A Sailor’s Workday

Heroes Remember

A Sailor’s Workday

The task group staff consisted of those who would be my representative in the operations room in the command ship so they were keeping track of what was happening every minute basically. I wasn’t always there. I was there quite a bit. Most of us worked. Personally I worked about twenty hours a day for almost eight months. I had eleven days off in eight months. No government can pay you for that. Nobody. Most sailors worked at least twelve to twenty hours a day for the time they were on. We took out of the three ships, every three weeks they would get four days ashore and we would transfer, if it happened to be Athabaskan, we would transfer our whole task group to Protector and we had a mini command set up in Protector to keep the control of everything going so… And we did it with Terra Nova. I took a small staff to Terra Nova. It was pretty cramped and they didn’t have all the same kind of information but it was close. And so we just kept, my staff just kept going the whole time. I likened it to being on a treadmill, and once you step on, you’re on and it took eight months to step off so… I know a lot of them, it took me about a year, a good year before I felt that I was back to some kind of semi-normality.

While working many hours on board ship, Vice Admiral Miller explains the routines used to give sailors a break from the long and gruelling shifts encountered at sea.

Duncan “Dusty” Miller

Born in the United Kingdom, Duncan “Dusty” Miller immigrated to Canada in 1954. At the age of 15 and having a strong desire to join the military, Mr. Miller went to the recruiting centre but could not be accepted until 16 years of age. He then attended Bishop’s University in Lennoxville. During his career, Mr. Miller rose to the rank of Vice Admiral where he became the Naval Task Commander aboard HMCS Athabaskan during the Persian Gulf War. Vice Admiral Miller later retired from the military and now resides in Halifax, Nova Scotia.