Memories of the Congo ONUC, A work in progress
I was born on
15 July 1940 in Stratford, Ontario to Mabel Haines and Eugene Hueglin and I
have one brother who is three years older than me. My early years were spent in
Stratford, Guelph, and Dover Township, Ontario. June and I married on 23 Dec
1961 and we had our first child, Stephen on 22 Dec 1962.
In 1961 I was
unemployed, with a Grade XII education and living with my parents in the
countryside outside Chatham, Ontario. No member of my family had ever been in
the Canadian military, however, for some unknown reason I had a desire to join the Army
so I went on my own to the Recruiting Office in Chatham to inquire about
enlisting.
On 2 February
1961, I was sent to No 7 Personnel Depot in London, Ontario where, after my
first military haircut, I participated in various forms of testing to determine
whether I was mentally, physically and technically acceptable to join, and what
I would be best suited to do.
On 23 February 1961, I was Taken on Strength of the Royal Canadian Corps of Signals and underwent six months of basic training at the Royal Canadian Regiment Depot, Wolseley Barracks, in London. My first six months at the Depot involved living four to a room, Kit layouts, frequent inspections, a good deal of marching and saluting and field craft. It was a time when each recruit kept a bayonet and rifle in their clothes locker and, a breach block in their barrack box. My wake up call each morning was a metal pipe being thrown along the terrazzo floor outside my room.
On 23 February 1961, I was Taken on Strength of the Royal Canadian Corps of Signals and underwent six months of basic training at the Royal Canadian Regiment Depot, Wolseley Barracks, in London. My first six months at the Depot involved living four to a room, Kit layouts, frequent inspections, a good deal of marching and saluting and field craft. It was a time when each recruit kept a bayonet and rifle in their clothes locker and, a breach block in their barrack box. My wake up call each morning was a metal pipe being thrown along the terrazzo floor outside my room.
On completion
of Basic Training I was shipped off to the School of Signals in Kingston,
Ontario. The initial time in Kingston involved indoctrination training into the
way Signals did things, Technical Preparatory Training, and getting to know the
other seven individuals who shared my one room, double bunked, living space.
Following the
aforementioned I commenced a long Group 1 training course, in Kingston, as a
Teletype & Cipher Equipment Technician, a trade that required that I have a
high level security clearance. During the time I was on course June and I
married in Chatham. This was not as easy as it sounds since I had to receive my
superior's permission to marry and live on the economy and, because of the
course I was on, there was some concern that I would be living with someone who
did not have a security clearance. As an aside, at the time we married, an
Other Rank had to be 21 years old to receive, in addition to a monthly basic
pay of $115.00, before deductions, a Marriage Maintenance Allowance of $30.00
and a Subsistence Allowance of $100.00 to help defray the cost of living on the
economy.
On completion
of the course I was posted, within the School of Signals, to the teletype
maintenance organization (X Tp), that operated out of the Genet Building, working
with a memorable group of technicians. Most of this group were solid role
models in terms of work and family, however, ... On completion of a Junior NCO
Course on 28 March 1963, I was promoted Corporal.
22 November
1963, the day JFK was assassinated, I was in the Orderly Room in the Forde
Building at Vimy Barracks in Kingston signing a document that read that should
I not appear for a tour of duty in the Republic of the Congo I would be
classified as a deserter. Before deployment June and Stephen moved to live with
her parents in Chatham and, as was then required I made a mandatory pay
allotment to June of $60.00 per month.
Our contingent
flew via Pisa, Italy in a Yukon, turboprop aircraft, from Trenton, Ontario, to
N'idjili airport in Leopoldville, Congo to join other members of 57
Canadian Signals Unit who were already serving there After takeoff from
Trenton, with this being the first time I had flown, it was somewhat
disconcerting when the pilot feathered the engine as the aircraft reached its
cruising altitude. The change from the noise of the aircraft labouring to gain height, to dead silence when it
leveled off was a shock I will never forget. In Pisa, along with other
tourists, I climbed the Leaning Tower and, later in the day watched others from
our contingent trying to pass Canadian Tire money off as legal Canadian
currency at the hotel where we were billeted. When we landed at the airport in
Leopoldville, the aircraft door opened and the smell and atmosphere of Africa
came wafting in.
In the course of my deployment my time was split
between Leopoldville and Elizabethville. Leopoldville, being a city at an
elevation of 240 m, some 515 km inland from, and East of the Atlantic Ocean and
480 km south of the Equator was hot, humid and rainy. Life there was quite
routine in many ways. I climbed up and down seven flights of stairs more than
once a day since the elevator in our quarters did not work. There were about 12 hours of daylight and 12
hours of darkness. It rained everyday at about the same time. I had access to a
community swimming pool that was always as warm as tea. Off duty life centred
around the wet canteen and its liquor and Polar beer; an outdoor area where
movies were shown at night on a large screen; buying local Franks on the black
market with the Canadian $10 bill June mailed to me in a magazine; an
occasional trip downtown to the ivory market area to buy souvenirs such as a
jewellery box, mask, spear or Katanga cross; or a walk along the Congo River to
watch the locals in dugout canoes or view the statues of King Leopold and
Stanley.
I walked
everyday to and from my quarters to my place of work in the UN Headquarters
Building (Athenee Royale). I stood guard on occasion outside our quarters with
an unloaded weapon. I worked the day shift in a maintenance shop above the tape
relay centre along with some of the same people I had worked with in X Tp and I
mostly chummed around with a fellow by the name of Bob Leckie.
