Highlight of My Career

Interviewer: I read in your book, a statement that, of all your experience and all your miliary knowledge and ranks that you held and everything, that your time in Sarajevo was one of the highlights of your career.Yeah the highlight and that’s been very misinterpreted by my critics. They say, how the hell could he, you know, how the hell could he enjoy that, you know. These are all the things he did wrong, you know, how could he enjoy that? But it was the most challenging, yeah, absolutely. It was by far the most challenging, demanding and actually, I remember my Dad when, when he, when he took his release. He wandered around for a year in Cape Breton with not much to do, but then he got taken on at Louisbourg as a labourer building the fortress and on the second day there the roads were sort of falling apart. The service roads. So he’s a soils technician, trained at Fort Bellevue, Virginia, Canadian Engineer so he sorted that out. The next day the under-graduate surveyors were having a problem so he sorted that out. So the boss of the organization called him in and said, “What’s your background? ” He said, “Sergeant-Major Combat Engineers.” He said, “Well you’re now my construction superintendent”, which he did for 10 years building the fortress of Louisbourg and used all those skills he learned in the military, but never practised. Well I was the same way. I thought I would retire with these training, education exercises, experiences I had. I never really put them to use. Then all of a sudden, at least for six months, I was able to use a lot of it. So from that point of view, it was really quite satisfying and , and nothing else reached the level of adrenaline, you know, that Sarajevo did and I was blessed with unbelievably good soldiers and I’m not being bias. The best ones were, you know, were Canadians.