother or I he’d lose control and often had to be stopped by someone else whether it be grandma, uncle Doug, or Sue.

If Richard perceived that someone had slighted him on the road, or was too stupid to be on the road he’d have absolutely no hesitation in showing the other person how to drive properly.

Richard also had another impulse control issue. Spending. Although he never had money to spend on my brother or I, he would always be buying himself doodads and gizmos whether or not he had any actual use for them. He’d buy computer parts, use them once, and then they’d sit on a shelf never to be used again. He bought a camera, a Canon AE-1. He had all of the lenses for it, he had the power winder, he had the different flashes for it. But he never really used it. This was just another impulse gizmo. He works on model aircraft for a while, but abandoned that hobby quickly.

He’d buy tons of automotive tools, but he’d never work on cars.

When I talked to Marie in 2013 she mentioned that how on CFB Shearwater, Richard was always going to HFC for loans. These were small loans. Think of them as the predecessor to Money Mart and their payday loans.

From Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSBC_Finance

As soon as Marie had said HFC I remembered Richard had taken me to store that had the red HFC logo on the front of it. We’d ride his motorcycle over. But being that I was a kid I never understood what HFC was. Did Richard finance his Honda CB 450-Four through HFC? I know his 1969 Thunderbird was bought with his retention bonus that he received from the Canadian Forces when he signed on again after his initial 5 year agreement.

I then thought about when we lived on Canadian Forces Base Downsview in Ontario of the times that Richard would race over to the American Express office in North York to drop off a payment cheque as late at night as possible. I still don’t understand what he was doing other than trying to delay the payment for as long as possible without missing a payment. I guess that he figured out that if he got the payment into the drive up drop slot by a certain day that it would take ‘x’ days for the cheque to get processed and sent to his bank for payment.

His inability to manage money probably explains why he didn’t really spend much on my brother and I.

Richard was a very heavy drinker. He was an alcoholic. The only thing is, there were a lot of alcoholics living on the PMQ patches back then. None the less, Richard had a drinking problem. When I brought up the topic of Richard’s drinking with Marie in 2013 she said that as bad as Richard’s drinking was, grandma could easily drink him under the table.

According to Marie, Richard frequently lost his driver’s licence and that’s why she had to learn how to drive in Nova Scotia. And that’s why I mistakenly thought that the Thunderbird was her car. Nova Scotia has an odd peculiarity in relation to its vehicle licences. You can have separate motorcycle and car licences. Not you can have one licence or the other, but you could have both at the same time. Or you can get you motorcycle qualifications as an endorsement on your regular licence. Apparently Richard would simply ride his motorcycle while his car licence was suspended because he had the two separate licences. I haven’t found out if he had a DND driver’s licence, but if he did this would complicate matters further.

Richard totalled the Thunderbird on CFB Shearwater. This got me sent to the base infirmary for stitches. Knowing that the IWK children’s hospital was beginning to have concerns about my home life I don’t think it was a coincidence that I wasn’t sent to a public hospital to get stitches where the civilian police would start asking questions.

Richard nearly totalled his Pontiac Astre on PEI when we were returning from him drinking at the mess on base. We lived in the City of Summerside in housing that was on long term lease to the Department of National Defence. This was after my mother had left. So Richard had to take my brother and I with him when he went drinking. My brother and I stayed in the car while he was in the mess getting pissed. On the way home he drifted over the centre line and side swiped an oncoming car. Tore the grille of the front of his car, crumpled the front L.H. fender. Smashed the L.H. head light. Tore the rear bumper off the other car. We all got out of the car. When the other driver asked Richard if he had been drinking I told the other driving that we had just come from the mess on the base at that my father was drunk. Richard nearly backhanded me into next week.

To her credit, Sue was the only person able to reign in Richard’s drinking.

Richard must have been Sue’s fix’him’up project.

I’m not sure if she was ever able to get him to entirely stop drinking, but she did get him to tone it down substantially. Sue saw grandma as enabling Richard’s drinking, and I think this is one of the reasons grandma moved out of our house in the spring of 1981. At the time when grandma was living with us, when Sue would come home from work grandma would go upstairs and barricade herself in her bedroom.

There were times when Richard would show up home drunk and Sue would kick him out of their bedroom. Richard would go pass out in the living room and often end up rolling around naked and making loud animal like noises.

My brother and I would often take blankets down to him. Sue would tell us not to, that Richard needed to learn a lesson.

I was sent over to the Sgt. and W/O’s mess a couple of times on CFB Downsview to drag him home at Sue’s request. One of these retrievals resulted in Richard buying me a beer when I was well underage. But the bartender served me, probably to keep Richard’s temper down, but called the military police anyways. We got out of there before the MPs showed up.

So were Richard’s issues a result of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. Very possible. But he’s dead, so there’s no tests possible.

Were Richard’s issues due to his upbringing that was no doubt dysfunctional due to his mother’s drinking, his mother’s emotional issues due to her time in Indian Residential School, his father leaving when he was young, and his having grown up in an environment that was probably not all that friendly due to his status as a “half-breed”.

Were Richard’s issues due to the PTSD he suffered as a result of his involvement with the HMCS Kootenay gear box explosion on October 29th, 1969?

Bill Parker, Bob Wrightson, Marie, and Pat Longmore said that the HMCS Kootenay event severely fucked Richard up and that the Canadian Forces never helped him. Richard was already a drinker when he joined the Royal Canadian Navy in 1963 at age 17. According to both Bill and Marie the Kootenay incident push Richard very deep into a bottle. I don’t know if Richard ever hit the hard drugs like heroin or cocaine.

After the massive domestic dispute in the summer of 1985, Bill Parker had said that he really wished that I could have known my father before the Kootenay as my father used to be friendly and outgoing but that the Kootenay had changed him for the worse.

Bill also mentioned to me in 1985 that my brother, my mother, and I would often come stay with the Parkers when Richard got out of control when we lived on CFB Shearwater, and that I was more than welcome to come stay with Bill if my father lost his temper and had a meltdown again.

This lodger accommodation would be confirmed when I made acquaintances with Pat Longmore around 2017. In fact domestic violence was so well known on the base and in Shannon Park back then that there was a “battered wives club” that ran secret shelters for women needing to escape violence in the PMQs.

When I was in Nova Scotia in 2015 I met a man named Chris Legere. Chris saw me taking pictures of the HMCS Bonaventure’s anchor and asked me what my attachment was to the Bonnie. I told Chris about my father and my father’s involvement with the Kootenay that day via his attachment to the Sea Kings. Chris invited me to sit down with him. He said that the Canadian Forces tried very hard to downplay the effects of the Kootenay. Survivors of the deceased were told to get off the base as they could no longer live there. Survivors of the deceased were given very little in the way of benefits and assistance. Chris also said that many sailors from the Kootenay that were involved with the gearbox explosion got into hard drugs like heroin and cocaine. Chris said that what was a minor problem on the CFB Halifax and CFB Shearwater with hard drugs prior to the Kootenay bloomed into a disaster afterwards.

As Richard had been with the Sea Kings and more than likely had been involved with the transfer of survivors and deceased off the Kootenay this would have fried his noodle as he had worked with the members of the Kootenay when he had been on that ship as a stoker. According to both Bill and Marie, three of the deceased from the boiler room had been his drinking buddies from his navy days.

Does any of this excuse his behaviour?

No. No it doesn’t.

But it does go a long way towards explaining why things were the way they were.

Did Richard have secrets?

Yes, he had a lot of secrets.

Richard was a womanizer.

Richard had girlfriends when he had girlfriends.

Richard also had an ability to make the truth whatever he wanted it to be.

In 2011 when Richard was asked about the babysitter from CFB Namao Richard claimed that my brother and I never had a babysitter and that we were never sexually abused but that I caused a lot of problems in school and that I always wanted money.

Richard should have know about the social service records in Alberta and Ontario. Richard should have known that everything he had to say could have easily been disproved.

When the CFNIS interviewed my father in 2011, was he told what to say by the CFNIS? Or was he covering his own ass? There’s no way that Richard could have forgotten that his mother lived with us from 1977 until 1978 in Summerside and the from 1978 until 1981 in Edmonton. In fact he blamed grandma for the behaviour and emotional issues that my brother and I were exhibitingRichard was frequently away with the military on exercises for 6 to 8 weeks at a time. And I know that he sure as hell didn’t let my brother and I live feral on the base. Plus you have to take into account that even when he wasn’t on training exercises he was often staying with Vicki in Wetaskiwin or with Sue at her apartment by Londonderry Mall.

My brother is of the opinion that the CFNIS coaxed my father to say what he said. As there is absolutely no way my father’s statement could have ever been reconciled with the contents of my foster care records. And there may be some truth to this as Alberta Social Services indicated that my father had a tendency to tell those that he perceived to be in positions of authority what he thought they wanted to hear.

I lean more towards the possibility that Richard said what he said because he benefited from the sexual abuse of my brother and I. We know from the findings of the Military Police Complaints Commission that the CFNIS had access to the court martial transcripts and the Canadian Forces Special Investigations Unit paperwork from the Captain McRae child sexual abuse scandal. The military police were well aware in 1980 that P.S. was abusing younger children on the base. In fact Captain McRae’s defence counsel was using P.S.’s abuse of younger children on the base in order to try to discredit the testimony of P.S.. As the Military Police Complaints Commission stated, there is obviously no doubt that the Canadian Armed Forces knew what was happening on CFB Namao back in 1980.

My father was having issues related to his drinking and his temper. I can remember once or twice Richard worried that he was going to get thrown out of the military and that he’d have to go work in a garage or something mechanical.

Did Richard make a deal with the devil in 1980? A deal whereby he would keep quiet about the sexual abuse of my brother and I in exchange for the Canadian Forces cutting him some slack with his issues? I wouldn’t put this past him. After all the psychiatrist hired by the Canadian Forces in October of 1980 said that Richard wouldn’t take responsibility for his problems and expected others to solve his problems for him.

This might explain why no matter how badly my mental health was deteriorating and no matter how my sanity required immediate intervention, Richard wasn’t concerned in the least. He had a bargain to live up to.

Richard’s dead so we’ll never know the truth as to why he did what he did.

I did examine my father for Federal Court in 2013 for my Application for Judicial Review. He practically recanted everything he told the CFNIS.

Yep, grandma was raising us.

Yep, Grandma hired the babysitter.

Richard had no problem using intimidation and threats of violence to get his was.

Around the summer of 1982 the relationship between Richard and Sue was on the rocks. It was documented in my foster care records that Richard and Sue refused to talk to each other and were instead using my brother and I as intermediaries. I don’t know if my brother honestly doesn’t remember this or if he’s just moved this to a far off-limit area of his mind, but Richard had threatened to kill the both of us and dispose of our bodies.

