A Secret Task as Operations Officer

I was a military engineer so basically either build it or blow it up and that included airfields in the Arctic, bridges in British Columbia, roads in Quebec and, of course, the usual demolition tasks both of in-training, bridging and mine removal. One of the more interesting projects that I was given was from a commanding officer when I was in one of the engineer regiments and he wanted to have a secret exercise. So he tasked me as his operations officer and I was to keep everything a complete secret. We basically loaded up an aircraft with one hundred and twenty people loaded down with explosives, ammunition, blasting caps and the rest of it and flew off to a location about four hours away. Landed, got off the aircraft, got loaded onto helicopters, dropped off at an old light aircraft landing strip and then infiltrated to an abandoned village and blew it up. It was the largest explosion that I’ve ever taken part in and it was actually a ton of high explosives that we set off. The water tower looked like a rocket starting to take off. Now of course the village was abandoned and had been declared a safety hazard so we were given the task of getting rid of it one way or another. My commanding officer had trained with the Marine Corps in the States so he was very much a fan of doing things the more exciting way.