'HE'S ARMOURED, BUT HE'S NOT THICK'
Some Canadians went on the attack this month when Gen. Rick Hillier said the Canadian army's job is to 'kill' the 'detestable murderers and scumbags' who commit terrorism. But his defenders in Parliament and the armed forces see the brash commander, who rose from humble Newfoundland roots, as a fresh breed of 'tell it like it is' leader the country needs to face the realities of a new world. DANIEL LEBLANC reports from Ottawa and SHAWNA RICHER from Campbellton, Nfld.
By DANIEL LEBLANC AND SHAWNA RICHER
Saturday, July 30, 2005
Updated at 1:02 PM EDT
With a report from Katherine Harding in Edmonton
Ottawa and Campbellton, Nfld. -- If Rick Hillier's life wasn't changed forever on that day in May, 2004, his feeling that terrorists are dangerous "scumbags" was certainly confirmed.
The general who would soon become the head of the Canadian Armed Forces was then in charge of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, with 6,400 troops from around the world under his command. One day he decided to visit his Norwegian soldiers, and tour their area of responsibility in war-torn Kabul.
He had intended to return to their camp with them, but the Scandinavians dropped him off at his headquarters instead. The amiable Newfoundland-born general shook hands with them all, lastly gunner Tommy Roedningsby. Fifteen minutes later, Mr. Roedningsby was dead, hit by a grenade launched by a Taliban supporter. If he had followed the original plan, Gen. Hillier would have been in the same open vehicle.
That death, the only one in Gen. Hillier's time at ISAF, helped shape his world view. In an interview this week, he recalled, "The guy who was killed was my gunner." Two days later, a Norwegian commander came to relay the last words Mr. Roedningsby spoke to his fellow soldiers, referring to the general himself: "There goes a leader I could follow."
Gen. Hillier fell into a rare silence. "You talk about something that will be with me forever," he said.
The incident, along with his time in the former Yugoslavia in the days of ethnic cleansing, helps explain why Gen. Hillier wants the military he was appointed to lead five months ago to become a more forceful presence in the world.
While he has long been a military star, Rick Hillier hit the national stage only this month with his tough talk about an upcoming mission to Afghanistan. He set off a tempest by saying of the opponents his soldiers face, "These are detestable murderers and scumbags, I'll tell you that right up front. They detest our freedoms, they detest our society, they detest our liberties."
The new Chief of the Defence Staff was accused of echoing the martial rhetoric of U.S. President George W. Bush, and betraying Canadian traditions. "We are also not a country that is going to easily throw away 100 years of peacekeeping reputation and noble reputation in the world by a testosterone-filled general, and I think somebody should put a clamp on his mouth," independent MP Carolyn Parrish said this week.
Gen. Hillier answered that he had to deliver a strong message, and that he would continue to explain what his troops are doing -- which hasn't been peacekeeping for more than 10 years. Canadians, he said, have to wake up to the new reality.
Not long ago, this country's top officers most often spent their foreign deployments in Cold War Germany, coming back with decorations widely ridiculed as "beer-and-bratwurst medals." Gen. Hillier's experience in the post-Cold War and then post-9/11 world gives him another perspective.
There is only a seven-year span between the 50-year-old Gen. Hillier and his former army boss, 57-year-old Mike Jeffery, but a world of a difference. "General Hillier represents a new breed of general officer, who has a fresh approach," said Mr. Jeffery, who retired as the chief of the land staff in 2003.
"My generation and my superiors grew up very much in the Cold War. . . . He really grew up with a much more practical view of operations."
And that view is: Forget the image of the peacekeeping Canadian blue beret. Gen. Hillier wants to convey the sense that Canadian soldiers are in the thick of things, even if he offends some of the public by saying that the Number 1 duty of his troops is to "be able to kill people."
"We're not cold-hearted warriors who do things in a ruthless manner," he added this week, "but we can . . . and will do what's necessary. What we're always trying to do is make life better for people."
The enemy now, he said, is a "ball of snakes" made up of terrorists, drug traffickers and other rogue elements. Canadian Forces are still structured to fight a rival state. Along with the expansion of Canada's military budget from $13-billion this year to $19-billion in 2010, they will have to adapt to the new threat.
