These shall be your skills: to impose ordered ways upon a state of peace, to spare those who have submitted and to subdue the arrogant. Virgil: Aeneid, bk. 6, l.851
Bull Chisholm died on a rainy night. This faded memory of a drunken soldier came to me when my mother was taking her last breaths. In a morphine stupor, she mumbled his name, opened her eyes, and stared at me.
‘He was a son of a bitch,’ she said, clear as day. When she uttered that name, I was overcome with memories of our family’s time in West Germany five decades earlier.
In 1966 my father’s battalion was chosen to be part of Canada’s NATO Forces in West Germany. The opportunity to move to Europe excited my parents. Unlike me, they had no fears of Nazis or Communists, the bogeymen that loomed large in my childish imagination. They tried to convince me with promises of adventure, travel, and foreign foods. Yes, all of that sounded dandy, but in my eleven-year-old mind, I could only conjure Nazis and swastikas and concentration camps and planes dropping bombs and machine guns rat-a-tat-tatting. What about all of that? These threats seemed very real to me. Seventh grade Social Studies class had taught us about World War II and the Cold War. I was too young then to understand it all, but I knew what I knew, and I knew that Nazis were bad, the big war had ended not too long ago, and my dad had to be in West Germany because there might be an invasion of communists. Looking back at that time, I know now that the only real threats were closer to home.
We moved from our nice, safe house in southern Ontario to Soest, a medieval, walled town in Westphalia, West Germany. It was a culture shock. I heard a new language, tasted foreign foods, and saw different faces. We lived shoulder to shoulder, in a treeless, concrete jungle of apartment buildings, set in a farmer’s field on the outskirts of Soest. Blended with this new country and culture, was the constant presence of Canadian soldiers, something we had not experienced in Canada.
To practice their readiness and response to the threat of an invasion from the east, our fathers would be roused by blaring sirens in the middle of the night. A loud, long tone would be followed by a shivering, fast wail, and a voice announcing an Alert, telling them to make their way to their base and report for duty. This would be repeated several times, making sure everyone was awake and out of bed. These alerts shocked and terrified me. I would put a pillow over my head to drown out the horrible sounds and fantasize about killing commies, hoping against all hope that my dad came home safe. On those nights, my dreams were filled with goose-stepping demons that looked like Adolf Hitler.
***
Bull Chisholm was a hard-drinking soldier who never amounted to much. At least as old as my father, he still held the rank of Private. One night the sirens went off and the next morning, I was told that my friend’s stepfather, Bull Chisholm, had passed away. Naturally, because I was still coming to terms with my imaginary monsters, I assumed he had died at the hands of an evil communist.
‘Was he shot?’ I asked, thinking that this was surely the worst way to die. To me this was a simple cause-and-effect situation: siren goes off, someone dies. ‘Did they shoot him?’
‘No,’ my father answered. ‘He was drunk. He fell down and hit his head.’ He told me this in a matter-of-fact manner and turned his attention to something else.
We cornered his stepdaughter Debbie in the school yard and insisted she tell us what happened. None of us understood grief, and not one of us knew the right thing to say. Heck, we didn’t know there was a right thing to say.
She shrugged. ‘Dunno. All I know is the sirens went off and my mom had to help him to the car. He was so drunk she had to drive him. She let him off and came home and that’s all we know.’
***
The sixties were a time of social change, and we were not insulated from the news of what was going on in Canada and the United States. Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A Changin’ was a popular anthem and music lyrics were rife with themes of civil rights, social change, and freedom. Jimi Hendrix and Procol Harum were in the background singing about fanciful LSD trips and drunken sex parties. Women were thinking about burning their bras. Liberation was looking them in the eye, enticing them with thoughts that they could think for themselves.
Despite women’s lib and birth control pills and the sexual revolution, our mothers lived with the reality of being a military wife. Their husband’s rank dictated who they could socialize with, how they dressed outside the house, and whether they could take a paying job. While our fathers were off playing soldier, sometimes gone for weeks at a time, our mothers managed our families, some with six or more kids.
