Canadian Armed Forces

“My brother had joined three years before me,” Barnes said. “I heard stories about how exciting everything was, I thought I’d give it a go.”

After completing basic training in Yorkshire, United Kingdom, Barnes chose to be a data telegraphist, leading to six months of specialized training. His first posting was to Krefeld, West Germany, during the Cold War. He would later go on to deployments in Northern Ireland in the late 1970s, followed by additional postings to Germany in the 1980s, where he worked to provide communications for NATO groups until 1986.

Signing on

Warrant Officer (Retired) Brian Prairie is a proud Métis Veteran with both Red River and Ontario heritage. He is committed to preserving and honouring his people’s cultureand history.

Prairie’s military journey began in the early seventies with the Army reserves in Thunder Bay, Ontario.

“It was a time when there was a lot of peace and love and marijuana and experimentation and I just didn’t fit,” he recalled.

Bill Toussaint was born in Sydney, Nova Scotia in 1947. His mother’s family successfully made their way to Canada through the underground railway. His father immigrated from Grenada in the search for work. Toussaint grew up in a community called Whitney Pier, a diverse community filled with many different cultures.

Bambi Gray’s enrollment in the CAF was somewhat unexpected but not completely without reason. As her father brought one of her three brothers to Army Cadets when she was only five and he subsequently volunteered with the Cadets as Quartermaster, she spent the better part of her childhood in uniform. “I swore up and down that I didn’t want to join the military, because I had been going to Army Cadets my whole life, from age 5 to 18. I said I’d had enough of wearing a uniform.”

Military college

In the 1990s, the layoff and early retirement of hundreds of nurses in Quebec greatly limited career opportunities for recent nursing school graduates. Annie Tétreault was in this very situation and was looking for work. A friend of hers who was studying at the military college advised Annie to apply for the CAF’s paid education program.

Captain (Ret'd) Andrew Webb has a tiny 30-year-old memento from the most awful thing he's ever witnessed – and his proudest military accomplishment - finding an abandoned children's hospital and rescuing more than 200 children in Fojnica, Bosnia during the Yugoslav wars. Webb was in Bosnia with the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) when “the whole country was in anarchy. We were trying to keep the peace in an area with no peace.”

Alex Grant, raised in Pincourt, Quebec, enrolled in the Canadian Armed Forces in 1981. He attended Royal Roads Military College, graduating in 1986 with a Bachelor of Science Degree in Physics and Oceanography. Following Navy training, he completed a two-year foreign posting at the Integrated Undersea Surveillance System's (IUSS) Naval Facility Whidbey Island, Washington.

Ainsworth Dyer was born in Montréal and grew up in Toronto.