Shake Hands With the Devil (5 page)

In high school I carried on as an indifferent scholar, more interested in sports than studying, until the day an old friend of my father's stopped in at the house for a visit. He was a major who had served with my dad in the war. They talked army all night, and I eavesdropped. The dream of soldiering was still with me; I had joined the cadets and spent all of my summers under canvas at Farnham, an old First World War military camp south of Montreal. There I learned tactical manoeuvres and how to use a machine gun from Korean and Second World War vets. I idolized those teachers.

Pausing between reminiscences, my father said to his friend, “You know, my son is thinking of going to military college.”

The major smiled and turned to me. “That's fine, son. How are your marks?”

I told him.

“Well, you know, young man, you're not even going to get close to the military college with marks like that. You have to be in the eighties—and solidly in the eighties—to even be considered.” Lending weight to his remark was the fact that for my father's generation, military college was only for the sons of senior officers; an
NCO
's child would never have been admitted.

After the major left, my father didn't say much, undoubtedly sparing my feelings. But I had sensed a different message in the way the old major had spoken to me, the way his eyes had held mine: I was sure that he actually thought I could do it and was challenging me to succeed. With the help of my friend, Michel Chevrette, whose work ethic to that point had totally eclipsed mine, I learned how to knuckle down. Surprising my family and myself, my average rose from 72 per cent in
grade nine to 91 per cent in grades ten, eleven and twelve. I'd close the door to my room and put the radio on, creating my own bubble to study in. On the weekends, Michel and I would sometimes study for twelve hours straight. When I was in grade eleven, my parents actually marched me downstairs one Sunday afternoon and told me that I was not living with the family anymore, that they were tired of seeing me only at mealtimes. They were right; I'd eat quickly, do the dishes and then disappear back into my room. But I had broken the code; I had found the determination to stick to that desk and work, and I wasn't about to give up now.

Just before graduation, the brothers sent us on a silent retreat so we could meditate and seek divine guidance on our future direction in life. For most of us, going on a retreat meant stocking up on
Playboy
magazines and chocolate bars, but while we were there, the odd bit of wisdom stuck. We went to confession and I ended up with a fat, old priest who was a retired army padre. He was a bit of a mess, his black soutane stained with ketchup, his ill-shaven face pale and his eyes bloodshot. And there was me, with my bony knees pressed into the cold, stone floor, and no clue what to say. After a long uncomfortable silence, he looked at me through his grubby glasses and asked me what I planned to do with my life. I told him that I'd applied to military college and wanted a career in the army like my dad. He settled back in his chair, his voice taking on a wistful note. “Ahh, soldiers,” he said. “You know, soldiers are very unusual people. On the outside, they are the hardest, most demanding, severe people, but underneath that, they are the most human, the most feeling, the most emotionally attached people who exist.” Those words perfectly expressed the depth of feeling I saw between my father and his army buddies, and the feeling that had passed between me and the old major, and they would come to describe the deep regard that always existed between my troops and I. I wanted more of that feeling.

I came of age in the Quebec of the Quiet Revolution and, like my parents, was an ardent believer in the vision of Jean Lesage, the premier of Quebec in the early sixties. With the defeat of Maurice Duplessis, who had run the province as his personal fiefdom for close to twenty years,
Quebec burst from the dark, church-bound isolation of the forties and fifties with a boldness and energy that seemed perfectly in tune with the times. In school I was part of a massive movement spearheaded by our teachers, called “Le Bon Parler français,” which emphasized respect, even reverence, for French and was an assault on the anglicisms that were creeping into the language. My generation became both confident and passionate about seeking equal recognition for the rights of the French-Canadian minority within Canada. In the words of Jean Lesage, “In Canada, ‘French' and ‘English' are our first names. Our surname is ‘Canadian.' We must be true to our heritage, but we must also be true to our first name as it is our individuality, our soul, and we must not have any inferiority or superiority complex.”

