Cyprus, 1991

Nothing prepares you for your first tour, coming out of high school and hitting the ground in a foreign country. You don’t speak the language, you don’t know what to expect. You get off the plane, instantly you’re getting your equipment issued, you’ve got to get your blue helmet instead of your green one, you’re getting your Kevlar vest, you’re getting your weapons, signing off for your kit, so it’s pretty fast and dramatic.

The first 24 hours was pretty dramatic for me because inside of six hours from landing on the island I was thrown in the observation post for the next shift change, and I was there for a twelve hour shift. That was my first eighteen hours.

Cambodia, 1993

There were snakes and scorpions living in the barracks, king cobras, and boas and various other types of snakes that would live under the sea containers and on the barracks. We caught a king cobra. He was the better part of six feet long, and we caught him in this cage.

The whole idea of trying to catch a lot of these animals was to get them back to Canada to show people that this was the stuff we were operating with. This is what a scorpion looks like, this is what a rhinoceros beetle looks like. We didn't have any of that for pre-training for the troops because nobody had been in that climate before...

Afghanistan, 2006-07

Our final FOB had the Afghan National Army) right there. We didn't work with them, the Americans had different groups that worked with the ANA, not us. But we got to interact with them. We showed them how to clean their weapons; their weapons were filthy, rusty. We had to show them how to grease them. They would sit there and pop rounds all night, indiscriminately, whenever they felt like it. Bang, ba-bang! The new guys came to replace us, and they just freaked when the guys started popping rounds, they dived for cover, but we were used to it.

Haiti, 1995-96

The road conditions were very poor, very little pavement. On the streets a lot of potholes, a lot of garbage, a lot of debris on the street. So it was not uncommon on any given day to change two flat tires on your trucks. Now you gotta change, you gotta crawl underneath your truck, you're crawling in garbage, you're stepping in garbage. The smell, atrocious smells depending on where you're going in the city, from garbage, from dead bodies.

Former Yugoslavia, 1992

I remember giving an interview one day in the safety of Daruvar. I was in an office, and I was giving a phone interview to a British radio station. There was a window behind me; I was standing with my back to it, and I heard this little tap-tap-tap on the window. I turned around and this guy is pushing an anti-tank mine through the window to me. Here I am, telling the British person about how the kids are forever getting involved on the losing end of the munitions over there, and this guy is passing me an anti-tank mine.

He said, "Here, I just took this away from a group of kids, they were rolling it down the road like a wheel." I grabbed it and the first thing I realised was that it still had its top on, so I unscrewed the lid. The bloody thing was fused! It was ready to go. This guy comes up and just shoves it through the window, here, take care of it.

Central African Republic, 1998

I didn't think it existed in Africa anymore, but we saw villages where people had never seen a white person before. We were the first white people and they touch your skin and face. In Africa you still have the jungle and you still have the monkeys and you still have the people hunting and there's always food. Nothing to go to the market and see monkeys as food, and they had cows, and snakes, and things like that, and that's normal for them.

Cambodia, 1992

We were in Battambang, myself, two other reservists, and my buddy Joe, who was in the RCR. So we were walking to the hotel we were supposed to be in. As we were coming into the hotel, four gentlemen--you know what, I don't even know, it could have been six, or maybe it was less, but it seemed a lot bigger at the time-these guys came in wearing non-CPAF uniforms, carrying an array of different equipment, in black uniforms. There's no doubt in my mind we were dealing with the Khmer Rouge...

Sri Lanka, 2005

Whole villages had been washed out to sea and literally there was nothing left. Concrete slabs where these houses had been, a flat piece of concrete like you expect to set your deck down on. No trace that a house, a whole community, had been there. That's a devastating thing to think of. You hear the stories and you talk to people. A fisherman, he doesn't want anything, he doesn't want money, he just wants to show you where his house used to be, where his children used to sleep.