Enemies within and without: Politicians and officers leave soldiers in the lurch Final Edition

• Published in: The Ottawa citizen (1986)
• Main Author: Bron, Ian G
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: Ottawa, Ont Postmedia Network Inc 14.10.1999
• ISSN: 0839-3222

I could hardly believe my eyes when, returning for a visit from my self-imposed exile in London, I read of a new scandal. I recognized the pattern quickly. Soldiers poisoned by contaminated soil in Bosnia, medical documents altered or destroyed, inventive and ludicrous stories of plots and secretly poisoned food. This was instantly familiar to me -- precisely the same sort of thing happened last year after I went public with my own tale of how, as an officer cadet at the Royal Military College in Kingston, I was sexually assaulted in 1984. It looks like the military has learned only one lesson -- the wrong one -- from last year's crisis: Destroy the evidence and nothing can be proved. One military official even said words to the effect that it didn't matter and that everything would blow over in a few months. His words came back to haunt him. I have begun to wonder how Canadians do judge their leaders. The list of scandals keeps getting longer: first the torture and murder of a Somali youth by Canadian peacekeepers, then the Airborne Regiment's abuse of its own soldiers, then the widespread claims of sexual assault in the military, now the poisoning of soldiers in Bosnia. And still nobody has forced the military to accept responsibility or initiated a thorough housecleaning.