Richard sat my brother and I down on the sofa in the living room of our PMQ on CFB Griesbach. Richard told my brother and I that things weren’t working out between him and Sue and that Sue might be leaving. Both my brother and I cheered. Sue was born in 1958. I was born in 1971 and my brother was born in 1974. Sue was practically the older sister that neither my brother or I wanted. Anyways, Richard told us to shut up. He said that if Sue walked out the door that he was going to kill my brother and I, and that he’d stiff our bodies into a duffle bag. He swore that no one would ever find my brother and I and that he’d simply go move into the barracks like nothing had happened. He just looked at my brother and I and asked “Do you understand? Have I made myself fucking clear to the two of you?”

I honestly do believe that had Richard been able to figure out a way to make my brother and I disappear he would have had no problem slaughtering the two of us and disposing of us. As he told one of his airforce buddies once, the only reason he kept us as opposed to giving us back to our mother is that as long as we lived under his roof he could control the costs whereas if he gave us back to our mother then he’d have to pay child support and alimony.

And my fear of Richard drowning me in a toilet? That wasn’t unfounded. He tried before we had moved off CFB Namao in October of 1980. I honestly can’t remember what this was about. But as we were being moved from Namao to Griesbach he would have known about the Captain McRae / P.S. affair.

Anyways enough for now.

Weird Dreams

Lexapro dreaming is a lot weirder than fever dreaming.

Well, ever since I’ve started taking escitalopram for my depression I’ve started having really weird and vivid dreams.

Last night was a really weird one.

I was riding my motorcycle down a highway somewhere when a cop riding on a bicycle pulled up beside me and told me to pull over because I wasn’t sitting properly upright on the motorcycle and therefore they thought that I was drunk.

As the cop was talking to me their face kept changing from male to female and back.

The cop wanted me to drive to a building for a breathalyzer.

So I drove to this building which looked more like a flop house.

There were a bunch of other people getting breathalyzers as well, and none of them looked drunk.

It was my turn to blow, and the reading came back as zero.

The officer made me blow again, and again I got another zero.

The officer went and got their supervisor. The supervisor told me that I must be drunk as I wasn’t sitting in the seat properly and that I was slouching.

Sure, okay, whatever.

The supervisor gave me a bunch of breathalyzer tests, all of which came back as zero.

I was told to go sit on a couch in the living room.

When I sat down, someone else came and sat down beside me.

Really weird dude. Kept talking about nothing. But then he showed me a trick.

He could point at the sky and stars would appear where he was pointing.

The cops came over and told him to stop that as it wasn’t allowed.

I was allowed to leave.

I got back on my motorcycle and drove to work.

Work was kinda like a hospital, but it was also a restaurant with a dining room.

To get in and out of the workshop I had to open a door that also served as a fuse panel for the restaurant. Every time that I would try opening the door I’d get a 208 volt shock. The panel/door was quite detailed. It had screw in fuses and blade disconnects.

Every time the door was opened, it would trip off the air conditioner and the maternity ward would call down an complain about the lack of A/C.

The restaurant was always complaining about the lights flickering.

One of the servers in the restaurant had a real bad limp and when he’d bring food out from the kitchen the food would always fall on the floor. He’d pick the food up, blow on it, and put it back on the plate. The customers saw this, but they felt sad for him because of his limp so no one ever complained.

Any ideas what the hell this was all about?
This had to be the weirdest dream of all since I first started escitalopram (Lexapro).
Even fever dreams that I’ve had before were never this weird.

It’s raining again.

What am I and where do I belong.
Surely I’m not the mutt my father said that I was.

I’m trying to ensure that I keep doing blog updates. I’m going to try to ensure that I give daily updates.

That’s one problem with my depression. My interest in things comes and goes super quick.

I really wished that I had developed hobbies as a kid, or had gotten into the habit of taking interests in things I like.

I’m in the process of buying rain gear for my bicycle so that I can ride more comfortably in the rain. As I’ve said, I don’t find the rain as fun to ride in now as I once did when I was in my teens and twenties.

It’s National Truth and Reconciliation day and I have absolutely no idea of what to do. Do I attend the marches? Should I attend the protests? I’m at a complete loss of what to do.

Yes, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has confirmed that my grandmother attended Indian Residential Schools as a child.

The fact that my grandmother was Swampy Cree meant that she would have suffered the anti-Indian sentiment and racism that was extremely prevalent back in the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s. Add to that her attendance at the Indian Residential School program and it’s easy to see why she couldn’t parent Richard properly.

I know that she had a problem with alcohol when she was pregnant with Richard. Sure, fine, people didn’t fully understand the effects of alcohol back then. But she was only 23 when she had Richard. She was much younger when she had my uncle Norman. What would drive someone to drink like she did?

We know the answer to that now.

My father never once embraced the fact that he was half Cree and half Irish. Being a “half-breed” no doubt would have caused him all sorts of problems in the 1940s and 1950s.

When I moved back to Alberta in 1990 I met up with my uncle Doug. He asked me if I had my metis papers. I asked him what those are. He said that Richard had done a good job of keeping both my brother and I isolated from the Indian side of our family. Doug had asked me if I wanted to get my metis papers. Sure I said. But it never went any further. Richard really wasn’t on speaking terms with Doug and Doug had told me not to mention my intentions to get my metis papers to Richard as this would no doubt upset Richard. My paperwork never went any further after Doug moved out of the city and went up north.

How much of the dysfunction that my family went through was due to this “intergenerational trauma” that everyone speaks of?

As a white person, do I have any claim to this “intergenerational trauma” which ran rampant on the paternal side of my family or am I supposed to apologize for the actions of my maternal French and Scottish forefathers?

I realize that being white I’ve enjoyed privileges that my uncle Norman’s kids probably didn’t have. However, at the same time my family tree was laid to waste by the treatment of the First Nations in this country.

When I was younger, I would often ask my father what I was if Grandma was an Indian. He’d say that I was nothing more than a mutt. A little bit of this, and a little bit of that, but not enough of anything to be special.

I forget what year this happened, but it was when Andy Anderson was still alive. Andy was my grandmother’s husband at the time. He was my father’s step father. Anyways, Andy was in the nursing home at the Mewburn nursing home at the Univeristy of Alberta Hospital. This is after my grandmother had moved out of our house on Canadian Forces Base Griesbach. She lived in an apartment on 111th Street and 107th Ave. Richard would frequently drop us off for the weekend to stay with grandma. One day we were taking the bus down to see Andy. The bus driver mis-calculated and stopped the bus with a garbage can blocking the rear doors. Without missing a beat grandma yelled up at the driver “Driver! Do you think because I’m an Indian I’m going to jump in the fucking garbage can for you?”. Yes, grandma could swear. Just as Richard could.

The next time that anything related to her Indian status came up was in the summer of 1985 when we had been sent up from Toronto to spend the summer with grandma. I noticed that she could write letters using both hands. I asked her how she learnt how to do that and if she could teach me. All she said is that she’d have to beat my hands with a stick like the nuns had beat her hands. She was left-handed. Being left-handed was actually something that the Catholic Church had an actual hang-up on.

Maybe eventually one day I’ll have this all figured out.

Until then it’s all as confusing as hell.

Slipping through the cracks.

Looking back on my life it has become readily apparent that the one thing that I am extremely accomplished at is slipping through the cracks.

And this has made me realize that there are actually a lot of people on this planet that have slipped through the cracks for all of their lives.

In 2011, in an attempt to bolster my complaint against P.S. after the case manger with the CFNIS told me that they couldn’t find any evidence against P.S. I started tracking down all of my personal information from any place that my father had been stationed.

The first crack that I seemed to have slipped through was in Halifax.

CFB Shearwater – Nova Scotia.

I had sent off a request to the Nova Scotia government for any medical or social service records that the government had from my childhood when my father was stationed at Canadian Forces Base Shearwater.

I was surprised that they had the detailed records that they did. They had my birth records that included my mother’s admission records. They also had all of my admission records from just after I was born all the way up until we moved from CFB Shearwater to CFB Summerside on PEI.

The records were notable for a few things.

First, the records identified an issue that I had with anything that contained beef fats like dairy.

The records also indicated that my mother was an extremely anxious person.

The records also indicate that my father had to be returned to port by the Canadian Forces due to “emotional issues”.

I had been admitted to the hospital on a couple of occasions as a “boarder”.

The longest I spent in hospital was 31 days.

Just before my father’s posting to CFB Summerside in Prince Edward Island the doctors at the IWK Children’s hospital had reached the opinion that my frequent admissions to the hospital were due to “societal problems” in the household and that social services should be notified.

Around 2015 I would make the acquaintance of Pat Longmore. She had been in the Canadian Forces along with her husband Bob back in the 1970s at CFB Shearwater. Pat knew both Richard and Marie. Pat was the first person ever to have confirmed the existence of a “battered wives club” on CFB Shearwater and that my mother had used it a couple of time when she needed to get us away from Richard when Richard was in the midsts of a meltdown.

  • How would things have turned out if Richard had not been able to escape the involvement of our family with Nova Scotia Social Services by obtaining a posting to CFB Summerside.
  • What would life had been like had Richard faced any real serious consequences for his alcoholism and his violent outbursts.
  • What would life had been like had the Canadian Forces offered Richard treatment for his PTSD and his Depression instead of encouraging him to self medicate his problems away with alcohol.

CFB Summerside – Prince Edward Island

I remember being in a bicycle accident while we were stationed at CFB Summerside. I didn’t remember too much about the accident, but I figured that I would submit a request anyways.

Turns out that someone had found me laying face down in the middle of the road unconscious with no description of what had happened.

The person who admitted to hospital was not my grandmother. To this day I still don’t recognize the name. When I tracked down my mother in 2013 and showed her the paperwork she said that she didn’t recognize the name. At the top of the admission paper it says “Father in Iceland with airforce, will return this evening”.

In 2013 I had to examine my father for a Federal Court application for judicial review. One of the questions I asked my father was what provinces other than Alberta were we involved with social services. His response was PEI for child custody.

I filed a request from the PEI Govt for these records. All the government would confirm is that my father had applied for custody, but that the matter was never settled by the court, the government had never granted Richard sole custody.

In 2013 I tracked my mother down to ask her about this. She said that the Canadian Forces Judge Advocate General had granted Richard sole custody of my brother and I and that she had been ordered to leave the PMQ by the Canadian Forces.

Behaviours such as this were confirmed in a report that was commissioned by the Canadian Armed Forces in 1996 and released in May of 2000. The report stated that because of the existence of the Defence Establishment Trespass Regulations military dependents such as spouses and children had no legal right to live on military bases. Military dependents are there at the pleasure of the serving member. If there was a breakdown in the marital home the serving member could have the military police eject the spouse from the base. This would prevent the ejected spouse from serving court papers on the serving spouse. Also, the serving spouse enjoyed free transportation provided by the Canadian Forces which would often cause the ejected spouse to be disadvantaged by travel distance from seeing her children.

