by Ray Wiss
Talk about irony! Theologically enforced sexual abstinence causing a desire that theologically enforced rejection of masturbation renders one unable to relieve. I was left to recommend that fallback of the British boarding school, the cold shower.
At the other end of the masturbation spectrum, a member of the interpreter staff arrived with a complaint that he was initially reluctant to describe. After some beating around the bush, he came out with it: he was masturbating so often and so vigorously that he had developed arm and back pain.
The physical exam was . . . unremarkable, as we say. The patient was discharged with anti-inflammatory medication and reassurance that this was normal behaviour for a nineteen-year-old male.
The things that bind us together as human beings: parents love their offspring, children need lots of fresh air, the elderly are smarter than anyone thinks and adolescent males will jerk off until their dick and/or hand drops off.
Addendum, September 6, 2009: As if to prove the above observation, a Canadian soldier came in today with the following complaint: “Every time I masturbate, I see little brown specks in my sperm.” And how long has this been happening? “Twice a day for two months.” And this concerns you now because . . . ? “I dunno. I thought it would go away.”
AUGUST 29 | Company Sergeant-Major
Since I have re-enlisted in the CF, I have been gratified to see the esteem that ordinary Canadians have for those who wear the uniform. Even individuals who oppose our mission in Afghanistan make a clear distinction between the mission and those who carry it out. There is none of the vile rejection of soldiers that was seen in the United States when American soldiers returned home from Vietnam. Instead, a common slogan of the anti-mission side is that they support the troops and do not want to see us hurt or killed in a mission they feel is flawed. I disagree with that view, but I respect it.
This affection for the troops, however, does not translate into an understanding of our world. To appreciate this next section requires a basic knowledge of the ranks of the combat team’s leadership. I will provide an abbreviated version of it here.
The army is divided into two distinct groups: officers and enlisted men. An adequate civilian analogy would be that the officers are management whereas the enlisted men are labour. The military reality is much more nuanced. While it is true that the officers lead and make the decisions, they do so in close collaboration with the senior enlisted men. Although the most junior officer has the authority to give an order to the most senior enlisted man, in practice that would never happen. Instead, officers work as partners with enlisted men who have been in the army roughly ten years longer than they have. Like parents, they may have vigorous disagreements behind closed doors, but they will never oppose one another in front of their subordinates.
The most senior enlisted man in the combat team is the company sergeant-major. This position is held by a master warrant officer, the second-highest rank among the enlisted men. When I joined my battalion as a junior infantry platoon commander, there was a sign on the orderly room wall that summarized the various ranks in the company:
MAJOR: Commands the company. Faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Walks on water. Raises the dead.
Relationship to higher authority: Has lunch with God every few days.
CAPTAIN: Company second-in-command. As fast as a speeding bullet. Wins tug-of-war against a locomotive two out of three times. Able to leap tall buildings with a running start. Can swim across the ocean. Performs open heart surgery with a bayonet.
Relationship to higher authority: Has weekly meetings with God.
LIEUTENANT: Platoon commander. Pedals a bicycle faster than a speeding bullet. Carries a heavier load than a Mack truck. Can clear a multi-storey building if there is a trampoline to assist him. Able to swim across Lake Ontario. Can perform life-saving CPR for hours.
Relationship to higher authority: Talks to God on the phone.
COMPANY SERGEANT-MAJOR : Catches bullets and eats them. Throws locomotives off the tracks. Lifts tall buildings and walks under them. Freezes water with a single glance. Tells you when you can die. If he does, drop dead immediately. Stay dead.
Relationship to higher authority: IS GOD!
Any questions?
Now that we have clarified the rank structure, we can go on. Because no description of the leadership of a combat team would be complete without describing the man who holds the thing together, the company sergeant-major.
Major Jourdain, like all combat team commanders, has a second-in-command. This post is ably filled by Captain Hugo Dallaire, a senior captain of long experience. He is capable of taking over and running the combat team if anything were to happen to the major, and he did so during the commander’s leave. But if Major Jourdain has a right-hand man, it is his company sergeant-major.
This person is the essential link between the major and the men. It is the sergeant-major that the commander turns to for assistance in dealing with morale and discipline problems, providing invaluable advice when the commander has to make the most difficult decisions.
Earlier I quoted David Grossman’s explanation of the motivation of the warrior. Grossman goes on to explain that a person is not born to be a warrior but can make the choice to become one. If ever there was an exception to that rule, it is Master Warrant Officer Guy Lapierre.
MWO Lapierre can remember wanting to be a member of the CF since he was five years old. He spent his childhood and adolescence dreaming of joining the Canadian Navy. When he turned seventeen, he headed straight for the recruitment centre. The power of the open ocean and the excitement of foreign ports were only days ahead. Then a rather large fly landed in his career ointment. The economy was in recession and the army was having no trouble recruiting. When MWO Lapierre came looking for his long-awaited job as a sailor, he found that they had all been taken. He was told that the waiting time to get a position in the navy would be a year or more.
