Description
Mr. Perry describes the hardships and challenges faced in getting accommodations for the military in an environment unknown to Canadians
John Perry
Mr. John Perry was born October 30, 1936 in Summerside, Prince Edward Island. He came from a large family of nine children. During his teen years, he worked on fishing boats and local farms as a labourer and at age 17 decided to travel to Halifax to join the army. He accepted training in Camp Borden and spent two years in Manitoba. Too young to join the Korean War, Mr. Perry became part of the United Nations Emergency Force where he travelled to Egypt and worked in the motor transport area as a motor transport driver. After military service, Mr. Perry used his knowledge in motor transport and held various positions with the motor vehicle branch of provincial government. With 38 years service, Mr. Perry retired and settled with this family in Fredericton, New Brunswick.
Transcript
The first couple of months we were there we didn’t even have shower units. We had trailers and we’d just sponge bath, you know. An old tin wash basin and you’d find a place to hide type of thing and have yourself a sponge bath and we had safari beds, like cotton cots to sleep on and they issued us with six blankets when I got there like in January. I thought what for? Two ended up as a pillow and four to cover you, two under you and two on top of you and you would have liked to have the seventh because it got chilly at night but after April things warmed up and May, June, July and August, you used your pillow only, no blanket, it was so hot. And the bugs, mosquitos and everything. We used camouflage nets, mosquito nets I should say, you know, we made something to holds the nets up in place and sleep and there was cockroaches and there was many types of bugs. But after we got established in the new camp in the Gaza Strip, April or early May I guess it would have been, ‘57 we went to the Gaza Strip and we established our camp in Raffia. We moved in, the transport was a lot of this camel sheds, we had three buildings that had been used as camel sheds. And as true as I’m here, there was three feet of camel dung on the floors in the sheds and they were almost the height of window sills and it had to be shovelled out and we had no dump trucks and we didn’t have decent shovels, all we had was square shovels, not round ones and we had to literally shovel it out, took us probably four or five days then we used brooms, like stable brooms. We found a couple, scrubbed the walls down after and we used our army water trucks with the hose on the end, pressure, you didn’t have that much pressure, but at least it was water. Then we managed to get some lime and wash everything down and then squish all this old water and stuff out of the building and it took us a week to clean up and then let the water dry out, you know, and then we put our safari beds in. But no it was hardship and this was like you do this during your two or three hours off in the afternoon.