Free Shake Hands With the Devil by Romeo Dallaire Page A

When I arrived, little formal military leadership material and experience were being passed on to the future officers. The task was immense, since the Canadian Forces at the time had little to no formal material to provide. My generation had been on the receiving end of experience passed down from our elders, who got theirs from Second World War and Korean War veterans. As the guys with the combat medals retired, with very little of their experience put to paper, leadership training became more and more difficult for those who had not been in battle. It was simpler for most to teach physical fitness or
conciergerie.
The principles of military leadership remain difficult to teach.
    Before my work at the college was complete, I was selected to attend the Higher Command and Staff course in Camberley, England. The Gulf War had just started, so we dubbed the course “How to Do Schwarzkopf’s Job.”
    When I returned to Canada, I was appointed commander of the 5ième Group Brigade Mechanisé du Canada at Valcartier. I was taking charge of about 5,200 military personnel, 1,200 civilian support staff and related historic garrison duties in Quebec City, the oldest capital in North America. I was the first officer who had started his career with the 5ième to command it; Valcartier was a superb operational posting at the height of the Gulf War and the beginning of a new era of peacekeeping and conflict resolution for the Canadian military.
    I worked constantly. We lived in the brigade commander’s historic official residence on the Plains of Abraham; my kids attended Catholic private schools, run by religious orders in the old city; I was driven the twenty-six kilometres to the base in an impeccable black staff car; my wife was a pillar of the community and worked hard to support the families of soldiers away on missions. I was excited by the wealth of possibilities that lay before me, but I was also completely and utterly alone.I never seemed to have an extra moment to spend with my children, and only now do I realize how much they suffered as they watched me work at my desk or at the dining-room table during the rare hours when I was at home.
    Commanding such a large contingent of soldiers in a bastion of Quebec that had nationalist sympathies was a delicate balancing act. That was never clearer to me and my headquarters staff than during an exercise aimed at training a 1,600-person contingent for a high-risk peacekeeping mission in the former Yugoslavia. We were training the troops in escort tasks and convoy protection, and to provide a little more realism, we had planned manoeuvres in local communities on a specific day, alerting the police and the town councils as to what we were doing. It turned out that on that very day Prime Minister Mulroney was in town with other premiers to negotiate the Meech Lake Accord, which was designed to reconcile Quebec to staying in Canada under special status. Someone told the media that the prime minister was trying to intimidate the separatists by ordering up a huge display of military force.
    I was ordered to stop the exercise and move the blue berets back to barracks with our tails between our legs. Caught by journalists later that day, I apparently created a small storm in Ottawa by accusing the media of fostering Quebec paranoia and of jumping to conclusions without making the effort to find out what was really going on. Someone in Ottawa must have stood up for me, because I never heard about it again.
    From 1991 to 1993, the brigade sent more than four thousand troops on peacekeeping missions in places all over the world, from Cambodia to the Balkans to Kuwait. At one point I called the commander of the army to suggest that my whole brigade headquarters be moved overseas, since it felt like I was the only one left at home. He thanked me for the moment of levity, but told me I should prepare for even more UN taskings. I couldn’t figure out where I would get the