THE THIN WHITE LINE: the history of a future avian influenza pandemic

Chapter 3: Pandemic

Interview with Sergeant Chuck Gordon, Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry

EDMONTON, ALBERTA

[Sergeant Chuck Gordon, A Company, Combat Support Group Company of the Third Battalion of Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, meets me in uniform outside the Canadian Forces Base in Edmonton. Gordon distinguished himself in peacekeeping missions in Croatia and Bosnia, and, more recently, as part of the Canadian contingent within the United Nation’s authorized mission in Afghanistan. During the Pandemic, the Third Battalion deployed in Edmonton, protecting essential infrastructure and safeguarding distribution of food and medicine. Over coffee, he described his experiences as a soldier operating on native soil during the Pandemic.]

    Three companies in our battalion took part in the Joint Task Force Afghanistan mission and recently returned to Edmonton for a cycle of rest and reconstitution before training for our scheduled redeployment in 2014.
    We are a light infantry battalion, trained to operate on foot in urban environments. Our training focuses on flexibility, initiative and the ability to act independently. This made us a valuable asset for certain types of operations during the Pandemic, such as defensive operations and convoy escorts. For a few weeks, we stayed on base and prepared for potential deployment. And then one day the call came.
    Third Battalion deployed in Edmonton and engaged in hundreds of operations related to providing security to essential infrastructure, such as healthcare delivery sites, and escorting vehicles involved in distribution of essential goods and services, such as food and medicine. By the end of the epidemic, our mission portfolio expanded. For example, we started providing security to pharmacies and food distribution sites such as supermarkets and grocers. Because of the National Defense Act, I was not just a sergeant, but a constable with police powers.
    During most of the Pandemic, my company got assigned to security for essential transports. Sometimes I drove, although usually I rode shotgun as escort because Jim, my partner, a 19-year-old kid from Red Deer, got a real kick out of driving the trucks while listening to heavy metal on this little boom box he kept on the seat. For protection, we were issued a C7A1 combat rifle and sidearm. Because we operated in Canada, however, special sensitivities obviously applied. The rules of engagement, for example, were of course severely strict because we were on home ground.
    At first, we had little problem and it all became boring routine fast. This was during the Great Panic, and we provided a highly visible presence to people that the government had things under control. The initial wave of violence seemed to go away once we got on the scene. People would wave, sometimes even cheer as we drove by giving them all a patriotic big thumbs up. Some of the younger guys, like Jim, they got a big rush driving around in uniform doing an op in their hometown. He would bore me to tears talking about this girlfriend he had down in Red Deer that he’d met online. [He laughs.] Over the next week, things changed fast, though. The number of flu cases kept on increasing and food got scarcer and more expensive until what they call the Second Panic. People wondered: What good are these trucks if the stores are going empty and you can’t afford to buy what’s there anyway? That’s when people saw us as a symbol of frustration. They no longer waved and cheered. Some threw rocks at us. A few started attacking the deliveries.
    The truth is the City never quite ran out of food and other necessities entirely, but due to distribution problems it was not always in the right place at the right time. Certain items became scarce over time. For a week or so it might be baby formula and insulin, the next it might be toilet paper and pet food, the next week it might be light bulbs and batteries and tissues. Fresh vegetables gradually disappeared. So did cigarettes and beer and liquor. Nobody was starving as far as I know, but there was little variety of food and people definitely ate a lot less than they were used to because of lack of availability, loss of income and high prices. Drinkers and smokers were climbing the walls. Street drugs also disappeared; the addicts were terrible, and as the drug trade dried up, the gangs moved into the black market, and they were the worst.(62) Rumors would start that the government was hoarding whatever happened to be missing at the time. Some people got mean, became willing to kill for a chocolate bar, a box of diapers, a pack of smokes, a fix of whatever they were hooked on. And some gave in to the idea that food and medicine would run out entirely and their families would no longer be able to survive, others that the world was ending and in a short while there would be no government at all. These people became just as irrational and desperate as the addicts.
    The first attack that I was involved with occurred in a residential neighborhood. We turned a corner and saw that another truck had been stopped by a crowd of people ahead of us. People were dragging the driver out of the truck, while others wrestled with the escort for his rifle. They had broom handles, baseball bats and other homemade weapons, and started giving the driver the beating of his life while others scrambled around the truck, clawing at the tarp and trying to get at whatever was inside. A cheer went up briefly as the first boxes spilled out onto the road, followed by a desperate yelling as it became every man for himself. People were running out of nearby houses, some of them obviously sick, to get some of the loot. They tore the boxes open, spilling bottles of pills that people scooped up and fought over. I’d seen scenes like this in other countries around UN delivery trucks; I’d never expected to see such a thing in Canada.
    Jim slammed on the brakes and we jumped out with our rifles. They ignored my order to disperse until I fired warning shots into the air. The crowd scattered, screaming, clutching their bottles of pills. The poor driver of the other truck would end up with a minor concussion, seven stitches in his face and losing some of the sight in his right eye.
    Over time, the attacks would only get more frequent and violent, particularly when the black market started thriving and the gangs got into it, and when, late in the epidemic, rumors went around that the government was hoarding a new vaccine. Third Battalion assembled a rapid response unit of Grizzlies and helicopters carrying combat infantry, military police and snipers, depending on what the nature of the threat was, which could be deployed immediately upon hearing a distress call and provide support. When available, a helicopter would work a route overhead, but due to limited availability only convoys got that kind of support.
    My own personal war strategy had become set way before that point, and it's what got me through the Pandemic.
    Jim and I were running a delivery to a fever clinic set up in a high school downtown and saw a young woman standing on the side of the road, waving us down frantically. It was just us because it was a small delivery, so no air support. The girl looked about 15 and scuffed up, so we thought maybe she’d been assaulted or something. We stopped the truck to see if we could offer some first aid, maybe a ride home.
    The shot came out of nowhere, punching through the windshield and slamming into Jim’s shoulder. I don’t mean he got shot in the shoulder like in the movies, where you say ouch and tough it out. I mean half his shoulder ended up on the seat and wall behind him and he was just sitting there blinking in shock while blood poured down his arm. I snatched up my rifle, opened the door and rolled out, ending in a fire position on the ground. I thought we’d been set up by a street gang looking for goods to steal and sell, but all I saw was this young guy standing there, another teenager, holding a rifle at his waist, not aiming it, just holding onto it.
    He was looking at the truck, crying.
    My training overrode my first instinct, which was to put some bullets into his brain for what he’d done, and then get back to help Jim. Instead, I screamed at him to drop his weapon.
    He said he didn’t want to hurt anybody. He was just hungry.
    To be honest, the kid looked like he had no idea why he did it. Like he’d just woken up from a dream. Now that I can basically look at the situation objectively, I can’t believe it either, but for a different reason——it was a ridiculous shot at that range for that type of weapon.
    I told him again to drop his gun or I would fire on him.
    He shouted that he didn’t mean it and that he was sorry. He threw away his rifle and ran off. His girlfriend or whoever she was had already disappeared.
    I had the powers of a constable, but I’m not a cop. My mission was to get my cargo to its destination and, while I was at it, stay alive, not shoot kids in the back out of revenge or chase after them and arrest them while my partner bleeds to death in the truck. I went back and found him slumped over the steering wheel, bandages in his lap, passed out while trying to put a dressing on his wound. I patched him up as best I could until the response units arrived. I reported, gave a description of the teenagers to a couple of real cops who showed up, and then they let me go to the hospital where they’d taken Jim.
    He pulled through. He’s a tough kid.
    After that, I drove the truck during the missions, and I drove as fast as possible. If I had to slow down, at the first sign of trouble I would floor it, which usually ended the incident. Most of the time, people did not shoot at you to kill you, they just wanted to scare you or make you stop. It was your cargo they wanted, not you. But I had seen a warning shot go through a man’s shoulder, so I took no chances and stepped on the gas. If somebody threw a rock or fired a weapon, we raced out of there until we reached a safe zone. If we were driving at night and we saw that a streetlight ahead of us had been broken, we floored it. If we approached a house that was burning down, we floored it. If a car pulled into the middle of an intersection ahead of us and tried to cut us off, we floored it. If somebody tried to flag us down for help, we floored it. If there was a mob standing right in the middle of the damn street, we floored it.
    That’s it. That was my strategy that got me through the Pandemic. I never stopped the vehicle.
    The only alternative, see, was to shoot back. But most of us didn’t want to do that. This was not Afghanistan or Bosnia. Our unit is stationed in Edmonton and we live here. You return fire in a heavily populated area, and you end up accidentally killing people. There’s no way you’re going to come out of a shooting situation a winner.