Seventeen-year-olds are not known for their patience. The recruiting officer must have sensed this. There is no other way to explain what he proposed next: “You can’t get into the navy for at least a year but . . . you can be in the infantry in three weeks!”
Translated into civilianese, that would be: “If you want a career on a clean boat, wearing clean clothes, eating three square, hot meals a day, you have to wait for twelve months. If you want to carry a heavy pack through swamps while eating scraps of freeze-dried crud, you can start working right away.”
As often happens when males are in their teens, testosterone won out over patience and good judgment. MWO Lapierre signed up on the spot and found himself in an army uniform within the month.
MWO Lapierre’s high testosterone levels now put him at a distinct advantage. After his basic infantryman’s course, he was sent to the paratrooper school. He was then assigned to the Airborne Regiment, the most elite formation in the CF. He must have been one hell of an impressive kid; he got into the infantry a year after I got out, and I knew soldiers who had been trying for three years to get into the Airborne. Being accepted into that regiment after basic training would be like being invited to play high school football . . . in Grade 7.
MWO Lapierre, who had so wanted to be a sailor, proceeded to have a career dominated by the most intense infantry experiences imaginable. During a decade as a paratrooper, he made the rounds of the more arduous peacekeeping missions Canada was involved in, including tours in Cyprus in 1986, Bosnia in 1993 and Haiti in 1997.* The most impressive part of his résumé, however, would have to be the two years he spent testing paratrooper equipment.
The conversations during these two years would have gone something like this:
(Note: Before any other old paratroopers out there think I am exaggerating, let me tell you that I have seen the video—not of the conversations—the video of the jumps. If I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have believed it. But it happened exactly as I am about to descr
ibe.)
“Lapierre! We have this new rucksack/piece of gear/whatever. But there’s a chance it will completely screw up the flight characteristics of the free-falling paratrooper, get tangled in his chute and he will crater.
Strap it on, go jump out of a plane and tell us how well it works. Or not.”
“Yes, Sir!”
“Lapierre! That seemed to work when you jumped by yourself, so we want you to do the same jump, but ‘tandem.’ Attached to another paratrooper. That way, we can drop paratroopers more closely together. But there’s a chance it will completely screw up the flight characteristics of the free-falling soldiers. They could get tangled in their chute and crater. Go jump out of a plane and tell us how well it works. Or not.”
“Yes, Sir!”
Even the most determined soldier would be having second thoughts about his career choice at this point. But the main event was still to come.
“Lapierre! We want to see if we could drop a paratrooper with a big bunch of gear at the same time. They could drop food into famine areas or large amounts of ammunition to our forces, with pinpoint accuracy. So we want you to strap this gigantic barrel to your chest harness. It is five feet high and two and a half feet across. It weighs 630 pounds. You will fall much faster than normal paratroopers do, and there’s no telling what might happen. It could get tangled in your chute, and you will crater. With the barrel on top of you. Strap it on, and go jump out of a plane and tell us how well it works. Or not.”
“Yes, Sir!”
There is an old joke about undesirable jobs whose punch line was “parachute tester.” MWO Lapierre did it for real.
He describes his time at the Airborne School as having been the most enjoyable of his career. But he has the warrior’s skills, and he lives by the warrior’s code. There were evil men doing evil things, and his country was at war against them. There was only one place he wanted to be.
He started to angle for a combat posting on Roto 4. Having seen war in Bosnia and misery in Haiti, he had no illusions about what he would be facing. He was nonetheless frustrated when he was not chosen. For the men of Combat Team Cobra, that was a good thing: it meant that he was available to come with them on Roto 7. Major Jourdain knew a good thing when he saw it and snapped him up. This made it easier to staff the rest of the combat team. MWO Lapierre’s reputation was such that soldiers from other companies were asking to transfer into Combat Team Cobra to serve under him.
If I tell you that MWO Lapierre is the very picture of what the ideal sergeant-major should be, most civilians will think back to the tongue-in-cheek description at the beginning of this entry and imagine that he is a fire-breathing terror. But while he can be harsh when the occasion calls for it, that is not his leadership style. On the contrary, this soft-spoken man motivates his troops by being tougher on himself than on anyone else.
He starts off by being in amazing physical shape. He has been in Ironman competitions, and he has come at or near the top of any group physical fitness test that he has ever participated in. In a group as fit as the paratroopers, that would be impressive enough. Call that Airborne tough.
But what does it become when you learn that MWO Lapierre broke his back in 1996? And was told he would never be in the infantry again, much less jump out of airplanes? And then attacked his rehab program with such determination that he was doing parachute jumps again eighteen months later? That is sergeant-major tough.
Master Warrant Officer Guy Lapierre in his element: the field
MWO Lapierre brings the same energy to everything he does. He pushes himself to always be more upbeat, more confident, more “together” in every way a soldier can be than any of the men who serve under him. In private conversation, he is candid about his weaknesses. For instance, he admits that he is not as good a public speaker as other men in his position. He compensates for this by working much harder than they do to get to know his men. When he speaks to them one-on-one, the impact is magnified.
