Out Standing in the Field Read online

  OUT STANDING

  IN THE FIELD

  SANDRA PERRON

  OUT STANDING

  IN THE FIELD

  Copyright © 2017 Sandra Perron

  This edition copyright © 2017 Cormorant Books Inc.

  This is a first edition.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free 1.800.893.5777.

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for its publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (cbf) for our publishing activities, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation, an agency of the Ontario Ministry of Culture, and the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit Program.

  library and archives canada cataloguing in publication

  Perron, Sandra, author

  Out standing in the field: a memoir of military service / Sandra Perron.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  isbn 978-1-77086-494-8 (softcover).—isbn 978-1-77086-495-5 (HTML)

  1. Perron, Sandra. 2. Canada. Canadian Armed Forces. Royal Régiment, 22e. 3. Canada. Canadian Armed Forces. Royal Régiment, 22e—Women—Biography.4. Harassment in the military—Canada. 5. Military offenses--Canada. 6. Military discipline—Canada. 7. Canada—Armed Forces. 8. Canada—Armed Forces—Women—Biography. 9. Women soldiers—Canada—Biography.

  i. Title.

  u55.p475a3 2017 355.0092 c2016-907300-9

  c2016-907301-7

  TREE TOO WEAK TO STAND, Words and Music by

  GORDON LIGHTFOOT © 1975 WB MUSIC CORP. (ASCAP). All Rights Reserved.

  Used by Permission of ALFRED PUBLISHING, LLC

  Cover photo: Ross MacDonald

  Cover design: angeljohnguerra.com

  Interior text design: Tannice Goddard, bookstopress.com

  Printer: Friesens

  Printed and bound in Canada.

  The interior of this book is printed on 100% post-consumer waste recycled paper.

  cormorant books inc.

  10 st. mary street, suite 615, toronto, ontario, m4y 1p9

  www.cormorantbooks.com

  To my loving parents and my three beautiful sisters.

  Thank you for always believing in me.

  And to all past and present men and women of the

  Canadian Forces who willingly put themselves

  in harm’s way to contribute to a better world.

  OUT STANDING

  IN THE FIELD

  one

  100th Anniversary of the Van Doos

  My expectations for the evening were as big as the grand ballroom of the Delta Hotel in historic Quebec City. Red, blue, and yellow lights sparkled from the high ceiling and each wall was adorned with floor-to-ceiling drapes highlighted by Academy Award-like spotlights, also in the three regimental colours. A flag of the Royal 22e Régiment hung on the left side of the front stage’s backdrop, while a huge banner of the regimental beaver insignia graced the right side. In the centre a giant screen flashed pictures of “Van Doos,” soldiers from the regiment in various eras of war, training, and deployments around the world. Round tables were squeezed together, each one dressed up with a tall glass centrepiece filled with bubbly liquid, also in the regimental colours. Trumpets, snare drums, violins, and flutes from the regimental band belted out “Vive la Canadienne,” a cue for the nearly two thousand guests to find their assigned tables. Following protocol, soldiers, officers, veterans, and their spouses, all dressed in their best suits and evening gowns for this special one hundredth anniversary of the Royal 22e Régiment, reluctantly cut short their conversations and headed for their seats.

  I wore a royal blue gown, one of the regiment’s colours, accompanied by expensive nylons, silver sandals, and a small Van Doo beaver proudly fastened on my dress strap. My long hair was pinned up, but wisps of curls escaped on the sides. I had never spent so much time getting ready for an evening out, but tonight I desperately needed to feel strong, beautiful, and composed. Tonight was momentous.

  I’d been waiting for this reunion for the last twenty-two years. Tension radiated throughout my body. I felt like I was returning to a war zone to pick up something I had left behind; something I had once cherished and now couldn’t live without.

  Tonight, I would get it back.

  At my table sat five other officers, each accompanied by his wife. There was nostalgia in the way these five officers and I looked at each other; a deep connection that transcended two decades — marriages, children, the loss of loved ones, tours of duty in Bosnia, Croatia, Afghanistan. These men had been nicknamed the “Pepperoni Lovers” in reference to my last name because they had chosen to become my allies during our infantry training in 1992. For some of them, the price of that choice had been steep. We’d been through hell that spring, but we’d become infantry soldiers together.

  Two tables over sat the men who had been on the other side of my front line, officers who had set their crosshairs on me when I became Canada’s first female infantry officer. They’d done things to me that no person should have to endure in the workplace, despite being my colleagues, men with whom I would eventually deploy to war-torn countries to serve side-by-side. Their reasons? I was breaking the barriers of their beloved male bastion. I was intruding upon the sanctity of a male-only combat unit, threatening their beliefs about what it meant to be a soldier. I was not welcome in their regiment, and had they let me know it relentlessly, until the only option I felt I had left was to become a civilian once again.

  Most of them were in senior command positions now, leading combat units, developing policies in Ottawa, shaping the future of the military. They had been rewarded generously for their leadership. I had not seen them since I’d left the military, but somehow I felt that this evening would give me closure, healing the wounds they’d left me with.

