In late August of 1985 my brother and I flew back from Edmonton after having spent the entire summer staying with our grandmother in Edmonton.
Upon our return to Canadian Forces Base Downsview in Ontario our father had to alert the base military police to our arrival back home.
The military police came to talk to my brother and I about a rage-out that our father had in the PMQ that had contributed a significant amount of damage to the PMQ and required 3 military police officers to bring him under control.
Richard’s rage-outs were nothing new, but during this one he had completely lost control and smashed out all of the ground floor windows and damaged a lot of the furniture.
Richard used to self medicate by getting himself pickled drunk. But since Sue moved in with us in the summer of 1980, she tried to get Richard to sober up.
Richard also had a thing for prescription pain meds. Beyond that I can’t say if he was ever into hard drugs or not. But yes, he was an alcoholic.
And by not self medicating, Richard’s physical rage and temper would often peak at boiling over.
The military police implored my brother and I to NOT call 9-1-1 but to instead call the base military police as the Toronto cops couldn’t just come on to the base.
The two military police officers told us that we shouldn’t call for help unless we got out of the PMQ first, and that we should be prepared to jump from the second story of the PMQ if we had to get away from Richard.
Looking back I now realize that the base military police didn’t want us calling 9-1-1 as the civilian police were duty bound to report domestic violence to civilian social services where as the military police and the Canadian Armed Forcesliked to keep things in house an out from under the noses of those nosey civilians.
The MPs gave my brother and I business cards with the direct phone number for the MPs so that we didn’t have to go through base switchboard.
I was going to go show one of my friends the business card and tell him how the military police promised me that they would protect me from Richard and his anger outbursts as the MPs had heard things from the neighbours about the way Richard treated my brother and I.
Bill Parker intercepted me as I walked across the common lawn that the PMQs surrounded.
Bob! Bob, come here, I need to talk to you.
Bill promised me that if my father ever got angry again that I could come stay with his family, just like my mother and I had done on Canadian Forces Base Shearwater. I would find out about the CFB Sheawater “Battered wives club” in the 2010’s.
I showed Bill the business card and told Bill that if the fucker ever hit me again that I’d call the military police and they’d come take care of Richard. Bill told me that I had to take it easy on my father, that I simply didn’t understand what my father had been through and how the Canadian Forces had abandoned him.
Bill went on to explain something about my father having sailed to England with the Sea Kings in 1969 and that there had been an explosion in the engine room on one of the ships and that my father lost three of his drinking buddies from when he had been in the Navy.
“Bob, I wish you knew your father before that. He was a completely different man. He would have been nice.”
Bill implored me to never ask my father about this, that I was supposed to keep this a secret and just understand and accept my father’s anger and temper.
August of 1985 was long before the advent of Netscape Navigator and Google.
I was in Sea Cadets at the time, so I devised a way in which I’d ask my father about this “engine room explosion” without asking him directly about it.
I came home one night after cadets and told him that as part of studying naval history in the Canadian Navy that I was supposed to write a report on ship explosions that would have occurred in 1969.
The blood drained from his face, his cigarette hung from his lower lip, and his fists clenched up. All he said was that if I ever asked him a question like that again that I wouldn’t have to worry about ship explosions because of my broken neck.
It was the early 2000’s when I discovered the HMCS Kootenay incident that occurred in October of 1969 when the ships from CFB Halifax and the Sea Kings from CFB Shearwater were returning from exercises to the UK. It wasn’t an engine that exploded. It was oil vapour in a high-speed gear box that ignited due to an overheated main bearing. 11 members of the navy died. The explosion had been swift and hot. It was so hot that it melted all of the aluminum ladders that lead out of the engine room / gear box room.
My father had been on the Kootenay in his navy days before unification gave him the opportunity to get out of the Navy and into the Air Force. His name won’t show up on any of the ship’s registers as he was with the Sea Kings in the Air Force and not the Navy.
When I met my mother, Marie, in 2013 she confirmed Richard’s involvement with the Kootenay incident saying that Richard became a different man in the days and weeks after. His drinking had increased, his violence increased, he started to exhibit a hair trigger temper.
When Richard was posted to CFB Summerside his temper and his drinking became even worse, hence why she tried to take my bother and I back to Nova Scotia to stay with our uncle Al, but why she ended up being ejected from the PMQ by the base military police.
I met a gentleman by the name of Chris Legerre in the summer of 2014 when I went to Halifax to see the city that I had been born in 42 years previously. Chris had been on the HMCS Kootenay on the day of the gearbox explosion.
Yep, the Canadian Armed Forces literally and figuratively fucked everyone over that had been involved in the incident. A complete lack of compassion. No mental health treatment, nada, zip, zilch. Drug use became rampant amongst the survivors. Families of the deceased were booted out of the military housing with absolutely no compassion shown to the kids.
And you’d think that things would have changed in the last 55 years, but you’d be sadly fucking mistaken.
The Canadian Armed Forces and the Department of National Defence don’t give one sliver of a flying fuck about the mental health of the members of the Canadian Forces . And from my personal experience the Canadian Armed Forces care even less about the family members of mentally ill service members that have to experience the untreated mental illness of the serving member.
See, in my day of living on the bases in Canada military dependents were of absolutely no concern to the Canadian Armed Forces and the Department of National Defence. We were referred to as D.F.&E., Dependents, furniture, and effects. It took lobbying by the Ombudsman to get the Canadian Armed Forces to change this and to stop lumping dependents in as the personal belonging of the serving member.
But that really didn’t change things.
David Pugliese of the Ottawa Citizen posted a link to a story by Morgan Lowrie of National News Watch that was about two member of the Canadian Armed Forces that committed suicide. They were brothers. Both had served in Afghanistan. The article talks about how the Canadian Armed Forces are going to give the mother of the two soldiers a silver star. The article however mentions nothing about the spouses of the deceased members, nor the children of the deceased members.
Children of service members that die in action or die as a result of committing suicide due to mental stress endured during service should automatically receive guaranteed scholarships to college or university or support through trade school.
Spouses should receive compensation up until the retirement age of the service member.
The Canadian Armed Forces asks a lot from its service members, and by extension it asks a lot from the families of the service members.
It should then have to look after the families of service members, and stop treating military dependents like an afterthought.
Beeshive 