But I was about to enter a military culture that lagged far behind the rest of the country in recognizing the rights and differences of French-speaking Canadians. In the fifties, the Canadian Forces had opened up recruitment to meet the demands of the Korean War and the newly formed North Atlantic Treaty Organization (
NATO
). The numbers enlisting from Quebec were embarrassingly low; potential recruits from that province were repelled by an armed forces that was English-dominated and highly intolerant of French Canadians. In 1952, a courageous member of the Opposition from Trois-Rivières, Léon Balcer, stood up in the House of Commons and challenged Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent, a fellow francophone, about the reasons for the low recruitment figures and especially for the lack of French-speaking officers in all the branches of the service. He sparked a political fracas that had a huge impact in Quebec. After all kinds of studies and commissions, the Collège militaire royal de Saint-Jean (
CMR
) was set up in 1952. Visionaries such as Major General J.E.P. Bernatchez and General Jean Victor Allard, the only francophones who had reached the rank of general at the time, pushed and prodded behind the scenes to eradicate inequalities and to educate and nurture French-speaking officers. I became one of the many beneficiaries of this monumental effort to eliminate the redneck policies that had ruled the Canadian Armed Forces in the past.

The night before I left for military college, my father and I took a walk around the block. I was eighteen and about to leave home for good, and he seemed to believe that I was ready for the most profound advice he could offer. Though he was enormously proud that the son of an
NCO
had been accepted at military college, he recommended that if I wanted to make the army my career I should change my name from Dallaire to Dallairds. Artillery was my passion, and in his experience, no French Canadian had gone anywhere in the artillery. He gave me this advice with no hint of bitterness, as if changing my name was simple pragmatism. If I did decide to make a career in the army, he said, I would never be rich, but I would live one of the most satisfying lives there was to be had. Then he warned me that that satisfaction would come at great cost to me and any family I might have. I should never expect to be thanked; a soldier, if he was going to be content, had to understand that no civilian, no government, sometimes not even the army itself, would recognize the true nature of the sacrifices he made. I decided not to change my name, but I have tried to understand and live by the rest of his hard-won wisdom.

At military college, a whole new world opened up to me. It had been founded on the site of old Fort St-Jean, where in 1775 Major Charles Preston and his band of French-Canadian militia, Indians, and a few British regulars resisted the American general, Richard Montgomery. They wiped out enough of Montgomery's men and delayed him so long that he was ultimately defeated in a blinding snowstorm on New Year's Eve at the gates of Quebec. The fort had been continuously occupied by soldiers since it was built in 1666. The site was alive with the ghosts of battles past, and it thrilled me to walk the halls.

On the weekends, my classmates and I would go into Montreal, where I experienced a totally different city from the narrow east-end parish in which I'd grown up. Montreal in the sixties was vibrating with theatre, bistros and music, the
gitane
atmosphere created by a wave of young French-Canadian artists and intellectuals fiercely proud of their distinct heritage and culture. We would go dancing at the many disco-bars, wearing wigs over our military haircuts to get by the bouncers, who often mistook us for vice cops or members of the
RCMP
. Of course, we would run into Quebec nationalists, who would engage us in heated debate about joining
that bastion of
anglophonie,
the Canadian Armed Forces, and we'd meet peaceniks, who were against anything military because of what was going on in Vietnam and the nuclear buildup of the Cold War. Sometimes we were hounded out of the more bohemian clubs and bistros, and at other times the opposition would make a particularly cogent argument and we would almost be persuaded to change our minds. Of course, there were times when we chose to compromise, heavily influenced by drink, beautiful young women and the pungent aroma of certain illicit substances floating in the air. Every possible moment of leave was used to escape the regimented, all-male campus, to plunge into the rich youth culture so alive in the streets of Montreal at the time.

My three years at
CMR
were happy ones, even though I lagged behind academically. To be truthful, I graduated at the absolute bottom of my class. I had arrived as a virgin in every sense of the word and was determined to remedy that lack of experience in the shortest possible time. I lost (or found) myself in varsity sports, political debates, sex, booze and rock 'n' roll, my work ethic shot to hell.