That's why Gen. Hillier supported a decision two years ago to get rid of tanks and replace them with smaller, more mobile vehicles known as Strykers. It was no doubt a tough choice, since Gen. Hillier first showed his stuff leading a tank squadron in the 1980s, as a member of the Royal Canadian Dragoons. But as another Dragoon points out, Gen. Hillier has climbed atop the hierarchy with his leadership skills and his own adaptability.
"He's not narrow-minded," said Clive Addy, a retired major-general. "He's armoured, but he's not thick."
Rick Hillier has a small-town ordinariness. He is obviously fit, but he doesn't have the face of a brawler. His only distinguishing characteristic is his razor-thin mustache, and the constant glimmer in the eyes. He greets visitors to his office in his green summer uniform, going past the military mementos to a picture of his beloved grandson Jack. His shoulders seem light, but his handshake is strong.
He betrays his Newfoundland roots when he speaks, often leaving out the "h" out of words like "huge." He is not an overtly formal man, but someone who's able to shoot off an endless series of jokes about beer, hockey and himself. During the official ceremony that saw him take over the Forces, he even joked about Governor-General Adrienne Clarkson's expense accounts.
But behind the smile, he is also a canny salesman who can talk seriously about such things as the need for the Canadian Forces to go from a "staff-matrix approach to a command-centric approach."
His plans are heavily centred on the land component of the Forces, with the goal of protecting Canada and North America first, and helping out failed overseas states second. He wants to streamline all operations in the country under one umbrella called Canada Command, removing responsibilities from other officers in Ottawa. And he wants to create new positions for a commander of Canada's missions abroad as well as for the commando-style special forces.
Gen. Hillier also wants to reform everything from recruitment to procurement, all the while growing the numbers of full-time and reserve troops by 8,000.
Just 49 when he became Chief of Defence Staff in February, Gen. Hillier is the second-youngest officer ever to rise to the top of the Canadian Forces. His first overseas posting was to Germany in the mid-1980s, followed by tours of duty in the former Yugoslavia, Bosnia and Afghanistan. He was not first in line for the position in terms of military hierarchy. But his ability to propose a concrete vision of the future caught the attention of Defence Minister Bill Graham, and helped convince Prime Minister Paul Martin to promote him.
Gen. Hillier has said he never planned his rapid rise through the Forces, but his former colleagues said it was long obvious he knew what it took to get the top job. Master Corporal Rick Bullied drove Gen. Hillier around the base in Petawawa, Ont., in 1997-98. Within months, he was sure Gen. Hillier would eventually graduate from one-star to four-star general.
"He's a fast mover. Even as a driver, I said to numerous people, 'This guy is going to be the next CDS.' And there he is," Cpl. Bullied said.
He had the right touch with the soldiers, said Cpl. Bullied, cancelling weekend training to ensure troops could spend as much time as possible with their families. He was equally at home helping civilian populations during the 1998 ice storm or conducting war games.
Even on Gen. Hillier's first posting in Lahr, Germany, where he led a tank squadron of 120, his superior Bob Meating saw great promise in his ability to motivate people and to generate ideas. "I prefer people that I have trouble reining in than people I have to prod," said Mr. Meating, who retired as a major-general. "He was one of the guys I had to rein in. He talked a thousand miles a minute."
Mr. Meating recalls Gen. Hillier as a smart leader who outshone the "enemies" in training sessions with other western militaries: "I remember in a war-fighting scenario in Germany, his squadron was being put through its paces and he did such a fine job, the brigade commander of the day questioned whether Hillier had cheated."
Gen. Hillier had avoided the danger zones on the field and went to the outer reaches of the approved territory to avoid fire. "He did a flanking movement through the deepest, darkest jungles you could find, and came out the other side. People believed he had gone out of bounds, and my boss of the day said, 'Fire him, he's cheated.' It wasn't so," Mr. Meating said.
