The Stone Frigate

by Kate Armstrong

  Copyright © Kate Armstrong, 2019

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purpose of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

  Cover image: RMC Archives

  Printer: Webcom, a division of Marquis Book Printing Inc.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Armstrong, Kate, 1962-, author

  The stone frigate : the Royal Military College’s first female cadet speaks out / Kate Armstrong.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-4597-4405-9 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-4597-4406-6 (PDF).--ISBN 978-1-4597-4407-3 (EPUB)

  1. Armstrong, Kate, 1962-. 2. Royal Military College of Canada. 3. Women military cadets--Canada--Biography. 4. Women soldiers--Canada--Biography. 5. Women and the military--Canada. 6. Discrimination in the military--Canada. 7. Sexism in higher education--Canada. 8. Sex discrimination in higher education--Canada. I. Title.

  U444.K5R1 2019 355.0071171372 C2018-906506-0

  C2018-906507-9

  1 2 3 4 5 23 22 21 20 19

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  Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays.

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  For the First Thirty-Two Women

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE

  ROYAL MILITARY COLLEGE OF CANADA

  1 BRACE FOR SHOCK

  2 BREAKFAST

  3 THE STONE BOAT

  4 PANIC

  5 PICKLES

  6 MADNESS

  7 ACADEMICS

  8 LCWB

  9 SHOULD I STAY OR SHOULD I GO?

  10 THE BET

  11 SKYLARKS

  12 DOGGIE NIGHT

  13 OBSTACLE COURSE

  14 SWEATS

  15 REGULAR LIFE

  16 GREET THE MEAT

  17 HOME AGAIN, HOME AGAIN

  18 THE BOSS

  19 FATHER-SON TIME

  20 MY CHANCE

  21 BLINDSIDED

  22 ALREADY DONE

  23 DISHONOURABLE INTENTIONS

  24 DON’T GET CAUGHT

  25 ON CHARGE

  26 SECOND CHANCES

  27 BILL AND ALFIE’S

  28 BAN THE SWEATS

  29 CAUGHT

  30 CHOPPED LIVER ROW

  31 HERMIT

  32 TIME OUT

  33 SECRETS

  34 KING EDWARD

  35 POSTER CHILD

  36 REALITY CHECK

  37 TIGERS

  38 CHERISHED

  39 GRADUATION

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  MORE GREAT BOOKS FROM DUNDURN

  BOOK CREDITS

  Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.

  — Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

  PREFACE

  A question I have been asked frequently during my adult life is why I ever wanted to go to the Royal Military College, or RMC. My answer has been correct to a point: I wanted to be an air force pilot and to pay my own way through university. But, of course, it was more complicated than that. The real answer is that I didn’t actually set out to go there at all.

  At sixteen years old, in 1978, I earned my glider pilot licence through the Royal Canadian Air Cadets, and from the moment my wings were pinned onto my uniform, I knew I wanted to become a professional military pilot. I had no idea that women weren’t eligible to be pilots yet. In fact, I had no conception of the realities of military life whatsoever. I was not alone in this. Years later, few of us, male or female — even the ones who had grown up as army brats — had a clear sense of what was about to happen when we entered RMC.

  I was one of thirty-two women surrounded by eight hundred male cadets. In my naïveté, I thought that we would be welcome, now that it was the law to include us. We were not welcome. In reality, the military solution to the quandary presented by the presence of women was to put an end to the farce before it picked up traction. If every female cadet quit or failed out, there could be no further question of our capability to meet the rigorous demands of military college life.

  What happened to me happened because I was a woman, and not a quiet woman, not a compliant woman. I figured out quickly that they wanted me to quit. At the time, I didn’t understand that knowing something intellectually didn’t protect me from its emotional impact or that I was easy prey for doubt and for feeling less valuable than my male peers. It was as if I believed that the men knew more about me than I did and had more right to be there than I did.

  And I was blind to the suffering of the other women. I didn’t want to look. I heard the rumours from other squadrons: near-naked fourth years parading the recruit hallways wearing only jockstraps, piss being thrown on someone night after night for her comment made to the press, one woman being presented a dildo at a squadron party, a fourth year fondling a woman’s breasts during intramural water polo and being treated with admiration rather than contempt, French Canadian women being inspected by bullying peers outside of their classroom each morning, and intelligent women being mocked for asking insightful questions in class.

  Still, I was desperate to belong to the inner circle of male cadets. I was constantly trying to find out what it would take to fit in. Sometimes I achieved the blissful state of being one of the guys, a garden-variety peer. I basked in those moments, in our teasing, laughter, and roughhousing, enthusiastically joining in when they made fun of me or each other and eagerly roasting myself to show it was okay, so long as I was included.

  In the years that followed, it was very difficult for me to overcome my loyalty to RMC and to my squadron. It took four years of breaking down my own resistance and self-doubt as I wrote, four years of overcoming my fear that I wasn’t worthy to write my story and had no business telling it. Gradually, paragraph by paragraph, I learned to say things as clearly as I could.