My classmates and I were a mixed bag. Some of us were serious about a military career, but many were not. And there were even some closet hippies among us who struggled to keep their hair long and cut class to spend time in smoke-filled coffee houses, listening to Gilles Vigneault or Tex Lecor, the francophone equivalents of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. These guys were as much a part of the gang that I ran around with as the more macho science-and-engineering types like myself It was stimulating to rub up against people who came from totally different milieux, people who loved art and literature and who held antithetical political views to mine.

The student population at
CMR
was 70 per cent francophone and 30 per cent anglophone, but I moved as easily between the groups as I had in my old neighbourhood. Familiar with the insecurities that plagued the two solitudes, particularly when anglophones were forced into a largely francophone environment and suddenly found themselves a minority, I would defend each group to the other. I never fully belonged to either gang. I wasn't sitting on the fence, but I was always a little apart. There were often times when I'd lose arguments and be furious with myself
because I hadn't been able to make the words come out right in either French or English. But by not limiting myself to one side or the other I was often able to pick up nuances missed by my more hardline classmates.

Over a hundred of us, out of an original class of 183, graduated and made our way to the Royal Military College (
RMC
) in Kingston, Ontario, for two more years of education. There we encountered a very different and not always sympathetic environment. In Kingston you touched the heart of Upper Canada, still very much tied to its British colonial past. Though our education was supposed to be bilingual, there was a deep divide between anglophones and francophones. The Quebeckers formed a tight clique and socialized amongst ourselves, often escaping the strict Protestant Orange of Kingston and the continual ragging of our English comrades for the familiar vibrancy of a weekend in Montreal.

Still, we were probably among the most confident French Canadians that the extremely conservative institution had ever encountered. We did not back down and become assimilated. Seized by the spirit of the times, we fought the sometimes petty battles required to achieve equity.

In the summer of 1967, when some of my friends had chosen to do their summer training in Montreal so they could soak up the life of the city and the excitement of Expo, I found myself in Shilo, Manitoba, smack in the middle of the Prairies. Shilo was where I first confirmed my vocation as a combat arms officer and a gunner. During my first time there, in the summer of 1965, they had us sit on the side of a hill to watch a live firing exercise. It was a splendid setting, with the white sand dunes of the Carberry Desert (the only one in Canada) glistening under a clear blue sky. A young officer, who had graduated from
RMC
only the previous year, explained his duties to us. He was responsible for the live firing of heavy artillery guns and had about ninety people reporting directly to him in the field. He was just glowing, imbued with the deep inner excitement and concentration that comes with command. He had his gunners demonstrate a fast-action deployment. We watched the guns come in from behind a hill to our left to take aim at the simulated Warsaw Pact target, about three kilometres away. The young officer stood on a truck in the middle of it all, like a conductor
on his podium, and ordered the immediate disposition of the guns, the ammunition vehicles, the survey teams and the heavy, mounted machine guns for self-defence. When all was in place, he bellowed, “Fire!” There was a colossal bang as the gun spat out a projectile that exploded in a huge plume of dust just to the right of the target. He immediately yelled, “Left 200. Fire!” and the gunners went about their tasks fluidly and efficiently, barely making a sound, firing to his command again and again. I became consumed by the noise and the awesome destruction, intoxicated by the smell of burnt cordite. Seeing all that raw power under the command of one young officer, I decided then and there that this was the branch of the army I would join.

So when my friends went home to Montreal for the summers, I went back to Shilo, even though any failure there would have resulted in me being dismissed from the military college. Each summer, I survived the milieu only because of the help my classmates gave me with the finer elements of the artillery fire discipline jargon. The summer of 1967 was particularly difficult as I was the only French Canadian in a class of forty. To make matters worse, our course officer, a rotund artillery pilot who disliked the “smart-ass”
RMC
gang, decided to make my life miserable. He paraded me in front of the chief instructor, where he upbraided me for being “flippant,” among other failings. I acknowledged his criticism, saluted and returned to my quarters, certain that I was destined to flunk. I had no idea what he meant. Only at the insistence of my roommate did I decide not to cave in to the pressure. I even finally asked my instructor the meaning of
flippant.
“Cocky,” he said. Bewildered, I carried on.