But Gen. Hillier's next overseas deployment placed him in a whole new world. He and his troops were shot at continuously in the Balkans in the mid-1990s. There was no peace to maintain in that part of the world, he said, thinking back to a day in the hills near Sarajevo. "All of a sudden I hear a whoomp. . . whoomp. . . whoomp in the distance, and a few minutes later we're diving in the back of an [armoured vehicle]. The mortar rounds were targeted directly at us, they'd seen us there," he said.
After serving in the former Yugoslavia in 1995 and Bosnia in 2000, he went to Afghanistan as the commander of the multinational force. He smoked cigarillos in his days in Kabul, where he had a simple approach: Find the good guys and help them out, and then go after the bad guys and take them out.
He decided to hire an American as his chief of staff, to liaise with the U.S. troops all over Afghanistan. Les Fuller, a native of Georgia, was jokingly provided with a Newfoundland dictionary to help him understand his animated new boss.
Mr. Fuller said Gen. Hillier kept up morale in those trying times by regularly invoking "rule 9" at the end of meetings -- which meant somebody in the room had to crack a joke before the meeting could disband. "He used his humour to keep people on an even keel. When things got hot and tense, he would tell a story to break the tension."
At the same time, Mr. Fuller said, there were confrontations with his bosses in NATO, who rejected Gen. Hillier's efforts to expand beyond the traditional security mission. "I don't think you'd find anybody that was in Kabul who would say, 'I didn't really like him,' " Mr. Fuller said, "although there are people in Belgium that didn't like him because he wouldn't let them - excuse the expression - sit on their ass."
One other thing that stands out in Gen. Hillier's CV is his two-year stint as a deputy commander of a large U.S. army division in Texas from 1998 to 2000. It was a temporary transfer between the two countries, to give a senior Canadian officer a unique learning experience inside the world's only superpower.
As deputy commander of the Third Armoured Corps, he had 57,000 soldiers -- a military unit roughly the size of the Canadian Forces. The posting gave Gen. Hillier a clear insight into the workings of the world's biggest military, but he insists he has no intention of importing the U.S. style. "We've approached everything from a Canada-first attitude, and what's right for 32 million Canadians," he told reporters this month.
Gen. Hillier's roots couldn't be much more Canadian. He began sending earnest letters to the Canadian Forces at age 7 from the house in Campbellton, Nfld., where he lived with his parents Myrtle and Jack and his five sisters. The military wrote back in an effort to recruit him, unaware of his age.
"As soon as he could write he was writing to them," his mother said in an interview. "We had piles of pamphlets and literature around. He would see ads in the papers and write away for things. . . . How he got the idea for it I don't know. I've often wondered that myself."
His late father, however, did not want to see his only son join the military. Jack was still heartbroken over a favourite uncle - John Clark - who had been killed during the First World War at age 19. "[Jack] associated the Armed Forces with that," said Myrtle Hillier, now 82. "But we left it to all our children to choose their own careers. And as soon as [Rick] was old enough to join, he went off to the military."
Even Gen. Hillier said he doesn't know why he started reading military history at such a young age. But his imagination just went wild at the thought of enlisting in the army. "I knew right from the start what I wanted to be."
Campbellton is a town of about 600 in the heart of central Newfoundland's rugged Exploits Valley. Overlooking a sheltered harbour on Notre Dame Bay and famous for the birch, spruce and white pine that once made it a bustling lumbering community, the town remains densely cocooned in a lush, green quiet about an hour from the Trans-Canada Highway.
Myrtle was teaching in a one-room schoolhouse in Campbellton when she met her future husband, a heavy-duty mechanic. She gave up working in the classroom when they began having children. "With Jack having to go away to work, if I'd continued to work probably the children wouldn't have done as well as they have," she said.
Like so many fathers in Newfoundland, Jack left for long stretches to find work. But father and son remained close, and the family lived comfortably. "He got home as much as he could. We didn't have phones here in those days," Ms. Hillier said. "His dad was really family oriented."
At the same time, there is little doubt that being surrounded by five sisters and raised by a strong mother shaped Canada's top soldier more than anything else. "Back in 1985, 1986, 1987, I remember all the debate and the emotion around whether women could do the job, whether they could be in the combat arms, whether they were robust enough and tough enough," Gen. Hillier said. "I knew way back then we were barking up the wrong tree.