My work dress
was a blue beret, armlets with rank, Corps and Unit designation, an Indian Bush
shirt, khaki shorts, a web belt and buckle, knee high socks and suede jungle
boots. You could tell you had been in theatre for awhile if you had hair on
your knees from not wearing long pants.
Other fond
memories include buying a Phillips tape recorder and short wave radio;
recording Congolese music; listening to CBC Radio International as The Beatles
arrived in North America and the Bonaventure headed for Cyprus transporting
Canadian troops. Other less fond memories include Wally Shannon, the SSM, who
insisted we play what came to be called "Wally Ball" (at one time his
wife was Head Waitress at the Vimy Officer's Mess); only getting milk when the
next Yukon flight arrived; seeing people eating from the kitchen waste area outside
our mess hall; and witnessing the local police arresting young people, throwing
them into the back of a vehicle and carting them off to jail.
The teletype equipment we maintained were electromechanical in design and included the Teletype
Corporation Model 15 teleprinter and the Model 28 teleprinter,
perforator/reperforator combination; and the Kleinschmidt TT-4 teleprinter.
These were all mid 1900's pieces of equipment that were widely used in the US
and Canadian military and that, for the most part, were easy to maintain. The
Model 15 and Model 28 lent themselves to static installations in message
centres whereas the TT-4 was a portable piece of equipment that was well suited
to field use. I, however, can remember one instance when it took me a great
deal of time to repair a singularly frustrating TT-4. The Typex cipher machine
used was a variation of an electromechanical device, with changeable rotors,
that first came into use with the British military prior to WW II. It was big,
bulky and, I believe, weighed about 120 lbs. To the best of my knowledge it
required a good deal of operator maintenance and was time consuming to operate.
After my return I heard a tale that for security reasons, and since there was
no value in bringing them home, all the in-theatre Typex machines were dropped
out of an aircraft into the Congo river.
Quarters were
primitive as I lived on the seventh floor of an apartment building with no
operating elevator, no laundry facilities, cots with tin cans filled with
liquid to deter creatures from climbing in to bed with you and ants
continuously streaming up and down the building, foraging for everything they
could carry away. Our laundry was collectively stomped on in a bath tub by a
houseboy and sun dried on the roof of our quarters. There was no need for
starch when they were ironed because of the residual salt they contained.
Elizabethville,
being a city at an elevation of 1208 m, some 1570 km by air inland to the East
of Leopoldville, and 1300 km south of the Equator, was cooler and drier than
Leopoldville. Life there was quite different and getting there and back was
hair-raising. On the flight to Elizabethville it took the pilot three tries to
get the plane airborne; that is to say he roared it down the runway, realized
that he could not lift it off, aborted the takeoff and taxied back to his
starting point and tried again. On the
return flight some months later, on a stop at one of the other detachments, the
plane came in to land, bounced when it hit the runway, took off again and
circled around before making a safe landing. As I recall, the plane was a
Douglas DC-3 flown by civilian pilots hired by the UN.
Once in Elizabethville
life became routine once again, but in a different way. I lived with other
detachment members in a ground level villa. We had our own French Canadian cook
and the houseboy, and his family, lived in a small dwelling behind the villa.
The local UN Headquarters building was a short walk away and getting there and
back offered an opportunity to interact with the local community and practice
basic Kiswahili such as Jambo, habari gani, habari nzuri, misouri kapisa, umke
na watoto howa jambo. The houseboy was not adverse to inviting me into his
family home and introducing me to a local dish of manioc and beef in Pili-Pili
sauce. Since practising my trade did not occupy all my time, my secondary duty
was to assist our cook on ration runs. This involved trips with him to the
local market to buy fresh food using our own transportation, and dealings with
Indian and Pakistani troops who collectively ran the local UN Rations Depot and
provided transportation to the Depot and back. What was most interesting about
this situation was that, notwithstanding the hostility that then existed
between India and Pakistan, the troops got along very well. Often, after a
ration run our cook would wind up bartering the UN supplied food, e.g. canned
bully beef, for local produce. Local sights included giant ant hills, malachite
mines, and the local zoo and its chain smoking chimpanzee.
I arrived back
in Trenton on Thursday, 28 May 1964. Rather than quarantine us for the weekend at Sunnybrook Hospital in
Toronto, Ontario we were told to report back on the following Monday for post
deployment medical examination for, among other things, parasites. I think we
all welcomed the chance to immediately see our family, however, It made no
sense then, and it still doesn't. At the time, June and Stephen were staying in
Preston, Ontario with my brother and his wife so I hitchhiked there for the
weekend. When I was dropped off on the highway outside Preston I was hungry so,
before heading off on foot to find my brother's house, I stopped at a
restaurant and bought a piece of cherry pie to satisfy a craving I had.
During my post deployment leave,
June, Stephen and I stayed with June's parents in Chatham. Shortly after we
started staying with them my barrack box arrived at the local Customs Office.
After clearing customs, and bringing It to June's parent's house, I opened my
barrack box and, lo and behold, out wafted the smell of Africa. From the money
we saved during my deployment to the Congo June and I purchased a used
Volkswagen Beetle and a Vilas kitchen table and four chairs. We still have the
table.
So endeth the story.
