Being a Young Sergeant
Heroes Remember
Being a Young Sergeant
I was from Toronto and they were Maritimers.
I was a high school graduate and they were not.
As I said earlier, these were really tough young men
and taking orders, some of them were older than I was,
taking orders from this upstart from Toronto was difficult.
First of all, I looked so different from them.
I'd been a soldier for a year.
I had been trained by the very best soldiers in Canada
and they were all recruits so I had a great advantage
in that I knew a great deal about the Army and above all,
I knew about these weapons.
And they were fascinated by these weapons.
They knew a lot about single shot weapons
but they wanted to learn everything about
these new weapons they could.
And since I was their teacher they accepted me without any difficulty.
The fact that I'd had little more than a year
experience than they did, made it very helpful.
They didn't, they were so, such raw recruits
they didn't even know how to put on their putties.
You know, they had all sorts of jobs,
even my officers were delighted to have me
because one of the first jobs we had
on the camp guard at Sussex, NB,
was to mount a guard, but my officers had never
mounted a guard and this was very important
that we didn't make a mess of it.
So I had to teach my officers the orders
and then I had to drill the guards so that
they would understand how this ceremony would be run.
And so I was an instructor to a bunch of civilians
trying rapidly to become soldiers.
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