Shake Hands With the Devil (6 page)

Then, on the evening of July 24, things got a whole lot worse. I arrived at the mess a little late and found a place not far from the door in the
TV
room. The supper-hour news came on. The top story of the day was Charles de Gaulle, the president of France, saluting massive crowds from the balcony of the Montreal city hall with “Vive le Québec. Vive le Québec libre!” The crowd on
TV
roared with obvious delight while the mess went dead silent—except for muffled scraping as people shifted in their seats to stare at the only Quebecker in the room. It seemed to me that the clip was repeated twenty times during that newscast, and each time I could feel more daggers coming at me. When
the newscast was over, the room emptied slowly. Nobody came up to me, nobody talked to me. I was part of the evil empire that was threatening to tear the country apart. The silence lasted for about two days. I was shunned not for who I was but for who I was assumed to be, and that experience remains burnt into my memory.

When I returned to
RMC
that fall, my future was in serious doubt. My poor mark from summer training and my even poorer academic performance at the college made failure seem inevitable. But at the last minute I locked into my old habit of creating a bubble of concentration and slowly and steadily pulled myself out of the hole.

In the fall of 1968, with the election of Pierre Trudeau and the publishing of the preliminary report of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, the language issue became more and more significant at
RMC
. In November, four of my francophone classmates convened a bilingualism committee and drafted a memorandum outlining the problems that francophones encountered at the college. They presented it to the commandant, which caused a minor explosion. The committee members were paraded in front of the commandant and asked to explain themselves—a frightening experience for the young officer cadets, who were being accused of harbouring nationalistic tendencies. But their quiet logic and commitment to their principles won the day, and they succeeded in forcing some small changes. Those of us who stayed in the Canadian Forces resolved to continue to monitor and defend French rights within the army. We were one of the first classes of French Canadians at
RMC
who were comfortable with our cultural identity; even so, only 58 of the 130 French-speaking cadets who had begun military college with me actually graduated in the spring of 1969.

I was posted to one of the brand new French-Canadian artillery units, the 5ième Régiment d'artillerie légère du Canada in Valcartier. It had been stood up in the winter of 1968 by General Allard and Prime Minister Trudeau, and had caused considerable acrimony as older English-speaking regiments were disbanded to make way for the francophone units. We were starting from scratch, actually building the regiment, which was housed in borrowed offices with little equipment or clerical help. Out of the four thousand gunners in the Canadian Forces
at the time, fewer than a hundred spoke French. We ended up with a lot of English-Canadian soldiers with French surnames but zero French language skills, and French Canadians who had worked outside of Quebec and had operated in English for so long that they had forgotten their French almost entirely. It was often frustrating, because I was forced to spend so much time translating all kinds of English paperwork into French. But there in Valcartier I had a taste of actually participating in regimental history.

By 1969 the mood in Quebec had begun to darken, fuelled by strikes and student protests, some of them pretty violent. A sudden wave of anger ripped through the province, setting hearts and minds on fire. Extremist separatist factions recast the complex struggle for cultural and linguistic identity into a fight against the anglo bosses. It seemed like the province was hovering on the brink of insurrection as Quebeckers—everyone from taxi drivers to medical workers—took to the streets in a series of crippling strikes and mass demonstrations.

Then there were the terrorists. The Front de libération du Québec (
FLQ
) had been active in the province since 1963, calling for the violent overthrow of the capitalist system and the establishment of an independent French socialist nation. The
FLQ
announced itself by conducting a serious bombing campaign, which targeted three Montreal-area armouries and included a thwarted attack on former Prime Minister John Diefenbaker's train. Another attack resulted in the maiming of a soldier, working as a bomb expert. The scale and violence of the assaults increased throughout 1969 and into 1970.

In Valcartier we were quietly training to withstand armed revolt. We all knew there was a strong possibility that we would be called in to help the civilian authorities quell riots, but just how serious the situation would get, nobody could guess. During my first year with the 5ième Régiment, we conducted exercises in crowd control and
VIP
and vital point protection. We were called out several times to restore order in prisons when guards walked out on strike, and we helped disperse crowds at some of the bigger demonstrations, including the Murray Hill bus drivers' strike where shots were fired. When three thousand
members of the Montreal police force walked off the job in October 1969, we were called in to keep the peace. The strike lasted five days. Later that month we were put on alert when forty thousand demonstrators marched on the National Assembly in Quebec City. We spent many nights and weekends camped out in our gun sheds standing guard over our weapons. A current of nervous excitement ran through the troops; we felt we would be tested sooner or later.

On October 5, 1970, the British trade commissioner to Quebec, James Cross, was kidnapped from his home in Westmount. The
FLQ
demanded that their manifesto be read in French and English live on the
CBC
, and the government acquiesced in order to save Cross's life. The manifesto talked of “total independence of all Québécois” and the release of “political prisoners.” General Allard, the former Chief of Defence Staff, and his family were stalked by an
FLQ
cell, and there were rumours of a plot to assassinate Trudeau. It was hard to believe this was happening in Canada. No one could tell if the
FLQ
were just a bunch of hotheads causing trouble or if they represented something more sinister. Then, on October 10, Pierre Laporte was kidnapped. It was as if the other shoe had dropped.

It was Thanksgiving and bitterly cold in Montreal. I was at home with my family for the long weekend. On Monday, my father said we'd probably be called out. At that point, I still couldn't believe the situation was so serious. I drove back to Quebec City that evening, arriving at my little basement apartment at about eleven-thirty. I had just settled in when the phone rang. We were being called out. I struggled into my combat gear and rushed upstairs to tell my landlord and his wife that I'd be away for a while and to hold my mail. I can only imagine what ran through the minds of that respectable, middle-aged couple when they woke in the middle of the night to find me on their doorstep, fully suited and wearing my helmet. The woman screamed and almost fainted, sure that civil war had broken out in Quebec. I hastened to reassure them.

