At war!!!

Guy was conscripted into the army in 1943 when he was 18, drafted to defend the hated Queen of England. Before being sent overseas, “il te dopait avant de partir, pour te calmer.” [“They put you on drugs before they sent you to the front, to calm you down.”]
I asked Guy if his war service was a sad memory. “Well of course!” he replied, “I saw my friends die right in front of me! Die! Murdered! And then right after you do your time on the front, they ship you back right away so you can’t tell any other soldiers, so you can’t warn them or scare them about what to expect. They put you in administration or send you back home,” he said.
The ‘doping’ he mentions before going off to war may have included various vaccines with serious side effects. When we spoke of this, a big story in the news was how some peacekeepers won a court case for compensation for the side effects they suffered due to drugs they were given. As a veteran, he was very interested by that court case, and was glad to hear that the soldiers got compensation.
He told me that when he was fighting on the front, he couldn’t shoot any enemies if he could see their faces. He just couldn’t. If they were crawling around in the distance, “then it’s like shooting at an animal,” he said, “BANG!” Perhaps for his conscience’s sake, he still doesn’t remember it as having killed people. It probably would be different, we agreed, if he had in fact shot at some of the enemies he ended up staring at face-to-face. That would have been a more difficult memory to live with.
While discussing this, we both wondered what the effect is on today’s soldiers, who kill so many people from afar without seeing hardly any of the misery… It would take a very serious, passionate and committed cause for soldiers to kill each other in close combat again, especially if young men had to be drafted to do that. But war is so mechanized now that that is unlikely to ever happen. Still, for some reason Guy was sure that there will be ramifications from this new reality, where terrible horrors happen without even passion or commitment on the part of soldiers, just simply orders on the part of sheltered and powerful generals and presidents… “Something’s going to happen,” he said.

The Post-War Boom

Not long after the war, Guy began working in the newly-built oil refineries in Tétraultville in Montreal’s East End. His attachment to this stretch of St. Laurent started way back then. “Je poignais mon char jusqu’à Montreal Poolroom pour un hot dog avec chou pour diner. Dans le temps c’était renommé partout dans le monde, leurs hot-dogs. Après ca, je venais ici pour boire de la bière avant de retourner sa job.” [“I used to grab my car and drive up to the Montreal Poolroom for a hot dog with cabbage for lunch. Back then they were world renowned for their hot dogs. Then I’d come here for a few beers before driving back to work.”] This would have been around 1947, 1948.
Guy made himself lots of money on the refineries, and claims he spent 1.8 million dollars in just six years. “J’ai faite 14 pays, dix provinces, la Gaspésie, toute. Il en a beaucoup qui on fait des fortunes dans les raffineries de l’est de la ville.” [“I ended up travelling to 14 countries, all 10 provinces, the whole Gaspé region, everywhere. Lots of guys made fortunes on the refineries in the east end.”]
He told me a funny story that occurred during those heady days of that post-war boom. He had left work early to go drinking and was driving home quite drunk in his brand-new Cadillac convertible, zipping around one corner, zipping around the other. Then suddenly he passed out, his foot still on the gas. He went right through a red light and lodged his car under a passing flatbed truck. He was probably hunched over from being passed out and thus saved himself from decapitation. In any case, he got out of it alive, and didn’t want to tell his wife about it for fear that she would insist he no longer drive drunk.
So, when he finally got home later that night, he told her “Thibault’s car is in the shop for a few days, so I lent him my car.” A few days later, he bought a brand new Cadillac convertible, completely identical to the old one. “To this day,” he said, and he repeated it loudly for emphasis, “to this day my wife doesn’t know what happened!”
Guy ended up working for Texaco companies for 37 years. By his fourth year there, he’d worked his way up to foreman, overseeing 32 employees. In the end, the refinery closed after suffering three strikes in six years. Guy claimed to have never voted for a strike. Despite his early riches made (then lost) from owning company stock, it took Guy 35 years to reach $50 000 a year in salary. However, he seemed very proud of the work he did in his life— but not at all proud of his service in World War II.

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