Did you ever feel like the people of Edmonton had become “the enemy”?

    No, I can honestly say I never saw the people here as the enemy, although I know some guys who did.
    This is a typical challenge for units on peacekeeping missions who risk their lives to help a population that occasionally responds with violence. I didn’t personalize anything, never tried to put a name or a face on my job stress. I maintained the perspective that most of the people in the city wanted us to be here to help them and we wanted to help them. Frankly, sir, we were so active that I simply didn’t have time to think about it very much. In situations like that, you find yourself falling back repeatedly on your training. We had our objectives and mission to complete. That was all that mattered.
    That being said, I never let down my guard in front of them, either.
    Near the end of the epidemic, food production and distribution became disrupted and food gradually disappeared from the shelves in the stores. Between that and the high prices, even with new government price controls, many lower-income people were actually on the brink of starvation. We had good water but the power kept going out. We’d drive past a closed-down pharmacy or grocer that had been looted, dark and full of broken glass and empty shelves, and I’d point and say to my partner: “Look at that, civilization just lost another battle.” Sometimes, it was hard to guard these places against mobs of desperate people; one time a unit from my battalion almost got into a firefight with a bunch of cops over how much force should be used to disperse a crowd of looters in a supermarket. My new partner, Cameron, would get spooked and say he was starting to believe the world was really ending, to which I gave the standard response that since Land Force Command had not ordered the world to end, it was not ending: Until then, we had our mission and if we stayed focused we would come out of this just fine. But remember how bad things got at the end, especially during the Second Panic? My company had lost a quarter of its strength to the flu by then, while the number of missions kept going up. Occasionally we would see a civilian standing in the street who would signal us to stop. There was garbage blown around by the wind, tons of it; the City couldn’t even pick it all up anymore. Sometimes the air was smoky from fires that went ignored until they burned themselves out. You would hear a gunshot, several gunshots, from far away. The civilian would shout at us as we drove past, asking us for Tamiflu or food or something else. It’s hard not to stop when you see a woman standing on the side of the road in the snow, holding her baby out to you and begging you for milk. There was nothing we could say or do. If we stopped to help one person, we might get hurt or lose our cargo and then many people would be hurt. Sometimes, we would throw spare IMPs [Individual Meal Packs] out the windows.
    Then I’d floor it.