  This is a narrative constructed from memory. I have aspired to be rigorously honest, and all the people represented in this work are real, individual people, not composites. I have, however, changed names and identifying characteristics to provide them with as much anonymity as possible. I did not keep a diary during the years depicted in this memoir. Dialogue is as accurate as memory allows, though at times I have combined various conversations for the sake of readability and an economical telling of events. Naturally, there is much I have had to leave out.

  My point of view is my own and o
f necessity, limited. I speak for myself, only about myself and those most directly involved in my experience. The process of transforming living people into players in a narrative was humbling and unavoidably reductive, and for that I’m sorry.

  ROYAL MILITARY COLLEGE OF CANADA

  Kingston, Ontario

  August 1980

  1

  BRACE FOR SHOCK

  Classical music blared in the hall with the tempo of a horse galloping across an open field, and Mr. Kendall was hollering over it. “Rise and shine, recruits! You have until the end of the wake-up song to make your beds and be standing in the hall dressed in PT gear!”

  I flew out of bed and looked through the window into pitch black. Morning already? A backlit clock face shone from a tower across the parade square. It read 5:30 a.m. It’s 2:30 a.m. in Vancouver. Nausea washed through me.

  Meg jumped down and just missed landing on me. We pulled the bunk bed away from the wall and worked together to make the beds. I knew this song from somewhere, but I had no idea how long it would last. I threw on my physical training gear of pressed green shorts and a white T-shirt and rushed to the sink.

  “Let’s leave the bunks pulled out at night and push them back in the morning,” I said through the foam of my toothpaste.

  “Deal!” Meg said as she ploughed bobby pins into her bun.

  “One minute!” Mr. Kendall, Three Section commander, our section, bellowed from the hall. We shoved the bed back against the wall. The music was reaching a crescendo and the yelling grew more intense.

  We opened the door and tumbled out together. Meg stepped left and I stepped right in a moment that sealed our spots in the A Flight recruit hallway for the rest of the term. Twenty recruit bodies spilled out of doorways and stood at attention: four women and sixteen men.

  Elated and nervous, I stared across at a room recently renovated in preparation for our arrival. On the door, the international symbol for women’s washrooms facelessly stared back at me. Her head floated, detached, above her body. Her arms stretched out to her sides in surrender.

  I could smell fresh paint.

  The song ended. Mr. Kendall yelled, “It’s showtime, folks!”

  That was it! The song was from the opening scene of All That Jazz — the Alka-Seltzer, the cigarette in the shower, the eye drops, the Dexedrine.

  “Fall in outside.”

  We crowded down the stairs into the cool, damp pre-dawn air to find Mr. Theroux, Two Section commander, already waiting on the parade square. His full lips and dark-circled eyes gave me the sense that it wasn’t just recruits who were feeling tired this morning. “A Flight! A-ten-shun! Time to separate da boys from da men.”

  The fourth years wore navy-blue T-shirts with a huge white spider blazoned on the chest above the letters SFMA — Stone Frigate Military Academy. I vied for a spot in the middle of the pack. I despised morning runs.

  “A Flight, repeat after me,” commanded Mr. Kendall with a hint of playfulness. We mimicked him as he leaned his head back and yelled, “Yea stone, yea boat, yea, yea, stone boat!”

  A responding cry from the seven recruit flights formed up across the parade square reverberated over us: “Stone boats don’t float! Stone boats don’t float!”

  Mr. Kendall drew in a deep breath and shuddered in feigned enjoyment. I got it. Hudson Squadron stood alone in the cadet wing, as the undergraduate student body was known, in more ways than just our dorm being separate from everyone else’s. We were special and we owned it. I could handle being universally despised by the rest of the cadet wing if there was pride in it.

  The morning run pace was double time, only twice as fast as walking. I took heart. I can do this! I was an athlete. I had just made it through ten weeks of basic officer training and seventy morning runs. How hard could it be? Half these guys looked like scrawny teenage boys.

  We ran platoon style down a little slope and out onto a gravel road along the water, passing between an old boathouse on the right with an eclectic flotilla secured to a concrete jetty and a modern academic complex on the left, which appeared to interconnect over a few acres of land. From there, we crossed an expansive undeveloped field and then took a right uphill on a long, winding road toward the Fort Henry National Historic Site and down a steep path along the backside of the fort to the St. Lawrence River. I caught my first glimpse of the Thousand Islands.

  We had run about three kilometres when the path, now as narrow as a goat trail, turned up a steep hill. The Stone Frigate came into view across a small bay. The old, yellow limestone building stood alone, separated from the other cadet dorms by 200 metres of parade square. The sun rose in a splash of colour across the phallic-shaped peninsula of the RMC grounds jutting out between Navy Bay on this side and Kingston Harbour at the mouth of the Rideau Canal on the other.

  “Break ranks for Heartbreak Hill!” ordered Mr. Kendall. We morphed into a single line. One of the guys stopped dead in his tracks and grabbed his side.

