Officer’s Training

Basic training was kind of nice actually. It’s not like you see on TV where you have this marine sergeant hollering at you, getting you up at 5 o’clock in the morning. We had courses based on what the military is like, a little bit of general service knowledge and Queen’s regulations and orders and so on, so forth. You know, the structure of the military. And we had parades. We had parades, of course you have to learn how to march. You have to learn to get commands and so on and so forth. Phys. Ed., a bit of Phys. Ed. They even had a station hockey team. I played on the station hockey team, station hockey team. But, we would report primarily 8 o’clock in the morning for classes. We did a lot of exercises. We had to do at nights, of course, you know walking in syndicates that type of thing, but for the most part it was 8 to 5.The toughest part was the parade. It wasn’t tough. It’s just, that you know, you march, march, march, left turn, right turn, about face, so forth, just remembering what you’re doing and what foot and so on and so forth and that’s not physically tough it’s just remembering what you’re supposed to be doing. But there was no physical training as such that was difficult. We went to a gym, we played rugby, we played badminton, we played basketball, you do what you want to do pretty well. There was no hand to hand combat. Small arms, fire arms, yeah, we learned about that. Browning pistol but that’s about the only weapon we learned how to use.