Record keeping.... In the army, we used to have what we called an ITR, an individual training record. It had a pay book. Heaven forbid if the company lost your ITR because that detailed all your courses and so forth. Yes, there'd be a hard copy of course reports, and yes, you could lose your pay book. It's a chargeable offence, because then somebody has to go through the pay office and find out what they owe you. That doesn't happen today. It's all automated and it's direct banking and so forth.
Let me leap ahead to 1967, where, as a sergeant, I was posted here to National Defence Headquarters from a battalion--why me, God?--to the personal management information systems study group on how we were going to integrate the three records from the army, navy, and air force because they were all different. To make a long story short, we came up with what they call a CF490, which is the automated Canadian Forces record of service, the old punch card business. I only lasted two years here and then I went back to the battalion. So that's the way it has progressed.
Nowadays, I don't know the system intimately, but it's all automated in regard to records.
As for the soldier, it's come light years from...we used to have an expression in the infantry that the best infantry platoon you could have was a bunch of grade five Saskatchewan farmers. They were all strong; they didn't need to be particularly well-educated.
When I joined the army--I had a grade 11 education, and obviously I brought it up--I was the highest educated guy in my company of 130 people, exclusive of the officers, of course.
Nowadays, these kids are smart. A lot of them have at least one year of university. They're very worldly. They're computer literate. They know what's going on so you're not going to be able to snow them. Not that you would get snowed in the old days, but there is light years from Corporal Bloggins joining in 1956 to the kids coming in today. Great talent, higher educated, of course, in one part, because of the sophistication of the weapons systems they have to use.... With all due respect to grade five Saskatchewan farmers, you can't employ them on a sophisticated weapons systems, a LAV-III or a tank, or whatever. So they've come a long, long way.
So there is a difference.
In the old days, sure, some people would grab a hold of themselves and move forward in the ranks and so forth. However, as a young soldier, you were more concerned with what the sergeant or, heaven forbid, the sergeant major was doing. You really didn't know the officers, and you could care less because you were very isolated in your own little world. That's changed, when you look at what's happening in Afghanistan with our troops as they move through an area as a cosmopolitan group of very well-educated and well-trained people. There is light years of difference between the two.