  • How would things have turned out in the long run if Richard wasn’t able to have Marie ejected from the PMQ?
  • What would have happened had social services become involved when I was admitted to hospital with no next of kin.

CFB Namao / CFB Griesbach – Edmonton, AB

The most egregious cracks that I slipped through here were related to my mental health.

As I’ve said in other posts, I fully believe that my long term mental health was willingly sacrificed to allow the Canadian Armed Forces to keep their damn secrets about the Captain Father Angus McRae child sexual abuse sex scandal under wraps and out of the public eye.

I had no idea of how bad things were until I received my foster care records from the Alberta Government. The fact that I had foster care records was the most stunning aspect of this.

In October of 1980 my family arrived at CFB Griesbach. This was 6 months after the events on CFB Namao. My teacher and my brother’s teacher brought us to the attention of military social worker Captain Terry Totzke. A psychiatrist hired by the Canadian Armed Forces to evaluate my family and I found that I was well past the point of despair and depression and that I was extremely anxious and fearful of men. I was also found to hate being touched. Oh, and I was terrified of my father and I was convinced that he was going to drown me in a toilet. It’s obvious that by this point in time Richard had been informed of what had transpired on CFB Namao.

For an added bonus my results from the Wechsler IQ test that I had been administered showed that I had an IQ of 136 +/- 6.

This same psychiatrist found that my father accepted no responsibility for his family, he expected others to solve his problems for him, he blamed his mother for the problems my brother and I were exhibiting.

I remember this time of my life as being full of confusion. I couldn’t make friends. The other kids on base were constantly beating the daylights out of me. I also started to be able to run my hands through my hair and pull clumps of hair out of my head. My father was angry with me no matter what I did. My stepmother started echoing my father’s anger towards me. No matter what I did I was a complete fuck-up. There was no pleasing anyone. I started frequently wetting the bed. To teach me a lesson and to get me to stop wetting the bed I was often sent to school without a shower which just amplified the attacks at school. The kids would often call me “onion head”. As a foot note, I didn’t stop wetting the bed until just after I had turned 16 and had moved out of the house.

Various follow-ups between October 1980 and November 1981 didn’t go anywhere. No matter what Captain Totzke was being told I was never medicated nor was I ever sent for therapy.

In November of 1981 my teacher, my brother’s teacher, and our principal contacted Alberta Social Services as Captain Totzke didn’t seem to be able to get my brother’s and my “odd and strange behaviours” under control. It wasn’t that Totzke couldn’t get our behaviours under control. It’s more than likely that the Canadian Forces didn’t want to risk either me or my brother talking to civilian therapists because there was the obvious risk that we’d start talking about the babysitter from CFB Namao which in turn would lead to the discovery of the true extent of what Captain Father Angus McRae had done on CFB Namao from 1978 until 1980.

Alberta Social Services sent me for testing and found that I was so emotionally disturbed that I would never be able to function properly in any school unless I received treatment. By the time I was supposed to be placed in a “special school” I had devolved so bad that I was supposed to be institutionalized. As Captain Totzke was my primary caregiver he would have to agree to this. Which he never seemed to. So a compromise was reached, I would attend a school program for emotionally disturbed children until further arrangements could be made.

Being in this program required two things. First my father had to sign my foster care admission paperwork. Second, me father was supposed to attend family counselling.

In December of 1982 a letter was sent to Captain Totzke and my father inviting them to a conference with my civilian social workers on January 26th, 1983.

The meeting occurred on January 26th, 1983. Captain Totzke was there but my father wasn’t. Captain Totzke said that my father was happy with my improvement from being in the Westfield program. My father was so happy that Captain Totzke said that he recently helped my father turn down a posting to Nova Scotia because my father wanted me to stay in the program.

My civilian counsellors informed Captain Totzke that my father was not attending family counselling and that unless my father attended family counselling that my behaviour and my emotional state would continue to deteriorate. My civilian case worker told Captain Totzke that in order to apply duress to Richard to make him comply that I would be removed from the home and placed into foster care or residential care. Remember the part about my father signing the foster care admission paperwork? My civilian counsellors told Captain Totzke to inform my father and my father’s commanding officer forthwith that Richard was to attend every scheduled family counselling session that was upcoming or Alberta Social Services would take action.

On January 28th, 1983 my civilian case worker called Captain Totzke for an update. Apparently my father lost his shit. He didn’t understand what the program was all about. He claimed that my counsellors were harassing Richard and Sue. Totzke also informed my civilian case worker that my father has just received a posting to Ontario. Remember Totzke claiming he helped my father turn down a posting? I wonder what changed in the span of two days, don’t you?

In closing the file Alberta Social Services noted that my father often changed his story from one meeting to the next, and that my father often told people in positions of authority what he thought they wanted to hear. Basically Richard was a pathological liar who could manipulate people to get what he wanted.

It destroys me to know that the Canadian Armed Forces and my father knew that I was experiencing severe psychological trauma brought on no doubt by the sexual abuse from CFB Namao, but also from my father’s issues, and they chose to do nothing.

What type of life would I have been able to enjoy had I received proper therapy and treatments back then?

What would have happened if my father had to prove that he had sole custody of my brother and I and that it turned out that he didn’t.

How would life have been for me had I been removed from both Richard and Marie and placed with a normal family.

If I had remained in Alberta after my father fled to Ontario and had I remained in the foster care program what type of assistance would I have received with obtaining higher education?

I slipped through far too many cracks to count here.

  • How would my life have turned out had I received therapy for my major depression?
  • How would my life have turned out had I received therapy for my severe anxiety?
  • How would things have turned out for me if Captain Terry Totzke was less concerned about my apparent homosexuality and had been more concerned about my mental health and wellbeing.?
  • How would things have turned out for me had I been institutionalized and received the proper care?
  • How would things have turned out for me if I had been placed into foster care or residential care and then felt safe enough to talk about what had happened on Canadian Forces Base Namao?
  • If I had been removed from the home and placed with a family that cared, would I have finished grade 12? Would I have gone on to college? University? Would I have been able to take proper trades training?
  • If I was removed from Richard’s house and placed into either residential care or foster care, would I have been free to develop a proper sexual identity?
  • Given a chance, what would I have parlayed my IQ of 136 +/- 6 into?

CFB Downsview

I obtained my social service paperwork from the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto as they were mentioned in my Alberta Social Services paperwork.

CAST tried to locate the contact information for my family from the Canadian Armed Forces, but the Canadian Forces wouldn’t comply.

CAST ended up tracking down my brother and I through the North York Board of Education.

CAST wasn’t able to get too involved with my family as my father didn’t want to participate and CAST was facing budget cuts. CAST said that they would keep the file open none the less and that if they received any complaints from the neighbours they wouldn’t hesitate to get involved.

I don’t ever remember being involved with CAST. Is this why Richard and Sue always insisted that my brother and I get out of the house in the morning and not come back until supper time? That way we’d never be home when CAST showed up for a house visit?

  • If I had been placed at the Sick Kids Hospital in Toronto for psychiatric treatment, instead of being forced to grow up with major depression, severe anxiety, and gender confusion, what would my future have been like?
  • What would have happened if the Canadian Forces Military Police on CFB Downsview had reported Richard’s violent domestic fight to CAST in the summer of 1985? Is this why when the military police came to talk to my brother and I about Richard’s violent breakdown that they told us to never call 9-1-1, that we were to call base switchboard and summon the military police?
  • When I moved out of the house in the winter of 1988 the CAST file on my family was still open. I didn’t have to go to work or rent a room in a house. Had I known that my family was involved with CAST I could have asked CAST for emergency shelter and emergency funding to allow me to attend school without having to work.
  • In 1989 when I attempted to finish off my schooling at A.I.S.P., I could have also received emergency funding and emergency shelter had I applied for it after Richard blew a gasket because he didn’t understand what the name “Alternative and Independent School Program” meant.
  • If I had known about my family’s involvement with CAST, would CAST have assisted me with extracurricular music lessons?
  • Would CAST have assisted me with getting into the National Science Fair if they had learnt about my father’s refusal because I was “showing off”?

CFNIS 2011

If I had known the truth about the period from October of 1980 until January 1988, would I have been better able to prevent the CFNIS, the Provost Marshal, the VCDS, and the Minister of National Defence from concocting a wildly inaccurate story about the period of August 1978 though to July of 1980.

  • The CFNIS in 2011 had access to the Canadian Forces court martial records relating to Captain Father Angus McRae. The CFNIS knew that P.S. had been molesting numerous children on the base and it was this abusive behaviour that attracted the attention of the base military police which eventually led to the CFSIU investigating Captain McRae for having committed “acts of homosexuality” with young boys on the base.
  • Alberta Social Services was of the opinion that my father was a liar and often told people he perceived to be in positions of authority what he thought they wanted to hear. Would the CFNIS had been able to place much emphasis on Richard’s statement in which he said that there was never a babysitter in our house?
  • If I had my social service records during my initial interview with the CFNIS in March of 2011, would I have been able to introduce enough evidence to show the CFNIS that my father was fully aware of what had occurred on CFB Namao but that due to his own issues he was refusing to allow me to receive treatment for the various mental illnesses that I was suffering through as a result of the abuse on CFB Namao?

So many cracks.

I’ve slipped through so many cracks that it’s not funny. It’s actually quite maddening.

To see that I was so close to receiving help with my issues, but that my father and the Canadian Forces were so hell bent on keeping a lid on the Captain McRae fiasco that I was kept from receiving the help that I so rightfully deserved.

You might say to yourself that maybe it would have been better if I had never found these records and documents. You’d be very wrong.

Prior to obtaining these records I had always viewed myself as a worthless fuckup who had screwed up his own life because as my father would often say that I was fucking insane like my mother and that I was a selfish crybaby who fucked with his military career.

The records allowed me to see that I wasn’t a fuck-up. That I was just a kid being crushed by forces far more powerful than I could have ever imagined.

I had been sacrificed in order to keep a secret.

The Canadian Armed Forces sacrificed me to keep the lid on a horrific secret.

My father, having his own demons and lacking his own backbone was more than willing to go along with this.

My father was obviously an unfit parent, so was my mother but I didn’t grow up with her, how would my life had turned out if I hadn’t grown up in an environment where secrets needed to be kept?

People keep telling me “Bobbie, you’re so smart, what are you wasting your life for”, or “Bobbie, you’re so smart, why didn’t you get into such-n-such a trade”, or my favourite “Bobbie, the guys in the shop are afraid of you because you know too much”.