"I grew up in a family with five sisters and a mother who guided me for life, and four of those sisters were older than I was and every single day, I got beaten up by one of them all through my childhood. Were they robust enough or tough enough to do what we need done? Absolutely."
The former schoolteacher's house was crammed with books, and Rick, like his sisters, could read before he began first grade, and devoured all the printed matter he could get his hands on. Yet he was in many ways a typical teenage boy, who would get together with friends to drink beer and shoot a .22 around town (a practice he's quick to say he wouldn't condone today).
He played hockey when the inner harbour froze over or on homemade neighbourhood rinks, with equipment his parents got at Sears, but he signals on his résumé that sports weren't always kind to him. "General Hillier enjoys most recreational pursuits but, in particular, runs slowly, plays hockey poorly and golfs not well at all," the document says.
The family attended the Salvation Army Church, and young Rick played the horn in the church band, and also dabbled on the piano and accordion. "It brought him out in public more than he would have been," Ms. Hillier said.
Quiet and modest, he frequently won honours at school, but come awards night it would be a surprise to his parents in the audience. He left home at 17 to attend Memorial University in St. John's and graduated in 1975 with a bachelor of sciences degree. His cousin, Clyde Hillier, said: "Growing up he was one of those fellows you always knew was going to go somewhere. . . . He was a little smarter, a little quicker than everyone else. You knew he was going places."
His mother believes his Newfoundland upbringing made young Rick a natural for the army. "People from outport Newfoundland lived their lives in the woods and on the sea in rugged activities and fit into the armed forces quite easily."
Gen. Hillier met his wife, Joyce, when she was teaching in nearby Comfort Cove. They eventually had two sons, Christopher and Stephen. They all remain in Ottawa, where Joyce is now a financial adviser at the downtown Bank of Montreal. Gen. Hillier's eyes glimmer when he mentions Christopher's baby Jack -- named, of course, for his great-grandfather.
"There's a lot of credit due [Joyce]," Myrtle Hillier said. "She's spent a lot of time alone so he could go on all these missions. . . . She's done a great job on the boys. And she's so good to me."
Gen. Hillier said his wife sees every one of the medals on his uniform as a symbol of the time he spent away to earn them.
His mother still lives in Newfoundland, in the same tidy, white, clapboard house where she raised her family with Jack, who passed away in 1997 after suffering from cancer.
While his father was in and out of hospital in St. John's over several years, Gen. Hillier spent a long stretch in Bosnia, but phoned every day. When Jack died two days after Christmas, Gen. Hillier was devastated. When he left to coordinate relief for the ferocious ice storm that battered Ontario and Quebec that winter, his mother appreciated the distraction. "It gave him something that filled up his time completely," she said.
"I like to think I inherited certain characteristics from my dad," Gen. Hillier added, "and I hope that one of those is that hard work won't necessarily kill you."
The general is widely regarded as a proud Newfoundlander. After he was promoted, the local weekly paper, the Lewisporte Pilot, ran a cartoon depicting him in uniform and deciding his first job would be to take on Globe columnist Margaret Wente over a column she wrote criticizing the province. Ms. Hillier still laughs over the clipping.
She visits her son in Ottawa several times a year, and most summers he comes home, where he focuses on family, though he might sneak in a few rounds of golf. Otherwise, Ms. Hillier couldn't remember a time when her son wasn't hard at work. He usually calls at least once a week, but she hadn't heard from him yet this week -- always a sign to her that he is swamped.
After five months in his job, Gen. Hillier often muses aloud, "I wish I could clone myself 1,000 times."
Gen. Hillier likes to say he entered the Canadian Forces to be a soldier and nothing else. He loves people in uniform, never missing an opportunity to chat them up about their hometowns or their recent deployments.
Even now that he is at the top, he sometimes seems to wish he were back at the bottom, at least for a few hours. He recently spent four hours training with soldiers to perform the time-honoured changing of the guard on Parliament Hill. He put on the red suit and bear-skin hat, revelling in the hot sun and getting screamed at by junior officers.
