Punishment

Heroes Remember

Punishment

After everything and after all the preliminaries were done, he looked at me and he said, "What the hell got into you?" And he's shuffling papers on his desk. I said, "I don't know sir." He says,"You know," he says, "I've heard lots and lots of excuses." He says, "I guess in my experience, in my years of experience I've heard thousands of them." and he said, "Most," he says, "most of them were supposed to be good excuses. I wanna hear yours if you say it's a good excuse." I said, "Sir, I haven't got an excuse. I know I did, I fully know that I did wrong, that I was absent without leave in a war zone". "Well," he says, "you know what the punishments are." "Well," I said, "it could be even worse than the glass house." But he says, "I still haven't heard your reason." I said to him, "Look, I've been abstinent, I have not had anything to do with women for, I forgot counting days and weeks and months and I meet this girl, this young lady and I stayed with her. I'm young, virile, and it was pretty hard to leave because there was others there to take over the moment I turned my head. So I stayed as long as I thought I could stay. Now I'm back and I'll take whatever punishment is coming."

Mr. Parker returns to base, and is arrested. He is brought up on charges in front of General Vokes.

Richard Allen Parker

Richard Allen Parker was born in Vernon, BC on May 27, 1917 to a First Nations family. He talks about his early years, the prejudice that he faced, and the meaning of being First Nations. He left home at an early age to work in the mines. He talks about joining the PPCLI in 1942, fighting the SS and Hitler Youth and his time in Algiers and Italy.