The last point I’m not kidding about. When I took on the position of Chief Engineer at St. Paul’s I got brought into the plant manager’s office for a little one-on-one. Seems that there was a little mutiny of sorts brewing in the power engineering section. I was too smart and the other engineers were feeling intimidated. And this isn’t the first employer that has brought this up.

And it’s true. I love to read. I love reading service manuals. I love to understand. If I didn’t then I wouldn’t have made so many changes at St. Paul’s. And this is something that I am sick and tired of apologizing for. Yes, I should be in more technical employment. But that wasn’t in the cards for me. And I’m not about to play stupid. Why should I? I didn’t ask to have my potential pulled out from under me.

I really despise it when people accuse me of having been lazy or having wasted all the opportunities that a person like me should have had. When I was younger this used to anger me quite a bit. “Bobbie, you must have partied too hard instead of going to trade school”, or “Maybe home life was too good and you just never learnt the value of hard work”.

Where would I have gone in life had I not had to drag along the diagnosed but untreated depression, anxiety, and other issues that were gifted to me?

No, the discovery of all of these records tells me that short of a fucking miracle I ended up exactly where the trajectory of my early life aimed me for. I think I did pretty good for a grade 9 dropout with a grade 12 G.E.D..

No drug dependency, no criminal record, a pretty solid employment history.

Sure, going to college, or university, or even trade school would have probably opened up a world of opportunity for me, but those things were never to be.

So I’m not upset and saddened by the opportunities that were taken away from me.

I’m just disgusted at the people and organizations that took those opportunities away from me.

You seem so normal……..

One of my curses if you will is that I seem “so normal”. Facial piercings and tattoos aside. This was especially truer back in my teens and twenties when I really had to appear “normal” in order to gain and keep employment.

I have never once in my life stuck a needle in my arm nor have I ever snorted anything up my nose. I don’t even like weed.

I can honestly remember the handful of times that I did drink. And not surprising these events often went way out of control. I honestly believe that alcoholism is genetic. My grandmother was an alcoholic. My father was an alcoholic. And I more than like was destined to be an alcoholic.

Outside of the wine that I had been given in the rectory of the chapel on Canadian Forces Base Namao, and outside of the occasional sips of Baby Duck or my father’s rum & coke mixes, the first time I had alcohol as a kid was in the summer of 1984 when I was staying with my grandmother over the summer. Grandma and her friend Hazel were drinking. Grandma asked me to get her and Hazel another beer each out of the fridge. I took two beers out and popped the caps off. I sucked the foam off the top like I would always do when getting grandma a beer. This time though she told me to get her another beer out of the fridge, and this time I wasn’t to drink any of it. So I got her the beer, I popped the cap off, and I let the foam run down the side of the bottle. I put the bottle on the table in front of grandma. Grandma slid the other bottle over towards an empty chair and told me to sit down and drink my beer. This was cool I thought. I’m drinking beer with my grandmother. What twelve year old boy doesn’t want to hang out with his sixty-one-year-old grandmother and get drunk with her. I finished two bottles and then it was time for me to go pass out in the bedroom.

I didn’t drink again until I was about 15.
I know “drink again” isn’t something you want to hear somebody brag about when discussing their childhood, but in my household, the fact that I wasn’t a raging alcoholic by the time I was 18 was a miracle.

Bob Becker, a man that I was working for on the weekends at the time, had given me a small bottle of Johnny Walker Red Label to give to my father as a present. When I got home my father took one look at the bottle and said that he wouldn’t drink that horrid piss. Richard was a Lamb’s Navy and a Pilsner kind of guy. Anyways, Richard told me to put the bottle on a shelf in my bedroom and that he didn’t want to see me drink it until I was 19.

A friend from cadets happened to be over at my house for lunch one school day. We went downstairs to my bedroom. He spied the bottle. He saw my father’s shot glasses over by my father’s computer desk. Peter grabbed a pair of shot glasses and challenged me to drink more shots than he did before we returned to school. After about four shots each I grabbed the bottle from Peter’s hand and chugged it until it was empty. I don’t remember how long I stayed upright for. But I woke up the next day on the floor of my bedroom laying in a copious puddle of vomit.

My bedroom in the basement didn’t have a door. Richard said that military housing rules didn’t allow bedrooms in the basement and the military housing authority agreed that as long as there was no door on the bedroom that it wouldn’t be considered a bedroom. But I don’t think this was the housing rules were the true reason. My bedroom door was off for most of the time on CFB Griesbach, and the door was off for most of the time that I lived in the upstairs bedroom on CFB Downsview before giving my bedroom over to Sue’s son in early 1986.

Richard’s computer workstation where he played with his computers, sometimes until 02:30, had a view right into my bedroom. So there was absolutely no way that Richard didn’t see me laying on the floor with all that vomit and the bottle of Johnny Walker laying beside me.

All I got from Richard was a warning that he was going to start locking up his rum in his desk and that if his rum ever went missing that he was going to make sure that I knew there was a price to be paid.

The next time I had a drink of alcohol was in the spring of 1990 when I was on the road with Canshare Cabling. Michael and I had stopped at a hotel in Gagetown, New Brunswick. This was the first time that I had ever joined Michael for dinner. We had both stopped at the bank earlier in the day and I had pulled out about $300.00 for the week. Mike invited me to the bar at the hotel after. He encouraged me to keep up with him. I was 18 at the time but no one asked me for I.D. as I honestly looked like I was in my early 30s with my moustache and the grey hair that was peppered though my hair. I remember making it back to the hotel room that we were sharing. As soon as I laid down on the bed to room started spinning. No matter how tightly I gripped the mattress the room would just start spinning. And once it started spinning it wouldn’t stop. I spent the night going between the bed and the bathroom throwing up. I vowed to never drink again after that.

The next time I would ever go drinking was in August of 2005. I had just gotten my new job at St. Paul’s. And to reward me for the previous 5 years of employment, the Board of Directors with Equitable agreed to allow me to celebrate at the Lion’s Pub with some coworkers from Equitable and some other workers that I had previously worked with at a previous employer. We ran up a tab of about $3k for I think 8 people, most of it was for steaks and other foods. I’m also sure that other engineers from other buildings started showing up too. I didn’t get pissed drunk this time, but still I knew that something was wrong as the depression started to get out of control. I spent most of the evening crying to Harry about what had happened on CFB Namao. This was the first time that I had ever, and I mean ever, talked to anyone about this. This was supposed to be a happy day for me and it turned into a disaster.

I wouldn’t drink again until I took a short leave in 2010 from work to go to a job in Surrey. At my going away party a bunch of the boys from the plant took me out for drinks. I only had a glass or two. No problem this time.

On July 18th, 2011 I had gone downtown to pick up a MIDI cable for my new Yamaha keyboard that I had at the time. I figured that with the CFNIS finally going to hold P.S. responsible for what he had done all those years ago, I was going to start trying to learn some of the things my father had denied to me as punishment for my involvement with P.S.. I missed the Tom Lee store by about 20 minutes. On my way home I stopped at a bar. This was a bar that I had gone to a couple of times recently with the chief engineer and the steam fitter from work. They’d have beer and I’d drink Ice Tea. So, I was gonna grab an ice tea and maybe an order of fish and chips before heading home. As I was sitting there I started to realize that I hadn’t heard any case updates from the CFNIS lately and I was curious. So I called the case manager. We had a couple of back and forth calls. Basically his response to me was that he had been transferred and wasn’t really involved with my case anyways anymore. But he also said that the CFNIS couldn’t find anything about P.S. that would indicate that P.S. had ever been suspected of abusing children. (Remember, at this point in time the Canadian Forces had the court martial transcripts which indicated that P.S. was the star witness against Captain McRae and that Captain McRae’s defence counsel was trying to discredit P.S. because the military police knew in 1980 that P.S. had been sexually assaulting younger children on the base).

I ordered a beer to calm my nerves. But here’s the thing. When you suffer from major depression and severe anxiety, and alcoholism runs in your family, alcohol doesn’t calm you down. It just drives you further down into maddening depression.

I had a few more drinks. And because I didn’t really drink at the time, 3 or 4 beers would hit me a lot harder than let’s say someone who had been drinking a beer a day for 10 years. I think I had about 6 beers, each one driving me down deeper into despair.

I called the CFNIS case manager back and asked him what the point of living was if assholes like P.S. don’t get held responsible for what they’ve done in life. Again he started off with the “Mr. Bees, we can’t find any evidence against P.S.”. So I said fine, fuck it, I was going to go home and kill myself. How he asked. I said either jump out the window or slice my femoral arteries. After I got off the phone with him I realized that I was too drunk, and that I was now very depressed and angry. I also realized that I was probably going to hurt myself if I went home. I decided to go get checked out at a safe place. Work. I went in and started talking to the staff in the Emergency Dept at St. Paul’s. As I was in there, the CFNIS case manager called me back and asked me where I was. I told him I was at St. Paul’s and that I was going to get myself checked out. Fine, sure, okay. So I got admitted to the psych unit for observation.

I had a talk with a psychiatrist the next morning. I explained to him what had transpired between me and the CFNIS case manager. I explained to him what had happened on CFB Namao almost 30 years previous. He said that it was understandable that I had the reaction that I did. He asked me if I had ever wanted to harm myself previously, I told him that I had, but that I was never able to act upon it. He asked me if I still wanted to harm myself. I looked at him and said no.

So he released me that morning. Basically told me that with what had transpired 30 years previously and the previous evening that my reaction was to be expected. His discharge summary said “Adjustment Disorder with depressed mood”. It also listed “Alcohol Intoxication” as the pre-admission diagnoses. In his summary the psychiatrist mentioned that the police showed up after I had self-admitted. This is important as the CFNIS case manager in his account of the evening indicated that he literally saved my life by putting out an alert to the VPD and that the VPD had picked me up and brought me in to the hospital.

When I was released from the Comox unit I was setting in the waiting area. One of the porters came over and sat down beside me. He said ” So I see you spent the night”. I replied “Yep”. He said ” Don’t worry, you’d be surprised at how many staff members have actually spent a day or two in the psychiatric units”.

I haven’t touched a drop of alcohol since then. That’s ten years and two months. Unlike my grandmother, I didn’t require a stint in A-A to quit. I think the fact that I drank so infrequently had a lot to do with this. Wasn’t hooked on the stuff so quitting something that I wasn’t addicted to was very easy.

Which brings me to the million dollar question.

WHY?

WHY AM I NOT AN ADDICT?

A counsellor that I was seeing in 2011 agreed with me that it was very surprising that I wasn’t an addict pushing a shopping cart up and down the alleys collecting cans to feed my drug habits considering my history of neglect, abuse, sexual abuse, and the fact that alcoholism is so prominent in my family.

As mentioned at the start of this entry I’ve never done heroin, I’ve never done coke, crack, meth, crystal meth, LSD, Special K, or any of the other multitude of drugs. I don’t smoke weed, I don’t eat mushrooms. I can’t stand prescription pain killers. And I can remember each and every time that I’ve had alcohol.

