I really wish that I had learnt earlier in life that the Canadian Armed Forces were nothing to look up to.
As a child growing up in a military family living on military bases you get exposed to the military in a way that civilians aren’t exposed to.
I’ve flown in a Sea King.
I’ve flown in a Chinook more than a few times.
I’ve flown in a Hercules at least once.
These flights were typically on “family days” on base, but with the Chinooks it was when I was at the squadron I could go on test flights if I promised to keep my mouth shut and just sit there.
And when the Canadian Forces used to operate passenger planes for transferring personnel, I flew in one of these from Canadian Forces Base Shearwater to Canadian Forces Base Namao.
I don’t remember going to the squadron on CFB Shearwater or on CFB Summerside, but I was a frequent visitor to 447 Sqn on CFB Namao in the days prior to the Captain McRae fiasco. I knew how to turn on the DC breakers to get power to the cockpit radio and I knew how to select the AM band and tune in the local radio station and kill time in the cockpit while my father was busy doing who the hell knows what. Yeah, I knew how to tune into the base tower or the local civilian towers, but this wasn’t as much fun as the radio.
I followed a mechanic up on top of a Chinook once. The rotors were off the helicopter and he was doing something with the swash plate assemblies. This was prior to us moving off CFB Namao in September of 1980 so I would have been around 8. I was out of my father’s hair so he didn’t give a shit so long as I didn’t fall off and create paperwork.
So, this is as good as it gets.
Sure, my father was a drunk and an asshole, but so were a lot of the other guys. And they all seemed to love hanging out together at the mess. Yeah, my father could get angry and issue beatings, but that was my fault. He wouldn’t hit me or beat me if I didn’t deserve it, right?
And after what I had done on CFB Namao with the babysitter and Captain McRae I really deserved his anger and his fury, right?
For the majority of my life I held the Canadian Armed Forces in high regard.
And of course that didn’t change until May of 2011 when Master Corporal Christian Cyr let the beans out about the whole Captain Father Angus McRae fiasco.
To this day I can’t believe that I was so fucking stupid to believe that the Canadian Armed Forces had any honour.
The more I dug into the whens and whys of the Captain McRae fiasco the more it became crystal clear that the Canadian Armed Forces is an organization that places more concern in its public image and its ability to “wash the laundry in house”.
It cares not about the children living on base.
It cares not about the families living on base.
And it really doesn’t care about the individual members of the Canadian Armed Forces.
It’s a soulless entity that will destroy lives in order to protect its image.
Men like my father?
Just fucking mindless robots that go along with what they’re told because they’re not allowed to think on their own. They’re part of the hive-mind or the Borg. Completely fucking useless automatons that can’t do fuck all unless the chain of command tells them to.
The Canadian Armed Forces will never reward individuality. The Canadian Armed Forces is all about conformity and following orders.
If the Chain of Command tells you that you 8 year old son is a homosexual because he was found being buggered by his 14 year old babysitter, well who the hell are you to question the wisdom of the chain of command?
If a Colonel doesn’t want the public to know that over 25 children were sexually abused for a two-year period on his base, then the public isn’t going to find out. Fuck the victims. Just charge McRae with enough crimes to get him the boot from the military, but don’t charge McRae with the full extent as this will only call your command ability into question and your plan of retiring from the Canadian Armed Forces as a Brigadier General will be at risk.
And don’t forget, in 2011 the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service knew the whole sordid affair from CFB Namao as they had the CFSIU DS 120-10-80 investigation paperwork as well as the Courts Martial transcripts for CM62 in their possession. They knew the full fucking truth. But they still insisted on running a dog’n’pony show investigation because there was no way that the Canadian Armed Forces was ever going to willingly suffer the public humiliation of having the Canadian public discover that the military had historically hidden child sexual abuse that occurred on the bases in Canada and that the problem was quite extensive.
And that’s the lesson that I wished I had learnt earlier in life.
Maybe not too young, but at least by my early 20s.
Beeshive 