Falling Asleep During Guard Duty

This is funny because they used to call us the twins. I eluded to where Gil Shaw and I lived n the movement control shack at the end of our warehouse and as I say we had no weapons. And between our quarters, there's a warehouse and then another door going into the main office, or our office, and then it was like one long building, all closed off with the doors locked at night sort of approach. In the warehouse was what we called the “MFO”, military forwarding boxes for these guys getting ready to ship stuff home. The box would be about the size of maybe that TV and they would have all the stuff that they were sending home, Grundig tape recorders which were big thing over there at the time and other stuff that they wanted to ship home. It would be packed and marked and we would keep it in the warehouse. Every week there was a flight in and out and some of those boxes would go each week on the aircraft to go back to Canada. And Gil was a bit of a physical fitness nut. He'd get up in the morning and he'd take his blanket and he'd go into the warehouse so he wouldn't disturb me and he'd be doing his push ups. He got up this morning to go into the warehouse and the door was locked and there was this small table between our two cots and he said to me, “Did you lock this door?” and I said, “No”, “Throw me my keys!” I looked on the table, ”They're not here!”, “What?” ”They're not here!” So he went out and down in the office and came back through and his keys were in the lock on the inside of the warehouse. Now they had come into our room and we used to leave that door open between our room and the warehouse but they had locked us in our bedroom with his keys, they had taken the screen off the back window and made steps up the piles and they had taken about 15 boxes out of the MFO box, they robbed us during the night. And he came through the door, “Holy, we've been robbed, the buggers broke into the place!” Well, what was his name, the colonel, I forget now but when he heard this, the base commander, Canadian contingent commander, was he ever upset. And he wanted to know why and how this happened. “I understand you had two NCO's sleeping in that building?” Okay over we went so he wanted an explanation and he said to us, “What were you doing?” And Corporal Shaw said, “Sleeping sir!” “Sleeping, you're on duty!” You know it was stupid thing, it was the middle of the night, certainly we were sleeping, I was tempted to ask the colonel what he was doing but I didn't say a word. But after that they called us the Bobbsey twins, the sleeping beauties and stuff like that. So he said something about weapons, we said we had no weapons. “No weapons?” “No, we have no weapons.” “Well, that's going to change.” So a couple of days later we were sent over to the RSO and we each picked up, signed out to us an SMG, a semi machine gun and 28 rounds of ammunition. I hadn't handled a weapon like that in about three years. And in case, the reason we got it was in case they come again, you shoot the buggers sort of thing, you know. We never did, we had to go out and practice firing with this SMG and I honestly tell you if it had happened, I couldn't have shot anybody with that thing, I'm not a killer, I'm a lover.

Mr. Floyd shares a funny story about a time when he and his buddy fell asleep and got robbed during the night!

Murray Floyd

Mr. Floyd was born January 10, 1931 in Toronto, Ontario. After receiving his education, Mr. Floyd became employed with a bus company. He later married and together he and his wife raised 4 daughters. Mainly for financial reasons, Mr. Floyd decided to join the military and enlisted in the Army. He took his basic training in Val Cartier and accepted his first posting to Vancouver with 11 Company having an occupation of Furniture & Effects Clerk. In 1964, Mr. Floyd traveled to Beirut, Egypt where he witnessed a great culture shock. His career would give him 2 tours to Egypt and later on in his career traveled to England to serve as clerk in logistic operations. At the time Mr. Floyd moved his family to England which proved to be a positive experience for all. Mr. Floyd retired from the military and resides in Toronto, Ontario.