My childhood, all of the physical, mental, and sexual abuse, my untreated mental illnesses, these all should have put me on the streets.

When I first arrived in Vancouver back in 1992 I spent time living at some of the rooming houses in the DTES. I spent time staying at the Catholic Charities Hostel for Men on Cambie Street. I was in the prime habitat for starting a drug infused spiral into oblivion.

But I didn’t.

Even when my anxiety and my depression would keep me from sleeping and I’d wake up with horrific night terrors, I never once felt the need to self medicate.

And let’s face it. Not being an addict is a double edge sword.

On one hand I’ve had a clean life.

But on the other hand medical and psychiatric professionals are very doubtful of my stories when I tell them about my past because research shows that a high percentage of drug addicts were sexually abused as children and came from dysfunctional homes as children and had substance abuse problems in their genetic lineage.

And yet here I am, the only needle marks I have are from my tattoos or piercings.

So, did I really suffer that abuse?

And that’s when the self doubt sets in.

Maybe I wasn’t sexually abused for 1-1/2 years by P.S.

Maybe I was given wine in the rectory at the chapel because Captain McRae was a really nice guy and he just wanted me to enjoy a cup of wine.

Maybe I misunderstood Captain Totzke when he told me that I was a homosexual.

Maybe Richard really wasn’t that abusive, maybe he was a fun loving parent that spent every waking moment doting on his children, and maybe social services in three different provinces were really just good for nothing do-gooders that liked to stick their noses into other people’s business.

And you can see how the self doubt can start to be just as bad as the major depression and the severe anxiety.

Is there something special in my brain that makes me resilient to drug addiction or even the desire to try drugs?

That I don’t know.

Was it my exposure to my father’s alcoholism and my grandmother’s alcoholism that made me generally steer away from alcohol and illicit drugs?

I don’t know.

Was it my father’s abusive behaviour and rage anger that scared me away from ever taking drugs?

I don’t know. I really don’t.

But what I do know is that if anyone wants to study my brain to see what’s up, it’s available. At the moment it’s attached to a set of vocal cords and a pair of lungs and it can answer any questions you have. You’re even welcome to do fMRIs on it.

And if I do proceed with M.A.i.D. it’s yours to pop out of my skull and slice up and pickle with formalin and study to your little heart’s content.

Maybe my brain will help understand why some people from traumatic backgrounds never go on to have drug dependencies and why others who have had less traumatic experiences turn to drugs without a second thought.

A Societal Malcontent with an Axe to grind against the Canadian Armed Forces

People often wonder why I don’t simply go see a counsellor for my issues. Or in the alternative they often suggest that my issues can’t be that serious as I’ve never sought help.
Welcome to the twisted life of a military dependent.

That is one of the questions that an investigator from the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service asked my brother in 2011 after I had made my complaint to the CFNIS in 2011 about the actions of the babysitter from 1978 until 1980.

The other thing the investigator asked my brother was if I had trouble holding down secure employment suggesting that maybe I had made my complaint against the babysitter as a way of making money.

I know of the existence of these two questions as I have certified copies of the 2011 investigation.

The point of this post is not to go over the 2011 investigation.

The point of this post is to illustrate how the Canadian Armed Forces have always blamed the victim.

Blaming the victim is nothing new for the Canadian Forces. You need to only look at the various reports commissioned by the Canadian Armed Forces over the years to understand that the Canadian Armed Forces have a significant issue with blaming the victim and that the Canadian Forces are very cognizant of the existence of this predisposition within the military community to blame the victim.

When a family member of P.S. found P.S. buggering me in the bedroom of his family’s military housing unit on base in late April early May I became a victim of sexual assault.

I would then also become a victim of the military’s attitude towards not only victims in general, but also the military’s attitude towards victims of male on male sexual abuse.

After being found in P.S.’s bedroom, I was told to go home. I lived right across the street from the P.S. family house. I lived in PMQ #11 – 12th street, he lived at PMQ #26 – 12th street.

I didn’t make it across the street before getting the shit beat out of me by a bunch of kids who were between 12 to 18. Remember, I would have been 8. P.S. was just weeks shy of his 15th birthday.

According to military records, the base military were coincidentally conducting an investigation into P.S. around the same time due to the numerous complaints that the military police had received about P.S. behaving improperly around young children. I don’t have the start date of this investigation, but I have no doubt that it was P.S. being found with me that started the ball rolling.

P.S. and I would have two very different tangents in life.

P.S. would go on to be convicted in civilian courts between 1982 and 1985 for molesting children.

When I spoke with the father of P.S. in July of 2015, P.S. was living in his father’s home. J.S. is the father of P.S.. J.S. had just had a leg amputated due to diabetes and he needed P.S. to be at home to help him with his care. P.S. at the time was facing trial for two counts of sexual assault and one count of forcible confinement.

J.S. had apparently supported his son from 1980 onwards as he view his son as the true victim of Captain McRae.

In 1980 the Canadian Armed Forces needed ONE victim and one victim only. And that was P.S.

The rest of us kids, which according to J.S. was known to be over 25 children molested by both McRae and P.S., were not allowed to be victims.

My father wasn’t around at the time I was found in P.S.’s bedroom in late April or early May of 1980. My father did move back in with us in August of 1980. He brought his girlfriend Sue to live with us.

The start of the school year was an absolute disaster. Not a day would go by that I wasn’t taunted or teased or beat up for being a fag, a queer, a fucking homo, for doing what I had done with P.S..

“Robert and P____ up in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g. First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Robert with a baby carriage”

In October of 1980 my family was moved from Canadian Forces Base Namao 10km down the road to Canadian Forces Base Griesbach. Looking back now I have no doubt that it was the Canadian Forces that relocated my family, probably in an attempt to get me away from the kids on Namao. I’m also pretty certain that the reason we didn’t get moved off to bases in other provinces like the families of other victims is due to the amount of money the Canadian Forces had just spent training my father on CH-147 Maintenance Management.

There really was no reason for us to move from CFB Namao to CFB Griesbach. My grandmother moved out not too long after our arrival at CFB Griesbach. So the 3 bedroom house that we lived in on CFB Namao would have been more than large enough for us.

This move also coincides with my father getting angry with me for what I had allowed P.S. to do to my younger brother. Richard had been living off base with Sue up to that point in time. He probably didn’t know about P.S. having been found buggering me in his bedroom, or the arrest and subsequent court martial of Captain McRae. But then again, my father had problems remember things as well. For example he “forgot” that in June of 1982 that he signed the paperwork placing me in the foster care system in Alberta.

When it was decided by military brass to get me off Namao, that’s more than likely when Richard was told what had happened and that I had been discovered with an older boy’s penis inside of me. After all, the Canadian Forces would have had to explain why they wanted us to move. Moving wouldn’t have been in Richard’s best interest as he could easily get pissed drunk at the mess on base and walk back home or be escorted back home by his drinking buddies and thus not risk losing his licence again. Living down on CFB Griesbach meant that he had to drive, and that meant that he couldn’t go to the mess on Namao to go drinking with his buddies.

This was also around the immediate time that I started engaging with a man name Terry. Terry would come to see me at the school on base for military children. Sometimes I would have to go see Terry over at a building near base head quarters.

I would have just turned 9 when I started seeing Terry in October of 1980.

I would learn in the summer of 2011 that Terry was Captain Terry Totzke, a social worker with the Canadian Armed Forces.

Terry seemed to know a great deal of my involvement with P.S.

I remember being told by Terry that I had a mental illness that was exhibited by me frequently having sex with P.S.. Terry would state that this mental illness was called homosexuality.

Terry would claim that because the encounters had happened so often, and that I never told anyone about them that I was just as ill as P.S. was.

Terry would tell me that boys do not have sex with other boys, that boys do not kiss other boys, and that boys do not touch other boys penises.

Terry would tell me that he had the base military police watching me and that if I ever tried to kiss or touch another boy again that I would be sent off to the Alberta Hospital for psychiatric treatments.

My father would sometimes come to these meetings and he was obviously taking what Terry had to say very much to heart. I don’t think this was only due to Terry being a captain and my father being a master corporal. Homosexuality was viewed in a very contemptible fashion within the Canadian Forces back in the ’50s through to the ’90s.

So here I am, the eldest son of Richard, a man dealing with his own demons of depression, PTSD, and alcoholism , being told by a captain of the Canadian Forces that his son is very quite possible a homosexual.

I wasn’t a victim of Captain McRae and McRae’s 14 year old altar boy P.S..

Nope, I was a homosexual who through his own homosexual depravity had allowed his younger brother to be victimized by P.S..

There was one time when Richard and Terry had taken me off base to see a psychologist. On the drive back on base we drove past the military prison on CFB Griesbach. I can’t for the life of me remember if it was Terry or if it was Richard, but one of the two pointed at the brig and said to me that “if I didn’t smarten up and stop trying to kiss and touch other boys that I was going to end up in there just like the priest from Namao”

The major depression and severe anxiety that I was beginning to exhibit around the just made Richard and Sue much more angry. Even Terry didn’t seem to have much sympathy for my battles with depression and anxiety.

I remember getting the strap from Mr. Little, the principal of the school on base for military children. The Canadian Armed Forces ran these schools until 1994 when the Canadian Forces handed the schools over to the local school boards and got out of the business of educating military dependents. Because the military ran these schools, corporal punishment was allowed right up until 1994. I still remember getting the strap from Mrs. Potter on CFB Namao. But yeah, I got the strap quite frequently. And my father wanted to know when I got the strap so that I could get a spanking when I got home.

I don’t talk about Sue very often in my blogs. I don’t think she really knew what was going on back then. I don’t think Richard was honest with her as to all of the issues the Gill family had. And she did apologize to me in 2003 for the way things had been back then.

When you have major untreated depression and severe anxiety everything can induce tears. And when you’re only around 9 years old and you start developing these mental health issues, you have meltdowns and temper tantrums, which to a man with his own depression, PTSD, and alcoholism may come across as nothing more than an insubordinate child in need of a good belting or back hand.

Richards spankings were always the pants down kind and he had a thick leather belt.

And he’d often lose control, so much so that either Grandma or Sue would have to step in to stop him. I think that the reason he’d lose control is that the sound of crying would drive him bonkers. It would trigger something inside him.

The funny thing about grandma stopping Richard is that she could dish out corporal punishment pretty good herself. Which makes me wonder if Richard was just reacting to inter-generational violence. After all, grandma had been through Indian Residential School as a child. Grandma was an alcoholic by the time Richard was born when grandma was 23. Richard was already a good drinker by the time my mother met him in 1965. Which makes me wonder. Did Richard get his drinking from his mother? Was Richard born with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome?

