Living Quarters and Equipment

We didn’t have the best of quarters or the equipment. We had a lot of equipment that was Second World War, like our uniforms and rifles. Living quarters were pretty rough. At one time a friend of mine just dug a hole in the side of the hill and sand bagged and we stayed in there for a couple of months I guess with the mud walls. It was during the monsoon season, the walls were falling in on us more or less, you know. We had a kit bag full of damp clothes all the time, nowhere else to go, and then we’d, oh we’d do some scrounging and get bits and pieces of American pieces of canvas and sometimes we’d get a fairly comfortable place. This one place in particular we scrounged and got a good piece of canvas for the roof and the windshield of a jeep for our window and a wooden door made of a.... The beer we used to get, come in wooden cartons, so we’d salvage them and make doors and things out of the wood.

Mr. Carney describes the living quarters and how the soldiers scrounged for equipment to make it more comfortable.

Cy Carney

Mr. Cy Carney was born in Fredericton, New Brunswick. He grew up in a coal mining town where his father worked in the coal mine. Coal mining not being a career Mr. Carney would settle for, he decided to join the Army. In 1950, Mr. Carney joined the Royal Canadian Corps of Signals as a signalman. Mr. Carney’s initial thought was to join for three years, but his military career spanned 29 years. After the Korean War, Mr. Carney served in other missions with the Canadian Forces to include two years in Yukon, three years in Europe under NATO as a machinist, and in 1969 he was posted to Cyprus under the Black Watch as an electrician for a six month tour. After retiring from the military, Mr. Carney was employed at the Owen Plant in Grand Lake for 17 years. Mr. Carney married and had five children.