Thank you very much for that.
I started off in Gagetown, New Brunswick, as armoured corps. My very first introduction to being active was during my training when we stood up to be on standby for the Oka crisis and essentially everything after that.
Then I went into Germany for Cold War stuff. We were always on duty—24-7, 365—in theatre. It was very different back then. We knew we were sacrificial. In the tanks, we had to take out 36 of them to one of ours. We knew we were a speed bump. We literally had a 15-second lifespan.
From there I came back to Canada, and I went to Bosnia in 1994 with the United Nations. I saw a lot of stuff going on there. My first deployment under NATO was in 1997. We rolled into Bosnia. Then again in 2000 I was with the air force.
Then I did the G8 summit and the Quebec ice storm. Then I did a bunch of time in the States to train for the Chinook helicopters. I did Afghanistan. I did a lot of international stuff there. I did a lot of international work.
I'm sorry I'm taking a little more time here.
When we work with a lot of other nations, you get to see the differences in the way their soldiers are treated and stuff like that. In a lot of ways we are left behind.