Medics Go Where Needed

The military chose me to be army. When you join at the time they were doing the three different elements; air force, navy and army. In basic training they came out and told me, you’re army! I tried to say well my dad’s air force and I wanted to go air force too but in our trade it doesn’t really matter, we call ourselves a purple trade because no matter what, we go everywhere so even here in Halifax in the navy, you’ve got army medics or air force medics serving on the ship. We’re support trade so we go wherever we are needed.

Well the support trade is actually either medics, clerks, supply, they’re all support trade because we support the mission whether they be a solider or navy or air men. So the different bases that we go to are all support. When you put an army uniform on and you’ve done enough time in the army, you are considered an army medic. If you just wear the uniform and you’ve never served in the army base or nothing, you’re not really an army medic; you’re just wearing the uniform of it.

Well you do your basic in Borden, Ontario as a TQ3 and they give you the basic indoctrination of what’s it’s like to be a medic, what you need to know medical wise, what you need to know about the history of the medics, and everything like that. You do your basic there and from there I went to Halifax and did my phase two of that and actually worked in a fully functional hospital in Halifax and learned what it was like to be a hospital medic. You do some more postings and you go back again for your 5’s trainings and that’s again in Borden. It’s a five month course at the time when I did it and it was, again, more anatomy, physiology and learning that kind of stuff. And they teach you more field craft and from there you can go out and do independent duty once you’re a corporal and your 5’s qualified. And then like after that many years later I did my 6A course again, you go back to Borden because that’s where our medical school is and you get really in depth training on your 6A’s at the time and then they unleash you after that onto another unit. But you keep going back to Borden for training and every time you are trained at the time, you’d go to another base to learn a new experience, a new way of doing things. So whether it be a training base, an air force base, or an army base everything is a little bit different in our trade. Sick parade is a little bit different so you get to learn all the different aspects.