The Canadian Forces and my father never allowed to be the victim of P.S. nor Captain McRae.

I was just a selfish crybaby who was fucking with his father’s military career.

The Canadian Forces had determined that I was never the victim of P.S., the abuse had gone on far too long for me to be a victim.

I was never allowed to be a child with mental illness, I was just a fucking selfish little asshole doing anything to get my way.

One of the ways that I learnt to avoid the wrath of Richard was to hide my emotions and to hide my wants and needs.

When I started seeing Pat and Wayne I wasn’t allowed to talk to them.

I was told periodically by my father and Terry that I had to be very careful what I told Pat and Wayne because if they found out that I liked boys that I’d be sent to a hospital.

When we’d start going to go see Pat and Wayne at the facility that had a one way mirror with a room behind the mirror, I was told by both my father and Terry that I had to watch what I said to Pat and Wayne and anyone else in the room as they would “twist my words” and make me say things that I didn’t want to say and that quite possibly that they would take me away from my father. To be on the safe side I should run my answer by my father first.

I honestly don’t think Pat and Wayne had any idea of what was going on, or what I had suffered through on CFB Namao from 1978 to 1980.

But to me they were the enemy. Both Terry and my father assured me that these people were not my friends nor were they there to help me.

I think this is one of the reasons I have never been able to interact with counsellors. My whole childhood was a lie. A lie to keep the public from discovering what had occurred on CFB Namao.

In 2011 I would discover that Pat and Wayne were social service workers with Alberta Social Services. Alberta Social Services had been called in by my teacher and my brother’s teacher in November of 1981 as the school though that Captain Totzke wasn’t having any success in helping my brother and I with the behaviour issues we were exhibiting.

I talked to Pat recently. She remembered me. She said that she knew there was something going on but that I was too afraid to say anything. She also said that once Alberta Social Services handed the case back to Captain Terry Totzke they had doubts that anything was going to improve for me.

Which brings me back to the heading at the top of this post.

The Canadian Armed Forces have always viewed victims as the cause of their own misfortunes. This is nothing new. It’s the way the military hierarchy functions. If you were sexually assaulted, or if you were physically assaulted, or if you were psychologically abused, you must have done something to deserve it. Or in the alternate, if you didn’t do anything to fend off the assaults, you must have either enjoyed the assaults or you were a willing participant in the assaults.

This attitude still prevails.

In 2016 during a meeting with the Minister of Parliament for Vancouver South, Harjit Sajjan, Mr. Sajjan asked me “what my game was” and “what angle was I playing”. To this day Mr. Sajjan refuses to meet with me as the Minister of National Defence. Something about having to legally act upon my concerns if I make my concerns known to him.

But, if you talk to anyone that I’ve worked for over the years or have worked with I’m definitely not a “Societal Malcontent with an axe to grind against the Canadian Armed Forces” nor do I “frequently jump from job to job frequently changing jobs”. I honestly don’t think that anyone at St. Paul’s knows of my troubled past or my unfortunate adventures as a military dependent.

As I’ve said elsewhere, I started working when I was young. Not because a 10 year old can make a fortune cleaning aquariums and rodent cages at pet shops, or because an 11 year old can make a killing washing pizza pans and fetching supplies at a pizza shop in a shopping mall. I started working because I could get validation. I could get everything from these strangers that I couldn’t get from home. Looking back I’m more than certain that everyone I worked for knew that I came from a troubled home and that I needed help.

Sure, St. Paul’s is finally closing down. But we didn’t know that until 2019.
During my time at St. Paul’s I’ve done the following:
1-Initiated the cooling tower replacement on Phase 1 / Phase 2.
2-Repaired a design flaw with the steam regulator system that would starve the facility for steam heating during the winter months.
3-Replaced old reciprocating compressors with newer more efficient screw compressors.
4-Initiated the replacement of the main Diesel fuel tanks once I had discovered that the original main tanks were leaking and couldn’t hold pressure.
5-Repaired a long standing flaw in the secondary chilled water loop that would starve Phase II for cooling water on warm days.
6-Upgraded all cooling and heating valves in Phase II to electronic ball valves.
7-Implemented electronic rounds and reading software for tracking readings taken by the shift engineer.
8-Started to implement an inventory control system that will be ported to the New St. Paul’s.
9- Pushed to have all the supply fans upgraded to variable speed drive removing the troublesome and maintenance intensive variable pitch mechanisms from the fans.
10-Upgrading the air filtration for the operating rooms.
11 – Upgraded the refrigeration monitoring in the hospital.
12- Upgraded the steam control valves for the main heat exchangers to allow for proper tight shut-off when the heating hot water temperature set point was reached.

And on and on and on.

So no. I’m not a societal malcontent with an axe to grind against the Canadian Armed Forces, nor do I frequently jump from employer to employer.

I’ve had a very long and laborious climb up the corporate ladder all the while carrying a sack full of shit from my past that has been tied around my neck.

I’m not rich, nor am I poor. I didn’t really have much growing up, and I never really expected much either.

But Bobbie, what about your class action against the Canadian Armed Forces —- GOTCHA!!!!!! See, you are just in this for the money.

Actually, no.

First, the Canadian Armed Forces and the Department of National Defence did that to themselves.

Second, M.A.i.D. for psychological reasons becomes legal in March of 2023.

I may not in fact be around to collect on the compensation that a judge determines that all class members are entitled to.

So no. I’m not just looking to make a quick buck.

And even with the hell that the Canadian Armed Forces have dragged me through since 1980 I don’t have an axe to grind with the military. Even I can understand that it only takes a few bad apples to spoil the bunch and that you don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Riding my bicycle

This is me riding my bicycle.

I finally tried mounting my RAM mounts and my GoPro on the front basket of the bike. This seems to give a decent angle of view.

I have a RAM X-Mount for my iPhone. It’s the same mount that I use on my motorcycle.

I use the iPhone for music, and for maps. I don’t text or take phone calls when I’m riding, but having an easy view of the phone makes it easy for me to pull over and answer the important calls and ignore the calls that I can ignore.

Lucky for me I live just off the new bicycle path on Beach Ave. This isn’t a half bad path, but it does get very congested in the summertime. And the nice thing about reducing car traffic to two lanes, one in each direction, is that the racers and speeders have had to find a different place to go.

Vancouver is the bicycle theft capital of Canada. And such my bicycle lives either in my apartment or in my office at work.

Yes, this is what I wear when I ride my bicycle. I don’t own a single piece of “lycra” or “spandex”. I ride to and from work. I ride to and from the supermarket of coffee shop. I go out for dinner on my bicycle. I don’t like the idea of having to change from my “riding clothes” to my “destination clothes”.

Dresses, skirts, and kilts are what I wear. I don’t think I’ve worn a pair of pants on a bicycle since the mid 2000’s.

I ride for comfort. I’m not setting any speed records, nor am I setting any endurance records.

My earphones block much less outside noise than you average car. Most cars these days are extremely soundproofed. With my earphones on, I can still hear cars coming up beside me, I can hear emergency vehicles blocks away. I can hear car horns and voices. These are all things that I wouldn’t be able to hear in the typical everyday Econo-box car.

I’ve done some minor upgrades on the bike, mainly being that I replaced the cable operated disc brakes with hydraulic brakes. I’ve replaced the stock seat post with a shock absorbing post. I have the front and rear baskets. The next upgrade I’ll probably do is upsizing the disc brake rotors from 180 mm to 206 mm.

I’ve always loved bicycling over cars and even motorcycles.

I think there are two reasons for this.

First, as a kid living on military bases, a bicycle was an easy way to escape and for me to get away from Richard or my grandmother.

Second, my father’s temper behind the wheel turned most car trips into anxiety inducing adventures in road rage.

When I had my bicycles I could go for rides and not worry about coming home or needing rides from Richard.

No Rain

Just me. Talking about my bicycle and thinking of something to say.

Well, today is stopped raining.

The rain is nice to have after the long hot summer that we had. Vancouver is a city that really can’t handle temperatures of 40C

It’s nice to have the rain, but the rain keeps me from cycling.

When I was much younger I used to ride in the rain without a care.

When I first moved to Vancouver in 1992 I used to ride from my apartment in the West End of Vancouver over to Brunswick Lions Gate Lanes in West Vancouver. And this was back in the days before the bridge was up graded with proper width sidewalks that can accommodate one lane of bicycles and one lane of pedestrians.

There’s nothing like descending the south side of the bridge going into Vancouver with nothing more than cantilever rim brakes in the rain.

I’ve pretty well owned bicycles for the entire time that I’ve lived out here. There’s only been a couple of years when I didn’t ride.

But now with my e-bike I find that I am logging quite a few more kilometres per day / per week / per month than I ever had before. Legs, knees, and hips don’t get sore anymore. And it’s an upright step-through. Being upright doesn’t bother C4-C5-C6 in my neck. And being a step-through means that my dresses aren’t a problem.

I bought this bike back in January and I put 5,000 km on it back in August. Already had to put a new tire on the back. Due to the geometry of this bike the rear is carrying about 50% more weight than the front.

Well, I’m also officially fifty years old now. If I actually still ate at Denny’s I’d be five years away from the Seniors Discount. I don’t let my head hair grow in very often, but when I forget to shave for a couple of day I can see that my head hair is Snow White now.

I’ll have some observations to come up on other things, but for now it’s time to go out for a bicycle ride.

Suicide / Physician Assisted Suicide / Euthanasia / Medical Assistance in Dying.

Not much to say here, other than I try to describe the difference between suicide, physician assisted suicide, euthanasia, and medical assistance in dying.

Okay, so I’m going to talk to the best of my abilities about what the differences between Suicide, Physician Assisted Suicide, Euthanasia, and Medical Assistance in Dying are. There really are no clear definitions used universally and some terms are used solely to stigmatize medical assistance in dying.

Suicide is an act of desperation. Suicide is the act of a mind that is so overwhelmed with emotions that it cannot think straight. If you’ve never suffered from major depression you’ll never know how tempting suicide is. Suicide is one of those things that no one ever talks about. As a society, we’re very hush-hush about this to the point that we like to pretend that it doesn’t exist. And if society does acknowledge the existence of suicide society often talks about how crazy the person was that committed suicide and how selfish they were and how much pain and suffering they selfishly inflicted upon others.

Suicide is often not planned for and as such family members, relatives, friends and co-workers can often be left devastated. Family members are often left wondering why their loved one committed suicide and if there were any signs they missed and if there was something they could have done. Suicide often has impacts on others as well such as the landlord or property owner that finds the body. The first responders and bystanders who may have witnessed the suicide will be affected.

How many suicides are there every year? This table is from the BC Coroner’s service.

6,102 people successfully committed suicide in the ten year period starting in 2008. I don’t remember hearing a single news story about these people, do you? Society again thinks that by not talking about suicide that suicide will just simply disappear.