  I expected, perhaps irrationally, that they would apologize to me tonight. For too long I had denied wishing for such contrition but in the last few months I’d come to realize that it would give me a reassurance that the conditions I had endured would not be acceptable today.

  I looked forward to having them see me, to having them remember the young woman they had harassed, excluded, and abused, and yet who was here, without resentment, to celebrate her regiment’s one hundred years of valiant history. Tonight they’d show me the deep regret, guilt, and remorse for what they had done. In their eyes I would see enlightenment, a profound awareness that twenty-two years before, they’d been bastards who didn’t realize that their actions would force me to leave the army, robbing me of my dream to be an infantry officer. Tonight, they would apologize and I would know for certain that the next generation of women would be treated with respect.

  Yes, that is what I was here to retrieve from my dark past’s battlefield.

  Peace.

  two

  School of Hard Knuckles

  My father sat on the edge of our black leather couch with his clenched fists held out so that his knuckles leaned up against my own. His smiling crow’s feet betrayed his serious attempt to stare me into giving up this game, Knuckles, which we had been playing for some time. My two younger sisters were stretched out on the opposite couch, and the oldest was lounging on the red shaggy carpet, all three watching Saturday morning
cartoons.

  It was my dad’s turn to strike, and at lightning speed he tried to hit the top of my small knuckles with his larger ones. I narrowly dodged his attempt. It was my turn to try to hit his. I nervously tried to flip one of my braids behind my head before realizing that I no longer had any locks to flip back. The previous week, my mother had lost patience trying keep her four daughters’ hair properly untangled and combed. She called us into the house one by one, while the others played outside unsuspectingly, and cut off the two thick braids each of us sported. She placed these in a keepsake envelope and sent us back outside to continue playing with a loving pat, as if nothing had happened. The neighbours must have thought she’d gone mad, but we laughed at each other’s outrageously short and crooked haircuts — until we got a glimpse of our own heads in the mirror as we brushed our teeth before bedtime. The giggles stopped abruptly. We all looked like boys.

  I laughed and my father grinned back at me, his emerald green eyes staring intently at mine, daring me to be bold. I twitched my knuckles, feigning a few times to lure him into a false sense of security. His eyes did not leave mine. Then, at the precise moment I felt he wouldn’t be expecting a full-blown attack, I went for the kill. My knuckles sailed through the air with no resistance. He laughed, but this time his comeback was immediate. His knuckles made swift contact with mine. I felt the sharp pain of bone on bone. I inhaled sharply, and one of my sisters winced on my behalf. I laughed as I returned my fists to their on-guard position, ready for the next wave of strikes. I stood in front of him, my skinny ten-year-old body putting me at the perfect height to pound his knuckles when it was my turn to attack, but unfortunately I hadn’t yet honed the reflexes I needed to be very good at this game.

  To the reader, this game between a grown man and a ten-year-old girl probably seems unfair. But to us, it was nothing of the sort. With three sisters who competed for his attention, it was no easy task to score time with him, apart from when I sat on the toilet seat lid early in the morning to watch him shave before going to work. I had him all to myself then. He would slap on his aftershave, then gently pat my face with what was left on his hands, and I would go back to bed with the smell of him lingering on my face.

  Bloody knuckles was a ritual shared between my father and me; it connected me to him in an unexplainable, yet powerful way. It was our thing.

  “Give up!” he would plead, to which my answer was always “Never!”

  I knew that in a matter of minutes, seemingly always at the precise moment when I approached the limits of endurance, my mother would charge into our living room and yell at my father for playing this game with me, even though she knew it was my begging that he responded to. I heard her puttering in the kitchen, preparing breakfast. Despite being only five feet two inches and barely a hundred pounds, my mom would shove my dad aside so that he had to stop playing with me. My mother, a hiking-booted, French-Canadian version of a southern belle, has the energy of a battalion. If she decides to make something happen, it is best to get out of her way. My dad would growl, capture her affectionately in his arms, and wrestle her to the ground until she giggled so hard she had to keep her legs crossed so as not to pee. Although I would pretend to be hugely disappointed at the interruption, this enabled me to rub my aching knuckles discreetly, and blink away my tears.

  My father was an ambitious young military firefighter, often away on courses, training, and exercises, sometimes for months at a time. When he’d joined the Canadian Forces in 1959, his first section commander had been an anglophone sergeant who couldn’t pronounce his French-Canadian name: Gaëtan (Gay-tan). The sergeant had told my father that from that day forward his name would be Guy. Knowing that we would be moving across the country on multiple postings, he and my mother had consciously decided to give all four of their daughters bilingual names: Line, Sandra, Nathaly, and Nancy. Both my parents had struggled to learn English as adults, and so made a pact that their children would be bilingual, attending anglophone school but speaking French at home. It was one of the most precious gifts they gave us as we moved from province to province.

