Middle East - Canadian Armed Forces in the Middle East

Well you first arrive, it’s all desert, it’s hot, there’s very strong customs, there’s different tribes who are warring. And it’s my first UN experience where the two parties that had been warring had been separated by X number of miles and we have to sit in the middle.
You know, there were always flare-ups, and when I say flare-ups, I mean they’d always be conducting little wars and attacking each other. That’s the reason we were there.

We were there to try and keep the Israelis and the Egyptians from killing each other.

With both societies you have to prove yourself and you have to establish credibility, you’ve got to establish trust, you’ve got to remain neutral.

We were peacekeepers with no weapons.

That was our protection, basically we were unarmed observers which gave us free access to anywheres in the conflict area.

They issued you an SMG sub-machine gun, a magazine and ten rounds and they told you, put the weapon over your shoulder, put the magazine in one pocket, put the ten rounds in the other pocket just so you don’t create an international incident and they give you a baseball bat and said, “If you have any problems, just wave this at the people, they’ll go away.” (laugh)

In the evenings, you could hear the canons firing, so it wasn’t the most peaceful place to be.


It was war.

We saw homes, cemeteries, churches destroyed and all that.


We always had a spare truck, a water truck with us type of thing, and a fuel truck, you know. Kind of a lonely trips out there in hot desert, you know...

And as I’m going through all these villages people would wave at you and all this, and now they’re throwing camel dung at me and they’re throwing stones and sticks at me.

There were barriers, like borders, between every town. You’d have to cross before five in the evening. If you got stuck between two towns, it was tough luck, you’d have to wait.

You had to know where all the roadblocks were because there’d be, next thing you know, you’re driving along and all of a sudden there’s a guy standing in front of you with a weapon just aimed right at the driver.

And this Egyptian soldier, he looks in the van and he’s sticking his rifle in there and he’s got it cocked because, tchk, tchk, we heard the bolt, and he wanted cigarettes.

You never knew. There’s a possibility there’s mines left through these places, there’s bombs left from prior wars.

So if we lost control, if we ended up hitting an antitank bomb, everything blew up.

They didn’t bring the bodies home then, they left the bodies there.

At the time we were in Egypt we were able to keep it pretty well neutral.

That was boring which isn’t a bad thing. Boring is good.

When you talked to people who had seen what was going on with Syria, Israel, and Egypt, it was a good thing we were there to stop the war.

We didn’t achieve anything. I don’t think you’ll find one person that can honestly say he feels that this tour of duty in the Middle East at that time made a difference.

Because as soon as you move out these people start fighting each other again.

Totally impotent in the sense that you can’t do a thing, can’t stop the killing.

It took a long time to realize there’s two sides to every story and there’s no right or wrong over there. They have been fighting for four thousand years and they probably will continue.