What are the common methods of suicide?

When was the last time you heard of a suicide on the Skytrain? Next time, pay attention to the “Medical Emergency” announcement. Yet between 2008 and 2018 there were 32 successful suicides on the Skytrain. The most prevalent method of suicide is the rather barbaric method of hanging. Let’s be honest, self hanging is NOT the same as hanging used as execution. There is very little chance that the person using hanging as a method will know how to do the proper calculations to ensure a quick death.

And it should go without saying, but committing suicide by Skytrain or railway is not a guaranteed way to go. More often than not you will survive with horrific injuries that will haunt you for the rest of your life.

What is often not discussed is the number of suicide attempts per year. The only stats I can find say that in Canada on any given day 275 people attempt suicide. That’s over 100,000 people per year.

I am not a neurologist, but it’s safe to say that the human brain is fragile and can easily be damaged and not just by physical trauma. The human brain can easily be damaged by traumatic experiences. Because the human brain relies on chemicals to transmit and receive signals any disruptions to these chemicals can cause long term effects. The longer a person suffers from untreated major depression and severe anxiety the more profound the damage becomes.

No amount of telling a depressed person to not be sad or instead to think happy thoughts will fix brain damage caused by trauma. And in the end, no amount of medication of therapy will reverse the psychological damage caused by trauma.

However, the events leading up to suicide tend to be very short term problems that could possibly be dealt with if the person committing suicide believed that they had someone to listen to them.

Physician Assisted Suicide.

Physician assisted suicide is a term that fell out of favour just as quickly as it entered the national vocabulary. When a person with an incurable medical condition wishes to end their life so as not to prolong their needless suffering, they are not committing suicide. And as such, the physician supplying the medication is not assisting in a suicide.

Euthanasia.

Euthanasia is a term for when a person, typically a doctor, uses medications to end the life of a patient typically without the consent of the patient. Euthanasia is pretty well illegal just about everywhere in the world. The only place that anything close to Euthanasia is practiced in on death row when prisoners are executed.

As much as I am in favour of any mentally competent adult, and children in very strictly controlled circumstances, ending their life for any medical or psychological issue, I don’t think that physicians should be able to decide on their own, or the next of kin for that matter, should be allowed to end the life of another person without very careful consideration from the courts.

Medical Assistance in Dying.

M.A.i.D. is the term for when a person applies to use medications prescribed for the sole purpose of dying. As I’ve said before, M.A.i.D. is something that has to be applied for, and it has to be planned for. When I apply for M.A.i.D. I can promise you that there will be a battery of tests that I will have to go through. It will not be as simple as me just going to my doctor and asking for a note.

Unlike suicide, almost every detail of M.A.i.D. is planned out from start to finish.

And unlike suicide, the medications used will ensure a proper death and not just an attempt.

If the proper drugs are used in the proper dosages the person undergoing the procedure will not feel pain and will not even be aware of their death.

And because M.A.i.D. is always undertaken with a sound, rational, and lucid mind, the person undergoing the procedure can stop the procedure at any time right up until the loss of consciousness. For obvious reasons you can’t withdraw your consent once the Propofol hits your brain.

And yes, during the entire M.A.i.D. process from application to the final day, the person electing to undergo the procedure will be frequently asked if they wish to continue forth or if they want to abandon the procedure.

The where, when, and how will be scheduled like clockwork. There will be no corpse for an unsuspecting landlord or relative to discover. Arrangements are typically made for the disposal of the body after the procedure. There will be no curious absence from work. People who need to be informed will be informed. And the answers as to why will be available to anyone who asks.

Why? Why do you want to kill yourself.

I prefer the term “going to sleep”. Kill implies violence. I’m just going to sleep. A sleep like the 18,250 sleeps that I’ve gone through in my life. Just that this is a sleep that I will never rouse from.

For 42 years now I’ve had to deal with the fallout from CFB Namao. What happened on that base is not something that one can simply get over and forget about. Then there’s the after effects of being swept up in the desire of the Department of National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces to keep the actions of P.S. and Captain McRae under wraps least the Canadian public discover what happened.

The Canadian Forces determined that my mental health and my mental wellbeing were sacrificial to the greater cause. Whether or not you like to admit it, the Canadian Forces chain of command sentenced me to death in 1980.

For 42 years I lived with and internalized major depression, severe anxiety, gender and orientation confusion, the inability to form friendships, the inability to form intimate relationships, the inability to enjoy life.

I’m 50 years old now. Seriously, I’m now fifty as I type this out. I honestly never thought that I would live to see this milestone.

I am very tired. I’ve fought the depression and the anxiety for as long as I could. I’ve hidden the depression and anxiety with every fibre in my body. I’ve tried my hardest to appear normal. But I am damaged. To say that I am not damaged is to minimize what occurred on Canadian Forces Base Namao when I was 7 to 8-1/2. To say that I am not damaged is to minimize my mistreatment at the hands of Captain Terry Totzke from age 9 to 11-1/2. To say that I am not damaged is to overlook the fact that I was supposed to have been institutionalized due to how bad my mental health had deteriorated by the time I was 11 years old.

I am damaged due to the wilful neglect of others. I am damaged due to the fact that others kept me from receiving timely counselling, therapy, and medication.

The damage was allowed to fester untreated and unmanaged for almost 42 years now.

There is no fixing this damage.

Just because I no longer cry myself to sleep at night doesn’t mean that this damage doesn’t affect me anymore. It just means that I’ve run out of tears to cry and I am almost completely dead on the inside.

The time for “fixing” me was in 1980. Not 2021.

My entire life was wasted because DND and the CF had a secret to hide.

I am actually at peace with myself now.

The more I think about how close I am to the end and how peaceful the transition from living to dead will be I become filled with a feeling of serenity. It’s actually a beautiful peaceful feeling.

I have a lot of unwanted people living in my skull, and they won’t voluntarily leave. They need to be forcefully evicted.
P.S.;
Captain Father Angus McRae;
The man in the sauna;
Captain Terry Totzke;
My father, Mcpl Richard Wayne Gill;
The other victims of P.S. that I keep seeing him abuse over and over;
Earl Ray Stevens;
And many others.

When I go to sleep they’ll never bother me again.

When I go to sleep my major depression and my severe anxiety will never trouble me again.

When I go to sleep I will never wake up in the middle of the night due to horrific dreams.

When I go to sleep I will never again grind my teeth down to nothing.

When I go to sleep I will never be crushed under the weight of a severe anxiety attack.

When I go to sleep my gender and orientation issues will never bother me again.

When I go to sleep all I will ever know is silence.

And after the life that I’ve been through never ending silence is fine by me.

This blog.

In this post I will briefly touch on some of the issues that I’m facing and why I am pursuing some of the paths that I am pursuing.

I wasn’t quite sure where I wanted this blog to go when I started it.

I envisioned this blog ( beeshive.ca ) as being separate from ( cfbnamao.ca ). And it will be.

My other blog, cfbnamao.ca , is more about the trauma and abuse I went through as a child living on a Canadian Armed Forces base that was gripped by the Captain Father Angus McRae child sexual abuse scandal that the Canadian Armed Forces buried out of fear of the public humiliation that would have resulted had the Canadian public found out that an officer of the regular force had sexually abused children on a secure defence establishment for just short of two years.

The other blog, cfbnamao.ca , is also where I go through the flaws in the National Defence Act which allow DND to hide and bury pre-1998 incidents of child sexual abuse.

This blog is intended to deal with the day to day or week to week goings on in my life.

I wasn’t sure what I wanted to post in this blog or how personal I wanted to get.

There are things I will talk about on this blog, and there are things I won’t talk about on this blog. The ones I won’t talk about are more to do with how boring they actually are.

I’ve been told by one of my counsellors before that I should write a book about my life. The problem is that I’m not a writer. I can type, and I can write blogs. So I figured that I would at least get my story out. It will be in blog form, and it will probably jump around from topic to topic a lot. Sure, I won’t make any money from this, but at least it gets my story out and allows me to tell my side of things.

Some of the issues that I write about will make a lot of people very uncomfortable. And that’s fine. It’s been a really weird life, and I’ve got a lot of issues and a lot of demons.

For a brief refresher, I was a military dependent as a child. My father served in the Canadian Armed Forces. I lived on military bases in military housing from birth until age 16. My father was an alcoholic with anger issues, he had depression and he also suffered no doubt from PTSD due to a naval incident that happened in 1969. He self medicated with alcohol and was quick to anger. Everyone minded their own business in the military housing on base and lots of people, including the military police would just turn a blind eye. My mother left when I was 5. She couldn’t take my father’s drinking or physical abuse. My father brought his own mother, a survivor of the Indian Residential Schools, into the house to raise my brother and I as my father was frequently absent. It is because of my grandmother’s heavy drinking that my younger brother and I ended up being sexually abused by the base chaplain and his 14 year old altar boy for just over 1-1/2 years. In the fallout of the CFB Namao scandal, I spent 2-1/2 years in the care of the military social worker receiving conversion therapy. A couple of years later, I would end up being sexually abused by a retired member of the Canadian Armed Forces who was working as a commissionaire at the armouries where I was in cadets. There’s a lot more dysfunction in my life, but that’s a basic run down.

In 2011 I obtained my foster care records, which I never knew existed. Turns out that in the aftermath of the CFB Namao matter, I was so depressed, so anxious, and so emotionally disturbed that I was supposed to have been institutionalized. That never happened though because the Canadian Forces needed to keep the Captain McRae matter under the rug and out of the public eye. In fact, my father was posted out of the jurisdiction of Alberta in order to ensure that I was taken out of the jurisdiction of Alberta Social Services so that my apprehension would never occur.

So, I suffered with diagnosed but untreated mental illness for 42 years.

Mental illness that various doctors were noting was getting more and more out of hand.

And for the most part I think I got everything “under control” and “hidden”. You learn quickly in life how to hide mental illness and depression and anxiety.

Things have popped up in the past, but you can only keep the lid on a boiling pot for so long before the roiling bubbles lift the lid.

I’ve had an interesting career trajectory.

Most employers that I’ve work for hired me because they could see that I was very technically skilled and that I had a very obvious ability to deal with technical issues. But, the one thing that most employers had remarked is that I lacked the personal skills required for advancement.

In 2011, after the Canadian Forces military police let slip to me that my babysitter had been involved with the base chaplain and that the base chaplain had been kicked out of the military for molesting children, I started to see a counsellor.

I started going over my history with this counsellor. I started discussing all of the paperwork I had uncovered. All of my personal records that I had found. The lawsuit between my babysitter and the Minister of National Defence in 2001. The out of court settlement in November of 2008.