At Valcartier, we trained hard for three days and then got the order to move; the government had invoked the War Measures Act, suspending civil law for the duration of the crisis. Our rules of engagement included the use of live ammunition to prevent acts of insurrection,
which meant that opening fire and shooting to kill were real possibilities. This situation presented me, at the age of twenty-four, with one of the most difficult ethical and moral dilemmas of my military career. Members of my own extended family, as well as friends from my old neighbourhood, were supporting the separatist movement. At any time I might see faces I knew in the hostile crowds that I was ordered to control. How would I react? Could I open fire on members of my own family?

As a young lieutenant, I had forty-one soldiers under my command. If I gave the order to shoot, I could not let my men sense the slightest shiver of doubt in my belief in the rightness of that order. Any uncertainty on my part would communicate itself to my men; any hesitation on their part could result in chaos and innocent casualties. In a nanosecond I had to be able to set aside deep personal loyalties and put the mission first. I spent many hours wrestling this issue before I could put aside my loyalty to my roots and wholeheartedly embrace my loyalty to my nation. I had to connect to a deeper commitment, past friendship, kinship or ethnicity, to absolutely believe in the rightness and justness of my path.

On October 17, the whole of the Canadian Army was deployed. Troops moved into the Ottawa-Hull area from out west; units from Petawawa moved into Montreal; the Airborne Regiment flew from Edmonton and was held in reserve at the military college in Saint-Jean. The bulk of our brigade was deployed to Quebec City. My regiment was posted to protect the National Assembly and other government buildings, as well as provincial politicians. There were huge convoys of troops entering Montreal, dozens upon dozens of Hercules transports thundering into Ottawa. We travelled from Valcartier in long columns, taking several routes into the heart of the city. I remember driving at the head of my column while people either honked their car horns and waved, or watched us pass in shocked disbelief that this was happening in Canada.

Later that day, the Quebec cabinet minister Pierre Laporte was found murdered, his body stuffed into the trunk of a car that had been abandoned in Montreal—the
FLQ
had answered our massive show of force unequivocally and violently.

Once deployed, we established our routine. For three months we worked constantly, six hours on post, six hours off, with a day off every
three weeks. We “hot-bedded” it, that is, we hauled out our sleeping bags to crash in the cots just vacated by the soldiers who relieved us. My troop rotated between standing guard outside the National Assembly and the main courthouse near the Château Frontenac in the heart of the old town. Through the bone-chilling cold of a Quebec fall and winter, we did six-hour shifts with only one twenty-minute break inside to warm up. We used to joke that if anyone wanted to start shooting, we wouldn't be able to handle the extra work. We took a fair amount of flak from separatist supporters who jeered and hassled us. A number of English-speaking troops in the regiment had families who lived off base and had no real protection from the mischief-makers who tracked them down and subjected them to harassment. The troops were allowed very little leave time, and they worried about their families. Their anxiety often boiled over in nasty scenes between them and the young French Canadians who served alongside them. The francophone soldiers were getting hostility from both sides. Some of them came from pro-separatist families who viewed them as traitors; at the same time, they were being branded by some of their comrades as untrustworthy “frogs.”

I would do my rounds with a crusty old sergeant, Roy Chiasson, a veteran from the Korean War. Because there was no action whatsoever, the troops needed constant reminders of the nature of the operation. They also needed a sounding board to talk over their difficulties. The sergeant and I spent countless hours out in the cold reinforcing and encouraging them. I have often been criticized for being an “emotional” leader, for not being macho enough, but even during this early stage in my career, I believed that the magic of command lies in openness, in being both sympathetic to the troops and at the same time being apart, in always projecting supreme confidence in my own ability and in theirs to accomplish whatever task is set for us.

Luckily, the October Crisis did not escalate to the point where lethal force was necessary, although there were some close calls that seemed pretty ugly at the time. One bitter evening late in November, my soldiers were guarding the Quebec Ministry of Justice and central courthouse. I was inside with a small reserve force of five or six men. Everything was quiet, so quiet that the Quebec City cops who shared
the building with us complained that since we'd arrived they were bored. All of a sudden a car came screeching down the street and stopped dead in front of one of my soldiers. The driver got out of the car, cursing a blue streak, and without any provocation, started beating up the soldier so severely that he ended up in hospital. I had guards posted around the building so that everybody was covered off and no one was isolated, but none of them could move from their positions to help their buddy because of the possibility that this was a trap or decoy. They radioed for backup and we raced out to assist. But the police, who were monitoring our radio frequency and were desperate for a little action, heard the call, too. In seconds, a half-dozen cop cars with sirens blaring and roof lights blazing came barrelling down the narrow street. Brawny cops leapt out, hauled the guy off and proceeded to make him regret whatever impulse had caused him to attack soldiers. As one officer said afterwards, “Nobody is going to hurt our soldiers and get away with it.” The police were protecting the soldiers who were there to protect law and order!

I was proud of my men. They had endured incredible provocation and responded exactly as trained. It pleased me that Sergeant Chiasson and I had been able to build that level of skill and discipline in the troop, that they had used their heads and followed orders. It was my first taste of true command.

On December 3, 1970, an army intelligence unit uncovered the approximate location of the
FLQ
cell that was holding James Cross prisoner. Almost an entire battalion of the Royal 22ième formed a tight circle around a block of nondescript row houses in north Montreal, and as the nation waited, the final tense negotiations to resolve the crisis began. Hours later, a thin, pale James Cross was hustled out of the house along with his kidnappers, who were placed on board a Yukon transport aircraft and flown to Cuba. The crisis was over. By January, I was back in Valcartier and the routine of peacetime soldiering.