The thing he enjoys least about his job is dealing with the interpersonal conflicts that are inevitable in any large group. This falls to him when it cannot be resolved at a lower level, so he gets to deal with the worst cases. But he knows his men so well that he can see the value in each one. This makes it challenging to resolve their quarrels—he can always see both sides.
When I asked MWO Lapierre to summarize what it meant to be a sergeant-major, he replied without hesitation. He sees himself as a teacher, one who demonstrates for the undisciplined the advantages of superb self-discipline.
Like all Canadians, MWO Lapierre is proud of our role as peacekeepers. But he also describes, with passion, the outstanding performance of Canadian combat soldiers in every war we have ever been involved in. He sees no contradiction in being good peacekeepers and good warriors. The job we have here in Afghanistan calls on the attributes of both.
MWO Lapierre is living the crowning achievement of an outstanding career. He does not enjoy being at war but, like most of the soldiers here, he has been given “the gift of aggression.” He is where he needs to be, not where he wants to be. He is serving his nation to the best of his abilities.
What is he getting out of it? He speaks with remarkable sensitivity and insight about achieving as much personal growth as possible from the experience. He feels that most of this growth will come from having been a member of a team, a team involved in the most valuable work a group can possibly do: bringing hope where there was none before.
AUGUST 31 | RCIED: Radio-Controlled Improvised Explosive Device
Every day, small groups of Canadian soldiers go into some of the most hostile territory on Earth. Reconnaissance patrols seek to obtain information. Ambush patrols lay traps for Taliban infiltrators. Some patrols escort our officers to a shura with a local elder. Others are “presence patrols” that make the point that we can go wherever we like. The territory the media likes to describe as being under Taliban “control” is territory they cannot stop even a few of our soldiers from traversing.
It is during these patrols that the skill of the Canadian soldier becomes overwhelmingly apparent. By day and by night, these men and women will engage in an activity that requires the peak level of the warrior’s craft. Camouflage, tactical movement, silent communication and combat skills must all be of the highest order.
The patrol that left at first light this morning was tasked with an engineering function. Led by Lieutenant Jonathan Martineau of the 5th Combat Engineer Regiment, their goal was to weld grates onto a culvert that passes under the main access route to the FOB. It is easy for the Taliban to sneak an IED into such culverts. They use the cover of darkness, civilian passers-by or even a wandering herd of sheep to gain access to the culvert undetected. Because they do not have to dig, it takes only seconds for them to place their lethal device. This obliges us to clear the road at least once a day, a time-consuming and occasionally dangerous task. The heavy metal grates would make it more difficult to access these culverts.
Accompanying the patrol this morning was Corporal Pascal Girard, the thirty-two-year-old combat medic assigned to Captain Lussier’s First Platoon. This platoon had just come back from two weeks of QRF duty. This was an exhausting time for Corporal Girard. When the QRF was called out, as it could be several times in a single day, it was common for Captain Lussier to assign only a portion of his men to the task. But it was necessary for the platoon medic to go out every time.
With his platoon back at the FOB, the soldiers of First Platoon now had to assume their share of the patrols. Most of these would not involve all the men of the platoon, but a medic has to go every time.
Master Seaman Cloutier, the senior combat medic, tries to even this out between the medics on the FOB. The fact remains that these young people work hard and are exposed to tremendous risk. I have never heard any of them complain about that.
The diagram accompanying this story offers a visual representation of the ground. When the patrol arrived at the culvert, Corporal Girard, the m
edic (M), took his place in the security cordon. From here he could cover the footpath which headed northeast. With his back against the wall of the abandoned family compound, he was invisible to anyone coming from the south. Because of the position of the sun, anyone coming from that direction would cast a shadow that would alert Corporal Girard to their presence before they came around the corner. Lieutenant Martineau (L) stood close to the culvert, supervising his engineers (E). Sergeant Luc Voyer (S), commanding the infantry, stood between the lieutenant and the medic, with an interpreter, or “terp” (T). Other infantrymen (I) completed the security cordon.
While the engineers were performing their tasks, two children (C) walking down the footpath from the east approached Corporal Girard’s position. Sergeant Voyer went to meet them and began The blast site talking to them through the terp, immediately to the west of the berm of hard earth shown in the diagram. The children, a boy and a girl both about ten years old, offered the soldiers pomegranates. Sergeant Voyer asked them where all the adults were. The children explained that, it being Ramadan, most people were staying inside and not exerting themselves. Corporal Girard saw that the sergeant and the terp were now exposed to anyone coming from the south. The compound to the south of the footpath blocked the view of the infantrymen near the road. He therefore moved further east to better protect his sergeant. Then a massive explosion occurred. The sergeant, the terp and Corporal Girard disappeared in a cloud of smoke.
The blast site
Corporal Girard was hit by some gravel and rocks, but was unhurt. Remembering where the abandoned compound had been, he headed in that direction. When he found it, he turned west and followed the wall until he got out of the smoke. Then he called to his sergeant and the terp, guiding them out of the smoke by his voice. Sergeant Voyer reached him first. Having gotten his bearings, Sergeant Voyer went a short way back into the smoke, found the terp and brought him out.