When I had joined there wasn’t really any
females in the field positions yet. So in 1989 I
asked to get posted to Petawawa to the service
battalion so I was one of the first females that they
stuck in the field platoons in Petawawa as a driver.
And it was tough at first, the boys didn’t want us
there because it’s the man’s world out there right?
But it wasn’t very long before they were going,
“Whoa, these ladies can really carry their
own,” and we gained a lot of respect from them
and our sister/brotherhood took off like wild fire.
It was great, they loved having us there,
we worked together very well.
My first deployment was in the Gulf War
and we went to Saudi Arabia.
Now I just told you I was a driver.
It’s against the law for women to drive in
Saudi Arabia so our government had a little
bit of a, I don’t know, a conflict when we
first got there. They didn’t want us to drive and
we ended up not being able to do our jobs
for the first week we were there until the
governments talked and decided that we
weren’t women, we were soldiers so they
finally allowed us to do our jobs and I drove
a 50,000 litre water tanker over there.
They called it the big silver bullet, I called
it the big silver target. But we were there
with 1 Canadian Field Hospital and we set
up like a MASH unit, a mobile hospital out
in the middle of the desert on the Kuwaiti/Iraqi
border along with a POW camp and it was
about seventeen hours after they called
ceasefire we rolled into Kuwait City to go into
the Canadian Ambassadors house to make
sure that it was still standing and to help the
Canadian Ambassadors aid that had spent the
whole time there during the war. So we went
there to his aid to bring him water and power
and stuff like that. When we pulled into the
city we were pretty much the first friendly
people to come in there so we were bombarded.