My counsellor said to me that I reminded him of a character in a series of books that he had read, and he wanted to know if I had ever heard about “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”. I had actually. I had already read the books and had already seen the films. My counsellor said that the parallels between my life and the life of Lisbeth Salander were remarkable. We were both very damaged people, but we were both very smart, very tech savvy, and able to put the puzzle pieces together.

And yeah, that’s pretty true. I have no interpersonal skills. I can relate with people on technical issues and in technical discussions, but outside of that I’m lost. I don’t make small talk. I’m not interested in discussing family life. Wanna talk about work, sure, I’m your man. Wanna talk about your sister’s wedding, or what happened in the sportsball game last night? Nope, not interested in the least.

Due to the “conversion therapy” I received from the military social worker I have no honest idea of what my gender is or what my orientation is. And sex is kinda a moot point anyways as (a) I really don’t like being touched, (b) I really don’t like being touched in a sexual manner, (c) I find sex to be repulsive, (d) I honestly don’t know if I’m GLBTQ. And it probably doesn’t help that my years of untreated and unmanaged depression and anxiety mean that I don’t like getting personal with people. I have honestly had very few partners of either gender in my life.

So, for the record I am the Chief Engineer at St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver, BC. This is a position that I’ve held since May of 2020. Prior to that I was the Acting Chief Engineer while we reclassified the power plant. Prior to being Acting Chief Engineer I was the Assistant Chief Engineer since about 2017. Prior to that I was a maintenance power engineer for about 11 years.

Power engineering was recommended to me back in 2002. It was a pathway to a decent paying job for a person who didn’t have the funds or the support to take a trade course.

St. Paul’s Hospital is being relocated to the False Creek Flats. Construction of the new hospital should be completed in about 7 years. I’ve had involvement with the planning and design of the new hospital. The old St. Paul’s Hospital will probably continue to operate for at least one or two years after the new hospital is open in order to ensure that all of the programs and clinics transfer from one site to the other without any disruption.

St. Paul’s hospital on Burrard will more than likely be my final place of employment. The hospital and I have been taking care of each other for the last 17 years. And we’ll take care of each other for the next few years.

Now, I will unequivocally state that the future of St. Paul’s Hospital has absolutely nothing to do with my decision to explore the possibility of Medical Assistance in Dying.

I am not looking at M.A.i.D. out of fear for my future. Even though the new St. Paul’s will have either a 2nd class power plant or a 3rd class power plant, which means that I cannot be the chief at the new hospital, there would still be ample positions for me in the power plant none the less.

I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that because of what I’ve done over my tenure at St. Paul’s that Senior Leadership would create a position for me if they had to.

I bring this up because I forgot that one of the Senior Leaders from Providence Health Care follows my twitter feed and saw my postings about M.A.i.D.

I am actually very proud of the work that I’ve done at St. Paul’s and the innovations that I’ve brought to the Physical Plant. I have a good team under me and I have good leaders above. The other trades and I get along very well.

In a way, being at St. Paul’s has probably allowed me to deal with my mental health issues as I could take off sick days on the days where I was completely incapable of getting out of bed in the morning.

Being at St. Paul’s has also allowed me to be as odd and weird as I want because so long as you’re doing the work required of you both HR and the union don’t care, and if they don’t care then the personal opinions of others don’t matter.

COVID last year was an absolute disaster and extremely disruptive to the physical plant. But COVID was far from the sole reason for my breakdown this past spring.

I’ve run as far and as hard as I can.

For 42 years I’ve been hauling around baggage that no person should ever have to carry.

For 42 years I’ve been denied treatment, help, and acknowledgement for issues that were far beyond my control.

The years of childhood neglect, the physical, mental and sexual abuse, the years of self loathing, self hatred, the feelings of emptiness and worthlessness, and the realization that I had been sacrificed by the Canadian Armed Forces to keep their secrets hidden finally came home to roost.

All of it is finally catching up.

I’m tired.

I want to go to sleep.

I don’t want any memories of the past.

I don’t want to remember being caught in P.S.’s bedroom.

I don’t want to remember the sexual abuse on CFB Namao. And let’s be very clear, P.S. could be very aggressive and depraved. This was not, as Alberta Crown prosecutor Jon Werbicki opined in October 2011, “childhood curiosity and experimentation “. P.S. would vent his own anger and hatred on the kids he was abusing, so let’s not mince any words here. There was no fun enjoyed by his victims.

I don’t want to remember watching P.S. sexually abuse my younger brother.

I don’t want to remember P.S. sexually abusing the other kids.

I don’t want to remember the five distinct visits to the chapel on CFB Namao to see Captain McRae in his living quarters. Visits that always ended with a sickly sweet grape juice. One of these visits hurts the most and will always stand out in my mind. I was with my father over at the storage unit he rented for his motorcycle. My father wasn’t around a lot. He’d bugger off for weeks or months on end and leave us in the care of his mother who was living on base with us. I really wasn’t helping him work on his motorcycle, but I just wanted to be near him. P.S. came walking by and asked my father if he wanted P.S. to look after me. I looked at my father hoping that he would say no. My father told me to go with P.S. and stay with him. P.S. took me right to the chapel.

After Mcpl Christian Cyr let slip to me in May of 2011 that the base padre Captain McRae had been arrested for molesting children on the base in 1980, I broke down and told him about the five visits to the rectory and the sickly sweet grape juice. And not having any memories after the grape juice. The CFNIS spent the entire rest of the investigation trying their best to gaslight me. When I finally received the court martial transcripts and the 1980 CFSIU investigation paperwork it killed me to find out that the CFSIU in 1980 knew that Captain McRae was luring children into the chapel and would give them alcohol before sexually assaulting them. The CFNIS had these documents in their possession through the entire 2011 CFNIS investigation.

I don’t want to remember my father threatening to kill me for fucking with his military career. When my father received his compassionate posting from CFB Summerside to CFB Namao in 1978 he ended up being attached to 447 squadron. 447 was the home of the tandem rotor heavy lift and troop transport helicopters. He arrived at that squadron when it was brand new. 447 Sqn wasn’t officially stood up until January 1979. I never knew what position my father had at 447. He would always go off on training exercises sometimes for 6 to 8 weeks at a time. The Chinooks were his escape from the responsibilities of his family. He could run off with his military buddies and leave me and my brother at home with his alcoholic mother who would hire P.S. to be our babysitter. In 2019 I learnt about my father’s death in 2017. I filed an ATI request with Library and Archives Canada for his service records. LAC complied and released a partial amount. But it was more than enough for me to understand that I really wasn’t exaggerating when I say that Richard despised me for “fucking with his military career”. Just after our arrival on CFB Namao in the summer of 1978, the Canadian Forces sent my father to Boeing-VERTOL for Maintenance Management training on the Chinook. Here he was, a kid from Fort McMurray, a kid with bugger all for formal education, and he was going to be a key player in the hierarchy of 447 Sqn. My abuse at the hands of P.S. caused us to be relocated off CFB Namao and sent down to CFB Griesbach. And then when Alberta Social Services divulged their plan to remove me from the home, the Canadian Forces arranged for my father to be posted to CFB Downsview in Ontario. Yeah, it looks as if he was right when he would often rage out that I had “fucked with his military career”. Sure, as a 50 year old man I fully understand that none of this was my fault. However when you’re 11 years old, you don’t understand this. When your father tells you that you fucked with his military career, that’s it, you fucked with his military career. You can’t undo the yelling, the screaming, the backhands, the belts. I lived through his rage, and there is no removing it from my brain.

I don’t want to remember the times my father would beat me and then beat me again for crying. Nothing would get Richard more enraged than crying. And what’s a sexually abused child with major depression and severe anxiety going to do? They tend to cry.

I don’t want to remember trying to hide under my captain’s bed to keep my father from getting hold of me. Richard could lose his temper. I learnt quickly that I could hide from Richard under my captain’s bed. Once he figured out where I was hiding he took all of the panels off the bed. I lost my safe space.

I don’t want to remember hoping and wishing all the time on CFB Griesbach that I would die in my sleep and never wake up again.

I don’t want to remember my grandmother’s alcoholism or my father’s alcoholism.

I don’t want to remember how Earl Stevens used his position of authority at the Dennison Armouries in Toronto to entrap me into providing sexual favours to him. Somehow Earl knew that I was a military dependent and that my father was in the Canadian Armed Forces and that I lived on a military base. Earl was retired from the Canadian Armed Forces and I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that he preyed upon children living on the bases that he was stationed at. He knew that if he touched me that blackmailing me would be very simple as male on male sexual assault is something that no one ever talked about on base. In fact you knew that if you got sexually abused on base the last people you ever wanted to find out were the military police or your own family.

I don’t want to remember the times my father would get angry at my school teachers for wanting to help me or to encourage me to take my hobbies seriously. This one I can’t really speak to or understand. Most parents would have died to have their child put extra effort into school. Not Richard. Just go to fucking school, stare at the fucking blackboard, and stop showing off.

I don’t want t remember being mugged in 1995 by a guy and his girlfriend only to have a Vancouver Police Officer tell me that he wasn’t going to investigate my mugging because he was certain that I was a homosexual prostitute. Even when I found a video tape that had the two suspects on it and showed the proximity to me in a line-up, this police constable refused to look at the matter.

I don’t want to remember all of the people in positions of authority who took advantage of my technical skills to make themselves look better while at the same time limiting my potential due to my lack of education.

I don’t want P.S., Captain Father Angus McRae, Captain Terry Totzke, Earl Ray Stevens, my father, or my grandmother living in my head. They all need to go.

I don’t want to remember all of the kids who beat the shit out of me as I left P.S.’s house the day I had been caught in his bedroom.

I don’t want to remember the kids at the various schools who used to beat the shit out of me for being different and not normal. Sure, I might have been odd and a bit of an asshole, but the Canadian Armed Forces decided that their secrets were worth more than my psychological well-being.

I don’t want to deal with the crushing major depressions or the severe anxiety anymore. I don’t want to wake up with night terrors, or have to have teeth removed because Ive cracked them due to excessive grinding. The anxiety is not fun. The major depression is a literal killer.

Sure, the Lexapro has brought the anxiety under control and seems to have tamed the anxiety monster, but they’re still there. I can feel their presence. I know they’re just waiting for my body to build up a tolerance to the serotonin and then they’ll come roaring back with a vengeance.

I’ve had the suicide monster lurking in my brain ever since the days of living on Canadian Forces Base Griesbach. The suicide monster is kinda easy to keep under control. But it’s there none the less. If I didn’t have a suicide monster living in my head after all that I’ve gone through then that would truly indicate that something was wrong.

So yeah.

There’s a lot of baggage in my skull. There’s a lot of trauma. There’s a lot of damage.

I’m tired, and I don’t want any of this anymore.

Knowing that the end is possibly within reach actually fills me with hope.

Think I’ll stop this post here.