My mother’s birth control pills sat beside the cough syrup in the medicine cabinet. She sometimes drank a cold beer out of the can, and she told anyone who asked that she worked outside the house because she wanted to. Many of the military wives came to her for advice and I heard her telling women to push back against the norms and speak up for themselves.
***
There was constant speculation about Bull Chisholm’s death. Our parents were talking, saying things we weren’t supposed to hear. We repeated what we heard to each other at school.
His wife Dorothy would be better off now.
His stepdaughter Debbie would be left alone.
He didn’t fall because he was drunk.
He was pushed.
The other soldiers were fed up with his drinking.
He got what was coming to him.
I was confused and not smart enough to put two and two together.
One night my parents’ yelling woke me up. I opened my bedroom door and heard my mother berating my father.
‘Goddamn it! You need to do something. All of you are guilty. You turn your heads and ignore it. You allow it!’
‘Just leave it alone,’ my father told her. ‘Leave. It. Alone.’
‘I won’t.’
A door slammed.
***
My memories of our time in northern West Germany almost always play out in sepia tones. The weather was dismal, and perhaps some sunshine would have helped the community that was struggling to deal with the death of one of its own. The talk and speculation continued. The cashiers at the grocery store whispered, the tellers at the bank huddled in the corner before the doors opened, and teachers talked about the stepdaughter in their smoke-filled lounge. But my dad and his men and the officers of the battalion were silent. Tight lipped. They were trying to put a secret back in the can, but the lid was already off.
Debbie and her mom Dorothy left and went back to Canada. There was no big goodbye. One day they were there and the next they were gone. I felt a hole in our group of friends, but we moved on.
***
The Shaw family lived one floor above us. They had three children, all with coarse, blond hair and dull, blue eyes. Their father was a drunk, just like Bull Chisholm and he was called Shaky Shaw. Everyone had a nickname in the army and Shaky got his nickname because, well, he was shaky most of the time. I heard my mom call it delirium tremens, but I didn’t know what that meant. Mrs. Shaw was a large woman who towered over her husband. She was very nice to everyone. Shaky was a quiet man but his silence in public belied the yelling that came from their apartment.
A few weeks after Debbie and her mother returned to Canada, my mom had some of her friends for a visit. This wasn’t unusual as the wives of the soldiers often got together when their husbands were away. I was told to go upstairs and babysit the Shaw kids so Mrs. Shaw could join my mom and her friends. What was going on? Were they talking about Bull Chisholm?
***
Several months later, the sirens sounded again, calling for the soldiers to drag themselves out of bed and get in their cars and drive to the military base and rally with their fellow soldiers. They loaded their weapons, and crammed themselves into armoured personnel carriers, waiting for some word from above telling them that this was it. They sat side by side on narrow benches, almost on top of each other, their rifles between their legs, breathing in the diesel fumes. Was this to be a night of mushroom clouds? Would the metal and steel machine protect them against an enemy they’d never met?
Armoured personnel carrier 10C housed C Platoon of Alpha Company. The Master Corporal was taking a headcount starting with the driver up front who was engaged with levers and pullies and chokes and gas pedals, completing a complicated checklist that had been drilled into his head to get this behemoth moving. The Master Corporal counted heads down the left side bench and twisted around, bumping knees with seated soldiers and counted the right-side bench.
‘Where the fuck is Shaky Shaw?’ he yelled over the sound of the engines. The men on the right side shrugged in unison and he turned around and yelled again, ‘Where the fuck is Shaky Shaw?’ All he got in response were shrugs and groggy, blank stares. Shaky Shaw was the least of their worries.
The driver up front shouted to get the Master Corporal’s attention and twirled his hand in a circle over his head. He nodded, and the rear ramp door of the armoured vehicle started to close. Three men on the right side crossed themselves, and the vehicle jerked and jumped and clanged and moved off. Without Shaky Shaw.