  My father had bought a tape recorder that he always carried when he was away for longer periods; he recorded lengthy letters to us, sharing stories of his training, his daily military life, and how he missed “his girls.” When we received one of his tapes, my mother would call us to the kitchen table in the evening after supper and we’d huddle over the tape recorder as if we could get closer to him somehow, his voice transported thousands of miles through the small machine. I could almost see his strong jutting chin and the military buzz cut. Sometimes later at night I’d hear my mom alone in their bedroom, listening to parts of the tape only she was allowed to hear. I never heard her cry. She’d accepted long ago that being a military wife meant being a single parent for long periods of time and that, in turn, meant she had very little energy to dwell on what she was missing.

  My mother’s anticipation and excitement was contagious on the days leading up to my dad’s return from his trips. When he arrived, often in the early evening, my three sisters and I had already been bathed, prettied up, and lined up on the couch like picture-perfect daughters who’d been little angels while he was gone. In the early years, we played “ride the train” in the afternoon. My mother would line four kitchen chairs one behind the other and all four of us, ranging from two to seven, would have to sit on board the “train,” with our virtual tickets ready for check-in. While she swept and washed the floors, she’d talk us through a long voyage around the world, injecting the occasional “choo-chooooo!” and “keep your feet and hands inside the train!” If we stayed in our seats the entire time, we’d be served a snack. By the time my father finally walked through the front door of our pmq (Private Military Quarters), it had been cleaned from top to bottom, with only the neon light from the stove on, a sure sign we’d be shooed off to bed as soon as we got a few hugs and a piece of warm apple pie à la mode, his favourite dessert.

  My knuckles were aching now. I could tell he was torn between wanting me to stop the game and his pride and amusement at watching me tough it out. I craved the admiration I saw in his eyes, even as tears swelled up in mine. I would later think that this was stubbornness school and that, contrary to popular belief, I hadn’t inherited the gene or been born pigheaded. I had learned it here, playing knuckles with my just-as-stubborn father.

  “Come on, give up!” he said, grinning handsomely. “Give up, ma p’tite tête de cochon!”

  •••

  i turned fourteen in 1979 and joined the 2551 Canadian Airborne Cadets Corps in Edmonton, where my family was posted at the time. Actually, it was my father who was posted there, but when one of your parents is in the Canadian Forces, the entire family becomes part of the posting as well. Military spouses get “promoted” alongside their spouse and children become base brats who barely balk at the idea of giving up all their friends to move to a new base every two or three years. Occasionally they attend schools on the military base with the other kids, and go to military church for Sunday service led by a military padre. It is a disciplined, hierarchical way of life that seeps into everyday activities almost unconsciously. I enjoyed it enough to push it further by joining cadets and it was transformative in every area of my life. So much so, that after I put on the dark green cadet uniform with the maroon beret that year, I never felt like a civilian again. A skinny teenager who was neither a girlie girl nor a brainy student, athletic only in individual sports, I had felt like an outcast until I became part of the Airborne family; learning to climb mountains, manoeuvre a canoe, navigate with a map and compass, fire rifles, and rappel from helicopters. I was finally good at something. In addition to being imbued with self-confidence from leaders who continually inspired me, I learned to lead and teach, to coach and mentor. I became best friends with Valerie, another airborne cadet, with whom I could share my dreams of joining the army and becoming a paratrooper. She used to call me “balcony
jumper” (my last name in French means porch or patio), and I’d call her Walerie in reference to how an Asian receptionist at her dentist’s office had pronounced her name: “Next please, Walerie Wochester.” In her parents’ old lime-green Ford pickup truck, she was brave enough to teach me how to drive. Together we ventured out to take on our teenage years with curiosity and boldness. We discovered boys. We fell in and out of love. We were going to join the army together, become paratroopers in the same battalion and the godmothers of each other’s daughters who would be born on exactly the same day and would grow up to be best friends and paratroopers too.

  But life had other plans. Valerie chose not to become an officer in the Canadian Forces, but rather to become a non-commissioned member, a supply technician, right after high school, and she was posted to Calgary. I wanted to attend university and to become an officer.

  When I went to the Edmonton recruiting office in December of 1983 to apply to join the Canadian Forces and was asked which “classification” I wanted to work in after graduating basic training if I was accepted, the answer had been in the making for four years. I smiled at the recruiting officer sitting behind a laminate wood desk and responded enthusiastically.

  “I want to be a commando, sir. Airborne!” I stood at attention in the man’s office, staring at the stack of personnel file folders piled high in his in-basket. The young captain made a sound that resembled something between a chuckle and a snort, replying that I couldn’t be Airborne since I needed to have paratrooper wings for that. I eagerly advised him that I did have wings. I’d graduated from Basic Parachutist last summer with army cadets, I told him. His eyebrows lifted and he pursed his lips in disbelief. I could tell he was skeptical and there was a good reason for it. The three-week Basic Para Course is one of the toughest courses offered to military personnel, designed to mould soldiers into paratroopers who can be dropped deep into enemy territory. Exceptionally, the summer course would open its roster to allow a few of Canada’s top cadets to attend the training after completing an additional three-week pre-Para indoctrination in Valcartier, Quebec. I had not only graduated from the course but had been chosen as top cadet. The following year I had pinned the same parachutist wings on my father, who had been goaded by his firefighters into completing the course even though he was air force and thought it was ridiculous to jump out of a perfectly functional airplane.