But Mr. Meating, Gen. Hillier's former superior in Germany, noted that his former officer spent just enough time in the National Defence Headquarters in Ottawa in the mid-1990s to learn the way up.
"He worked in the inner sanctums in Ottawa . . . which a lot of people in the army hadn't done," Mr. Meating said. "He realized where the power was, and he moved around from job to job, and when he went down to the States, he kept an eye on it. . . . I won't say he preconditioned things for himself, he just knew if he ever got that opportunity how he was going to deal with it."
A senior federal official said the Canadian Forces were "dying for leadership" and Gen. Hillier was the person to fill that void. While even his supporters were surprised by the vigour of his recent comments, they heralded a new tone in the Canadian Forces, to match promises of more money and troops.
Politicians had been struggling for a year to put meat on an international policy statement in which the government expressed a desire to increase Canada's relevance in the world's most volatile countries. Now, suddenly, the country's top military official is articulating Canada's foreign policy in a clearer - and more controversial - way than any elected official.
Many in the Forces are relieved to finally hear a general who "says it like it is," after silently suffering through decades of budget cuts and demoralizing episodes such as the Somalia scandal. The contrast is sharp between him and his predecessor, Ray Henault, who was seen in the Forces as more chairman than leader.
Former army head Mr. Jeffery said the Forces were "long overdue" for a change in style. "The Canadian military and the senior officers in particular, for a variety of reasons, became grey, they moved into the background. I don't think that's healthy in a democracy," he said.
Lewis MacKenzie, the last Canadian general who was known as a blunt talker, said he is happy to see Gen. Hillier pull off the tough talk without being reined back in. And now, Mr. MacKenzie said, there is no turning back. "If he changed his style, everybody would notice and he would lose credibility."
Gen. Hillier, for his part, joked, "I'm not smart enough to be anybody else but myself."
While some members of the Forces actually wanted to take part of the war in Iraq, they now take solace in Canada's decision to go on the offensive against the insurgents in Afghanistan. Yet Mr. Jeffery said the biggest roadblocks to Gen. Hillier's plans remain within the military. He is launching ambitious reforms without having undertaken reviews or consultations to ensure that everyone is buying in.
"He has articulated a vision for the Canadian Forces that is different than the past. While I have no belief there is not agreement to that, I know the institution well enough to know there are probably those who are not fully embracing that perspective," Mr. Jeffery said.
Corporal Jeff LaBrash has already been on two missions to Bosnia and is now in Afghanistan. As he was leaving Edmonton this week, he said this new mission is "a little scarier because there is a lot more going on." He said Gen. Hillier is "well-spoken," but he's reserving judgment about the big things that are now in the works.
"We'll have to see," the 37-year-old father of two said. "A lot of people promise a lot of things and until you see the results and the follow through, well, only then you can get a real impression."
Daniel Leblanc is a member of The Globe's parliamentary bureau, and Shawna Richer of the Atlantic Canada bureau. .
In his own words
'Canadians don't realize how great their soldiers are. They can find the bad guys and take them out, and they can find the good guys and support them.' -- April 13, 2004
'Our relationship with the Americans is close. It will continue to be such. And we work with them on an hourly, daily basis . . . on this continent and around the rest of the world.' -- Feb. 13, 2005
'We have to . . . start treating Canada as an operational theatre.' -- March 3, 2005
'Our population has to look at us and see themselves in us.' -- April 14, 2005, on recruiting visible minorities
'You've got to be seen as capable and seen as too big of a bully to take on.' -- May 30, 2005
'These are detestable murderers and scumbags. . . . ' -- July 14, 2005, referring to perpetrators of terrorist attacks
'I see the Canadian population right now, in general, waking up from a bit of a long slumber.' -- July 22, 2005
'We're not the public service of Canada, we're not just another department. We are the Canadian Forces, and our job is to be able to kill people' -- July 22, 2005
'I'm not offended at all. I have a job to do, and I'm concentrated on doing that job.' -- July 26, 2006, responding to critics of his tough talk
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