Shaky Shaw died drunk that night after the sirens summoned the soldiers. His death was just as shocking as Bull Chisholm’s, but it felt closer to me because the Shaw family lived just upstairs. I peeked through a crack in our door and watched a parade of Military Police and neighbours trudge up and down the stone stairs after that rainy, dark night. Mrs. Shaw seemed even bigger without her tiny husband standing at her side. Their children, Susan, Cathy, and Barry silently appeared two days later and walked with the rest of us to school. The oldest daughter, Susan, who was a year younger than me didn’t seem very upset at all. She was smiling. Susan never smiled.
***
All the soldiers – and their wives – drank a lot of alcohol. It was cheap and readily available. Cocktail parties happened every night. Some of us were luckier than our friends and had parents who weren’t called drunks and didn’t yell and hit people. Or other things. Alcohol fueled a lot of family fires and open secrets festered like gangrenous wounds, hanging over our community like a dreaded mushroom cloud.
Everyone knew that Bull Chisholm would fight anyone who looked at him sideways. Most times he took his arguments to the Corporal’s mess where the men started drinking beer on Friday afternoon and drank until they couldn’t sit up anymore. Beer was Bull Chisholm’s courage. He didn’t care who he fought. The men around him knew that if they didn’t take his rage and his anger and his knuckles on their noses and in their bellies that he would take it all home with him. Fellow soldiers who could still hold their heads up would watch Bull stumble out to the parking lot, knowing full well that if they’d truly been a man’s man, they would have fought him one more time. To help him get rid of the rage.
Shaky Shaw did his drinking at home.
The whispers and rumours about Shaky Shaw’s death were relentless but I paid no attention because, to me, it seemed simple: drunk men fell a lot, and they died. What else was there to talk about? Mrs. Shaw came to say goodbye, and I heard mom tell Mrs. Shaw that she was better off. Better off than what, I wondered. Mrs. Shaw mumbled something about the kids being safe now and that’s all that mattered. Safe from what, I wondered. Then my mother raised her voice and called someone a son of a bitch. Who? Who was a son of a bitch? So many questions and no matter how many times I asked, I was told to mind my business.
On her way out, Mrs. Shaw grabbed me in a bear hug, smothering me in her bosom that reeked of stale cigarettes and vinegar. They left for Canada the next day.
***
The apartments we lived in were called married quarters or PMQ’s. Our school and a little strip mall of shops formed an imaginary Green Line between our apartment buildings and where the officers and their families lived. They had single-family houses, covered in the same drab, grey stucco, with front lawns and backyards for the kids. This enclave of privilege was a no-man’s land where we never ventured unless for a very special reason. My father’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Barclay and his family lived in one of these hallowed houses.
One dull day at the beginning of January, bored and staring out the classroom window, I was shocked to see my mother striding down the road towards the officers’ married quarters. I wondered why she wasn’t at her job at the bank. Why was she venturing into no man’s land? Where was she going?
At the dinner table that night, I asked, ‘Where did you go today, mom? I saw you walking into the officers’ quarters.’
My father laid his knife and fork down and looked up, directly at my mother across the table from him. ‘The officers’ quarters?’
She put her elbows on the table, and glanced at me, and then my father.
‘I went to see Mrs. Barclay.’
‘The CO’s wife?’
‘How many Mrs. Barclays do we know?’ my mother shot back.
‘Jesus,’ my dad muttered and pushed his chair back from the table.
‘I was hoping she could talk some sense into that husband of hers.’
‘You,’ my dad said, pointing at me. ‘Go to your room.’
I scurried out of the dining room and stood up against the wall in the hallway, wanting to hear and not be seen.
‘How could you?’ my father demanded. ‘You know that’s not the way things work.’
‘Nothing seems to work, and if you and the CO aren’t going to do something about it, I will. Others are with me. I won’t stand back and allow this to continue.’
Allow what?
