Shake Hands With the Devil (8 page)

Luckily, the commanding officer was a reasonable, open-minded man named Tim Sparling, who gave me the go-ahead to try out French commands in the field. I ran a conversion course, translating all the technical stuff into French; it worked like a charm, and our effectiveness increased dramatically. The signallers were ecstatic because they finally understood what they were saying. Over the years there had been much muttering about me being a French-Canadian nationalist, but nobody could argue with the result. When the troops were able to fight in their own language, there was a positive surge in morale and effectiveness.

I was soon given the opportunity to attend the U.S. Marine Corps Command and Staff College in Virginia. It was a great year, although it took my family and me a while to adjust to the culture. Our sponsors
were Major Bob List and his wife, Marty. List was an A-6 Intruder fighter bomber pilot who flew off aircraft carriers during his two long tours in Vietnam. He and his wife got a bit of a surprise when their young daughter, listening to Willem speak French, cried out, “He doesn't speak English!” To which I responded, immediately and without thinking, “He doesn't speak American either.” Things went uphill from there.

At the staff college in Virginia, I saw first-hand the terrible price exacted by Vietnam. There wasn't one of my instructors and fellow officers whose body had not been horribly scarred in battle. The mental toll was equally apparent, revealing itself in bitter invectives against the U.S. generals and higher command who had either screwed up in the field or stayed comfortably at home. I wondered whether I wouldn't have been equally suspicious of politicians, grand strategists and pencil pushers from
NDHQ
if I had lost 63 per cent of my classmates in combat.

I put my nose to the grindstone and managed to reasonably distinguish myself academically, producing a research paper on circumpolar threats and the nature of Arctic warfare, which was later used by National Defence Headquarters when it was seriously considering setting up a permanent garrison of army, navy and air force personnel along the Northwest Passage.

Immediately upon returning to Canada I was appointed executive assistant to the deputy commander of the army, Major General Doug Baker, a privileged position. He was known to everybody as “Two Gun” Baker because of his straight-shooting style of command. As the army's senior serving gunner, he was the godfather of the artillery. The war in the Falklands was on, and we seemed to be constantly zipping around the country or back and forth to Britain and the United States, with the general munching on chocolate bars, immersed in one of the several horse operas he always carried with him, while I dutifully read Clausewitz's
On War
.

General Baker was a hard taskmaster with a demanding work ethic and extremely high standards. He never counted his hours and I learned not to count mine. Paperwork was limited during regular working hours, as that time was reserved for decision-making and for his troops.

In the summer of 1982, I was promoted to lieutenant colonel and
our daughter Catherine joined the growing ranks of the Dallaire family. I spent less than a year as the deputy chief of staff of a militia area headquarters in Montreal. In March 1983, I returned to Valcartier as the commanding officer of the 5ième Régiment d'artillerie légère du Canada, with a troop strength of over six hundred. It was a very different outfit from the struggling young regiment I had joined as a young lieutenant. For the fifteenth anniversary of the regiment, we were to receive the Freedom of the City of Quebec. Gunners had been a part of the old garrison town's history since 1608 and, during our day of celebration, we marched through the streets of the old walled city with our guns to receive the honour from the mayor, Jean Pelletier.

But there was a feeling in many quarters that because the 5ième was one of the specially created French units, it had never been really tested. In April 1985, there was going to be a big army exercise in Alberta called RV85, and I was determined that during this two-month exercise, my gunners were going to outshoot and outmanoeuvre the rest of the Canadian artillery.

Nine months before the exercise, I brought in a couple of my operations staff officers, Captain André Richard and Captain Michel Bonnet, to devise a training plan guaranteed to produce the best artillery regiment in the army. During the first week of September, I assembled the whole regiment into the big theatre on the base, sat them down and said, “I think it is high time that we show the rest of the artillery that we are not second-class citizens.” A hush fell over the room. Although soldiers had muttered these kinds of sentiments to themselves, no senior officer had ever had the temerity to get up and publicly acknowledge that this is how we were viewed. At the very end of the speech, I said, “I need every single one of you there, body and soul, for that exercise, and I don't want to see any of you having to pull out because your wives are expecting.” There was much laughter, but those words came back to haunt me.

For the next six months we worked hard. I scrounged ammunition, equipment, more training time in the field, more winter exercises with the guns. I kept pushing the troops to go beyond their own expectations to reach what I believed was their potential. My soldiers were magnificent, focused, diligent and totally committed.

When we arrived in Suffield, Alberta, the largest training area in the country, we were technically and tactically ready. As the exercise went into its second month, the army and divisional commanders confirmed that my regiment was not only the best artillery regiment in the corps, but one of the best combat units in the division.

Two days before the end of the exercise, I got a phone call. Beth was pregnant with Guy at the time and was having complications. The doctor had moved her into the hospital because he was concerned she might lose the baby. I knew I had to be with Beth. I went on the radio net to tell everyone in the regiment that I had to leave. My voice was breaking, and I was keenly aware that I was doing something I had asked them not to do. Later, back in Valcartier, I lost track of the number of gunners who came up to me and thanked me for not keeping a stiff upper lip, for being human, for sharing my life and my struggle with them.

Guy was born a few days later, and both he and Beth came through in fine shape. I bought a beer for every member of the regiment.

In 1986 I was in Ottawa at National Defence Headquarters as a section head, learning the ropes of project management and procurement. Promoted to full colonel, I was appointed the director of the army equipment and research program, a job I relished, since one of the overwhelming problems facing the Canadian military was the lack of expenditure and rational plan for the acquisition of the systems we needed to remain operational. It was a perfect job, with a tolerant boss, Major General Richard Evraire, who gave us guidance, a team of near-workaholics, and the advice of a small inner cabinet to help us keep within the tolerances of the friction war we were fighting with the air force and navy, and with the federal bureaucrats.

