New2view's Blog   Life on The Blue Marble

It won’t please recruiters, but I cannot recommend joining the Royal Canadian Navy. As a 5 year recruit from Vancouver it had seemed like a good escape from teenage reality. Although I had held down a couple of jobs in Vancouver, the future just wasn’t bright. So at 17 I joined the RCN and travelled to their Cornwallis Nova Scotia boot camp

Boot camp did challenge my youthful spirit, and a subsequent posting to the navy frigate Lauzon was exciting. However my ‘Oiler’ designation was not.

So going through the necessary command structure I requested a change to ‘Radar Plotter’. It required a several week course ashore, which I topped. Then followed a 20 month draft assignment to HMCS Athabascan, a so-called ‘greyhound of the fleet’ veteran of the Korean war, followed by a similar period on the Quinte, a coastal Mine Sweeper.

Although there were some highlights, viewing amazing stars at sea is  beyond imagination, a sea full of porpoises from horizon to horizon, and sweeping instant storms. For me there were some personal benefits, such as learning and accepting discipline, and visiting a few ports in Europe and the East Coast of the US. And of course I was singularly fortunate not to have been involved in wartime conditions during all 5 years.

However negatives included fending off homosexual predators, and vicious street gangs, at many, if not all, ports I visited, and that was in the 70’s. So I can only imagine today’s conditions.

Based on my own experience, all I can say is I believe there are much better paths for a youth to take than joining the RCN, please choose wisely!

Please visit my posting: Paradise lost to Paradise Regained