***
Our fathers thought of themselves as defenders of democracy. Our mothers were the defenders of our families.
Early in 1967, our fathers were away again in a place called Sennelager where they held military exercises. I answered a knock on our door and two of my mother’s friends announced that they were here to see mom. I was told to go outside and play, for reasons that were not explained to me. Instead of playing, I sat on the cold and damp steps in front of our building, silently watching a steady stream of my mother’s friends arrive. I desperately wanted to know what was going on. The parade of visitors finally ended. I was allowed back in our apartment when the sun had set, and everyone had gone home.
***
Jimmy Gammond, a Corporal in A Company failed to report for duty in early February and after three days he was declared AWOL. I didn’t know Mr. Gammond that well but I knew his wife because she had been at my school, dropping out last year in the middle of grade 11 to get married. Her father, Sgt. Major Hill, was part of the regiment, and her mother was friendly with my mom.
His body was found three months later, buried in a shallow grave in the forest behind the pristine home of Lt. Colonel and Mrs. Barclay, on the other side of the invisible Green Line. The Barclay’s dog, known as a rascal who loved to dig, had uncovered the body, and proudly presented Mrs. Barclay with a mangled left hand.
I was twelve now. I knew that this time it wasn’t an accident. The Military and German police interviewed every member of my father’s battalion and their wives.
‘Who cares? They’re all dead. And I’m not sorry.’ This was my mother speaking to my father, and I shouldn’t have been listening. ‘They were bullies and they got away with despicable things. How can you look the other way?’
My father remained silent all the while she was berating him.
‘You and your duty of honour. Honour among soldiers,’ she spat. ‘What honour is there in knowing what these bastards get away with? Show me the honour!’ She was yelling now.
The horror of finding the mangled body buried behind the commanding officer’s house cast a black pall over the regiment and the families. Things changed dramatically overnight. There was little socializing and less drinking in groups. The mystery of this death was never solved. Four months later we returned to Canada, and I was able to leave behind the monsters and bogeymen that made regular appearances in my dreams and my imagination. The battalion was silently disbanded. Families were sent across Canada to various other postings.
***
The memory of the two years our family spent in West Germany faded as I aged, until my mother started rambling one night in a drug-fueled haze. Her epic battle with ovarian cancer was coming to an end.
‘So many rotten things handed to us,’ she had said months earlier, after telling us she was dying. ‘A woman’s disease and like everything else given to us, it’s painful and messy.’
She had spent her life fighting back at the inequities doled out to women.
She was dying at home and on her last night on earth, she rambled and ranted, and I let her go at it. Did I wish the morphine made her say loving things to me and have her utter happy memories? I did. But more important things were bubbling inside her.
Breathless, a few nonsensical words at a time, the pain and bitterness rose up. I held her hand and listened for a while, giving up on trying to make sense of it all. Until I heard her utter, ‘Bull Chisholm.’ Her eyes opened and she stared at me. ‘He was a son of a bitch,’ she said, clear as day.
Memories of that time lay buried under fifty years of life. But when she uttered that name taking her last breaths, I was back in our apartment in West Germany, eavesdropping on my parents arguing and my mother cursing.
She left my father less than a year after we returned to Canada. I lived with my dad, and mom became a full-time activist for women’s and children’s rights. She marched for any cause, volunteered in Montreal at Henry Morgentaler’s abortion clinic, and became a spokesperson for the abused, the downtrodden, and the ignored. She fought hard for all of them.
‘Bull Chisholm. And Shaky. All of them. They were just like my father,’ she whispered. ‘No brains. No honour. All of them.’
I had never heard her disparage her father.
My god.
Her life, her drive, her honour, all of it suddenly made sense to me.
I didn’t know what to say.
Her breathing slowed, and I knew I was watching her die. Her eyes opened. Lucid and with meaning, she uttered her last words.
‘Those men had no honour, and they deserved to die.’
She tried to take a deep breath through her mouth, and wheezed, ‘And we made sure it happened.’