In response to increasing pressure from the United States, which under Ronald Reagan was spending trillions to win the Cold War, Brian Mulroney's Conservative government announced that it was committed to increase defence spending. The government asked for a white paper that would plot a fifteen-year strategy to bring the Canadian military up to scratch. At National Defence Headquarters, we were jubilant. Finally we could start to think about real defence budgets, maybe in the $18-billion range for the army alone, and
about increasing the forces from about 72,000 to 90,000 regular members, and doubling the reserves from 45,000 to 90,000. Instead of being a shop-window force with no sustainability, we had a chance to become a truly credible defence force able to live up to our
NATO
commitments.

We worked constantly on the white paper. We believed that if we could come up with the right arguments and the right fiscal package, we might actually persuade the government and the country of the wisdom of supporting a larger, better-equipped and better-financed military. I worked with my small inner core of about sixty dedicated staff of captains, majors, and lieutenant colonels and my sterling deputy, Howie Marsh. We worked nights, weekends and statutory holidays (some of us had cots in our office) for eight months.

Then on March 17, 1987, word came down from the Department of National Defence that cabinet had decided that our plan was not affordable. Some of us cried in shocked anger and disbelief. Still, the young and ambitious minister of national defence, Perrin Beatty, decided that we should continue work on the policy document, and table it in the House of Commons, even though he knew it would never be implemented. We expected an outcry from the senior generals and admirals who had persuaded us that this battle for a new policy base and funding line was the closest we would get to the high stakes of war, but none of them uttered a peep of protest.

I had never seen morale drop so fast and so violently in a group of experienced officers as it did on that day in March 1987.

I sat in the gallery of the House of Commons on June 5 when Beatty tabled a toothless and even hypocritical document. Over the next two years, the Conservatives hacked and slashed what was left of our acquisition programs. I finally left Ottawa in disgust in the summer of 1989. I wouldn't say I was disillusioned, but I had suffered a loss of innocence.

My family and I moved back to the Montreal area. I was promoted brigadier general to take up the position of commandant at the Collège militaire royal. I adored the job. It was not only a magnificent challenge, but it brought me back to the place I had started from and gave me a chance to reappraise myself. The routine helped heal some of the
wounds of Ottawa, and my wife and I also revelled in the social life with its extraordinary mixture of academics, officers, and cadets, integrated in one institution and pursuing the same objective: the development of future officers. The principal, Roch Carrier, was an acclaimed writer who hid his strong will and determination behind a calm and serene manner. Our two years together were an absolute joy.

My interest was to try to improve leadership training. When I arrived, little formal military leadership material and experience were being passed on to the future officers. The task was immense, since the Canadian Forces at the time had little to no formal material to provide. My generation had been on the receiving end of experience passed down from our elders, who got theirs from Second World War and Korean War veterans. As the guys with the combat medals retired, with very little of their experience put to paper, leadership training became more and more difficult for those who had not been in battle. It was simpler for most to teach physical fitness or
conciergerie.
The principles of military leadership remain difficult to teach.

Before my work at the college was complete, I was selected to attend the Higher Command and Staff course in Camberley, England. The Gulf War had just started, so we dubbed the course “How to Do Schwarzkopf's Job.”

When I returned to Canada, I was appointed commander of the 5ième Group Brigade Mechanisé du Canada at Valcartier. I was taking charge of about 5,200 military personnel, 1,200 civilian support staff and related historic garrison duties in Quebec City, the oldest capital in North America. I was the first officer who had started his career with the 5ième to command it; Valcartier was a superb operational posting at the height of the Gulf War and the beginning of a new era of peacekeeping and conflict resolution for the Canadian military.

I worked constantly. We lived in the brigade commander's historic official residence on the Plains of Abraham; my kids attended Catholic private schools, run by religious orders in the old city; I was driven the twenty-six kilometres to the base in an impeccable black staff car; my wife was a pillar of the community and worked hard to support the families of soldiers away on missions. I was excited by the wealth of possibilities that lay before me, but I was also completely and utterly alone.
I never seemed to have an extra moment to spend with my children, and only now do I realize how much they suffered as they watched me work at my desk or at the dining-room table during the rare hours when I was at home.

Commanding such a large contingent of soldiers in a bastion of Quebec that had nationalist sympathies was a delicate balancing act. That was never clearer to me and my headquarters staff than during an exercise aimed at training a 1,600-person contingent for a high-risk peacekeeping mission in the former Yugoslavia. We were training the troops in escort tasks and convoy protection, and to provide a little more realism, we had planned manoeuvres in local communities on a specific day, alerting the police and the town councils as to what we were doing. It turned out that on that very day Prime Minister Mulroney was in town with other premiers to negotiate the Meech Lake Accord, which was designed to reconcile Quebec to staying in Canada under special status. Someone told the media that the prime minister was trying to intimidate the separatists by ordering up a huge display of military force.

I was ordered to stop the exercise and move the blue berets back to barracks with our tails between our legs. Caught by journalists later that day, I apparently created a small storm in Ottawa by accusing the media of fostering Quebec paranoia and of jumping to conclusions without making the effort to find out what was really going on. Someone in Ottawa must have stood up for me, because I never heard about it again.

From 1991 to 1993, the brigade sent more than four thousand troops on peacekeeping missions in places all over the world, from Cambodia to the Balkans to Kuwait. At one point I called the commander of the army to suggest that my whole brigade headquarters be moved overseas, since it felt like I was the only one left at home. He thanked me for the moment of levity, but told me I should prepare for even more
UN
taskings. I couldn't figure out where I would get the troops.