  “Let’s go!” Mr. Kendall screamed at him. “Are you a fucking pussy, Recruit Dahl?”

  “No, Mr. Kendall!”

  “You can’t even keep up with the girls. Doesn’t that make you a pussy, Dahl?”

  “Yes, Mr. Kendall! I have a cramp.”

  “No one cares, Dahl! If you’re looking for sympathy, you’ll find it in the dictionary between shit and syphilis!”

  “Yes, Mr. Kendall!” Dahl hollered. He was feigning an effort to run again as I shuffled past him on the path. He looked like he was going to cry, bending over now, clutching his side. He had an athletic build like Moose from the Archie comics. I left him behind.

  “Passed by a girl, Dahl! Have you no shame?”

  I cringed at being singled out by Mr. Kendall. I didn’t like him broadcasting the fact that I was female. I wanted him — and the rest of A Flight — to see me as just another one of the guys.

  Mr. Kendall remained behind with Dahl. We reformed ranks at the top of the hill and ran on without Dahl. When we reached the edge of the field, Mr. Theroux turned us around.

  “Time to pick up da trash,” Theroux said. “No one get left be’ind, if you know what I mean.”

  Loud and clear. If you drop out, the entire flight will suffer.

  We ran back up the hill, scooped up Dahl, and turned back toward home. He winced with each stride but stayed in our ranks. I wanted to punch him. One stride at a time, I concentrated on controlled breathing, keeping cadence with the centipede of legs shuffling alongside me. The repeat of the hill was a killer. I felt shaky with exhaustion.

  We arrived back at the Frigate just after 3:30 a.m. Vancouver time. At this hour the previous morning, before our long day of travel to RMC, I had still been asleep in my bunk, freshly graduated from basic officer training on the West Coast at Canadian Forces Base (CFB) Chilliwack. That night, when we had first stepped off the recruit buses from the Ottawa airport into the Kingston evening air, I was struck by an almost tropical humidity. In the distance, someone was playing a lament on the bagpipes and the notes squeezed in my chest. I was frightened. I didn’t know how to be a cadet at military college or how I should act.

  I had been assigned to One Squadron in the dreaded Stone Frigate and formed up at the stanchion holding a navy-blue burgee, a tiny triangular flag, with a white number one on it. The flight leader had told us to stand easy and look in his direction. He was formally dressed in a scarlet uniform. His red doeskin tunic fit like a second skin, a red sash crossed his chest from his right shoulder to his left hip, his sleeves were adorned with badges, and his gold-trimmed pillbox hat hung precariously off the right side of his head, held on by a thin black chinstrap. He was good-looking in a dark, brooding way, like a pirate.

  “Welcome to the Royal Military College of Canada,” he said. “I’m Fourth Year Donald Morgan, your recruit flight leader for One Squadron, known as Hudson Squadron. Do not speak unless I address you. Call me Mr. Morgan. Do not call me sir. We are all officer cadets here. First thing, grab your bags off
the truck and get back here. STAT. Dismissed!”

  We raced as a gang, alongside the other recruit flights, to the army truck full of luggage that had trailed our buses from Ottawa. I jostled for position at the ladder to get on the truck and help unload bags. A big guy shoved me aside and went up before me. I gained my balance and scrambled up behind him. I stood with the men, hurling luggage to the waiting arms below. I knew that first impressions were lasting impressions and if I could appear keen from the beginning, it would save me hassles later. Soon the truck was cleared, and I jumped down and found my bags. Then we were marched straight into the Frigate and assigned our roommates. Recruit term had officially begun.

  For the next six weeks, we would have no control over whom we lived with or talked to, what we did, or where we went. Rumours had circulated at basic training about recruit-term hazing, physical exhaustion, lots of yelling, mind games, even death — at least one recruit had died running the obstacle course. Less than half of us would graduate.

  I knew it was a game. They could haze me but they couldn’t really harm me. They called it recruit training, though it wasn’t really training but a test designed to crack us and expose our emotional underbellies, to see if we had the guts to be cadets at RMC and, later, officers in the military. I felt ready to face the big tests, physical and emotional, but as an eighteen-year-old girl, the concept of psychological warfare was lost on me.

  That morning, after our run, Mr. Morgan met us in the recruit hallway. He was dressed in the dress of the day, the No. 5 uniform of navy-blue pants with red piping, a tricoloured belt, and a light-green short-sleeved shirt. He still wore his red sash, indicating his cadet rank of three barmen, from the night before. He gave us seven minutes to shower, dress, and be standing in the hall. The four women of A Flight — Meg Carter, Nanette Travers, Nancy Sloane, and me — stood smiling at each other in the women’s shower room, introducing ourselves in whispers. We didn’t have to say it. No men allowed. We could hear screaming from down the hall, coming from the men’s shower room, as the fourth years lorded it over the guys. Being amongst the first women to enter RMC, we had no one above us to supervise showers.