Citizen Soldiers

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

headnote: While I wrote this 10% of the bombs being dropped in Yugoslavia were Canadian. (How does it feel to be a member of an aggressor nation?) I interviewed people for the 1994 Mount Royal College yearly magazine, Skylines. After publication I was asked to bring lots of copies down to the armory for the lads to take home. [ : ) ]

In military field-maneuvers a high profile is something to be shunned. Lately, however, the Calgary Highlanders and other reserve outfits have enjoyed a higher public presence due to reservists serving with the regular army as part of Canada's peacekeeping forces. Yet few Calgarians understand that membership in the Canadian Forces Reserves is an avocation pursued by ordinary people.

Corporal Walter Fritz is a general contractor in civilian life. He is not in the service for the pay. "I lose money when I go on call-out (active duty with the regular army)," he says. His relatives worried about him going to Yugoslavia. "They had the normal worry-worry crap, but my wife supported it completely."

(Socio-economic leveler)

Fritz is a section commander in the Calgary Highlanders with about 10 men under him. He and his comrades train every Wednesday night and about two weekends a month. "The main thing to remember," he says, "is that this is not a career." He has seen too many "professional students" become "militia bums."

Lieutenant Barry Agnew agrees. "It certainly can become an overriding part of your life." In the Highlanders, Agnew writes articles for service papers and news releases as the public affairs officer. By day he works in a museum. "I wouldn't want to come down here (to Mewata Armory) to do museum work," he says, explaining that people join the reserves to do something different. His commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Lynn Moffat, is a school teacher.

The Alberta district recruiting officer, Captain Graham Oakley, says that he doesn't want any Rambos. "We want mature, serious, responsible people," he says. "Absolutely everybody joins the reserves: doctors, lawyers, high school students... everybody joins." He explains the militia is a socioeconomic leveler. "While they're here they have everything in common."

Oakley says that with recent peacekeeping there has been a "tremendous increase" in recruiting. "The militia has changed tremendously in the last two or three years," says Oakley, adding that the reserves have better equipment, more of it and more exposure to regular force personnel. Summer training, which is geared to the post-secondary student, starts as early as May. Most of the training takes place away from Calgary. The soldiers do basic training and then go on to specific trades training.

(Learn)

Russ Meades is a second-year journalism student at SAIT. "If there is one thing I am committed to, as the company sergeant major, it is to weed out the 'Rambo wannabes,'" says Meades. "They are undisciplined fly-boys who could risk the lives of others."

The training provides physical and mental challenge, according to Meades, and can provide people with a focused chance to learn about their capabilities and who they are. "Am I someone who flips burgers or a part-time soldier?" asks Meades. He says that challenge is big part of the appeal of the reserves. He had a classmate who was having some problems, and was "hurting for money." Meades recommended the reserves, and later was surprised to get a phone call from the man saying that he had enlisted. "He came back (from summer training) a changed man, extremely positive. He was getting school assignments done without excuses, on time and neatly typed. An instructor said, 'This guy's really turned around.'"

Army life has been good for Sergeant Cindy Greenough. "I was a very mild, meek, normal person," she says. "If I knew you and you walked by, I wouldn't say hello. The military does give you lots of self-confidence." As the regimental quartermaster sergeant for the Calgary Highlanders, she provides the "beans and bullets" whenever they go on maneuvers. Greenough would recommend that anyone give it a shot, adding, "Even if you don't stay with it, you've still learned something."

Epilogue-footnotes:

~God bless our sailors and ground crew.

~Canadian spelling was changed to match U.S. software.

~For more on citizen-soldiers and democracy see my essay Heroes are Soldiers.

~A Canadian soldier of Japanese ancestry, Michael Hayakaze of Alberta, was killed in Afghanistan this year, but I don't regard him as a "visible minority." I am confident he grew up here reading comic books and buying bubblegum to get the hockey cards.

~At home in my hall I have a limited edition photo-lithograph, Morning Swim, of a lady walking into a remote forest lake while taking off her T-shirt. Next to it is a limited edition print, The Hunters, of some U.S. army rangers patrolling in a muddy sunken creek, past a poisonous snake, with a sun peeping high through the dense foliage... When my massage practitioner friend passed down the hall she cried, "Ahhhh!" She was horrified that the soldiers were so close to the vulnerable woman! I said that because of those brave men, dedicated to civilian control, the lady could swim safely...

~...She couldn't safely swim undressed in a nondemocracy, not with the sort of "unmotivated" soldiers and police force that such states always end up with. When peasants from such states immigrate to North America they often assume that police are corrupt and that soldiers, if not conscripted, (drafted) enlist for the money, as soldiers for the dictator's government. Hence the glaring lack of visible minorities in our armed forces. Peasants can't conceive of volunteer "citizen-soldiers."

Sean Crawford

sleeping soundly because others guard the frontiers,

summer 2008