No life like it!

As section commander of small engine repair at Cape Gagetown, NB, Eric leads a 17-man crew which, on any given day, could be busy in the shop rebuilding starters, installing new alternators, or tuning up all kinds of engines in ATVs, skidoos, lawn tractors, outboard motors, jeeps, or trucks. Pretty routine stuff.

But they could also be assigned to drive a “soft-skinned” (unarmored) wrecker along a Croatian border highway while Serbs on one side and Bosnians on the other are firing mortar rounds at each other.

“When you first arrive in a war zone, the bombs exploding everywhere are nerve wracking. But after a month or so, you jump up on the roof when it starts, to take pictures. You just get used to it,” says the 15-year career army man.

“One of our jobs there was adding ceramics to military vehicles to improve their armor. We’d add two tons to the weight of each one.”

Besides that seven-month tour in Bosnia in 1995, Eric also served a seven-month stint in Haiti in 1997, was part of the emergency response in Montreal after the devastating ice storm in 1998 and has been posted to Canadian bases in Ontario, Quebec and Alberta. He’s also had the opportunity to visit Italy twice on R&R leave.

The Northern Quebec native signed up for military service at the age of 17 and has never regretted the decision.

For one thing, he points out, the pay scale for his job as compared to a similar ‘civvie’ job is very good. Pay is determined by rank. The starting pay for a private is $25,000, by the time you make corporal in a few years, you’re earning about $42,000; master corporals earn more than $50,000.

“I’d never be making that in a similar job outside the military,” Eric says.

“It’s a lot more than the money, though. The army of today cares about safety, quality of life and taking care of its troops.”

Besides the opportunities to take specialty training in your trade to advance your knowledge and career, personnel trained in other ways, as well, such as cultural preparedness before being shipped off shore.

But nothing could totally prepare Eric for the cultural gap he witnessed first-hand in a small, remote town in Haiti where the Canadians had to surround the camp with barbed wire to deter the curiosity of throngs of adults and children who were mesmerized by a television set. “They had never seen a TV before! They’d crawl up into the barbed wire just for a glimpse.”

It was also in Haiti where Eric and his fellow camp members captured two poisonous tarantula spiders, kept them in a fish tank, and named them Sprocket and Ratchet.

“It’s just a whole different world there,” he says. “Like you wash your clothes and hang them outside to dry in 45 degree heat, but they don’t dry because of the humidity.”

One particularly harrowing assignment he had in Haiti was participating in the recovery of 480 bodies from a taxi boat disaster. The overloaded boat (with a capacity for only 200) was ferrying passengers from one coastal village to another when it sunk.

The passengers were trapped because they’d been locked in the hold to prevent them from jumping off and swimming to shore near their destination to avoid paying the fare.

But the desperate conditions of the people there were really brought home to him one day when Eric and a fellow officer found an abandoned newborn infant on a deserted beach. They took the wee one back to camp and began preparations for one of the members of his team to adopt him, but it wasn’t to be.

Eric swallows hard. “He died when he was only five weeks old. The exposure before we found him was just too much.”

Back in Gagetown, Eric points out a BV206 track vehicle, for which he has taken specialized training, as well as many other camouflaged vehicles like tanks and Leopards.