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| ROKS Dae Jo Yeong |
I have to confess that I've always had a great deal of respect for those in peril on the sea. In my youth, enamored of tales of submarine warfare in WWII, I had mostly wanted to serve in the navy rather than the army. I obviously didn't and served in the finest arm of service in the army instead, but I still carry great respect for seafarers and consider it an honour that 3BAM had the opportunity to engage in an age old naval tradition of firing a salute when foreign warships, in this case the Korean destroyer ROKS Dae Jo Yeong and the combat support ship ROKS Hwa Cheon entered the Port Of Montreal this October 13th. Maybe we should have looked at the date a little more closely.
The number 13 is considered unlucky in western culture. I don't know why, but it is and if I weren't a skeptic, disbelieving in all things supernatural or that can't be explained by science, or at the very least by careful examination, I'd be sorely tempted to believe there was something to this or that we were cursed. From the beginning, nothing went according to plan this day, including my participation in the event which was only made possible by the cancellation of a boudoir / pin-up shoot which was supposed to have taken place at 11.000 AM. Good for 3BAM, bad for me.
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| Our gun tractor. |
But this isn't about me; it's about the mission. The mission however, just didn't go according to plan. We had planned to have two guns for the salute. We actually had enough personnel present to man two guns, but as luck would have it, both FAT's had mechanical problems that day and we were forced to use only one gun and tow it behind Colonel Borne's red pickup truck. In retrospect, it was a good thing that we had decided to have it present to serve as a support vehicle. If not...we'd have had major problems.
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| Cmdre David Craig, RCN (right) and Lcdr Geoff Hamilton, RCN (left) |
On the way to the Old Port, one of the two fire extinguishers in the truck back of the vehicle somehow "went off," making what looked like smoke and prompting those of us in the other vehicles to think the brake on the 25pdr had not been properly released or had somehow become engaged, causing it to overheat and smoke. That wasn't the case, but all of our stores were now covered in fine white dry chemicals. The gun too, come to think of it. At this point in the game, one might be tempted to think that we'd had our quota of screw-ups for the day, but as I will shortly explain, the best was still to come. Needless to also say, as soon as we got to the Old Port, I realized that the sun would be in entirely the wrong place for good photos of the ship, creating severe contrasts and creating yucky hard shadows on everything. But as I've learned...this is pretty much par for the course in 3BAM and hardly worth commenting on.
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| Capt Richard Ayoub "hoists" our "colours" so to speak. | | |
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This being a naval event, steeped in naval tradition, there was of course a naval delegation present, headed by Commodore David Craig, RCN. Also present, Lcdr Geoff Hamilton, CO of HMCS Donnacona, our local naval reserve unit, currently located just a few blocks from where I work in St-Henri. It was from Commander Hamilton that I finally obtained the names of the ships that were coming into port. Tall and very athletic looking with a commanding presence, he reminded me somewhat of Colonel David Patterson, late of our own regiment, the 2nd Field Artillery.
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| Crew members of the Dae Jo Yeong rendering a salute from the stern as she passes by us. |
There was time to rehearse a few times, chat with the naval delegation and the forces photographer, go over the routine, safety procedures and make sure everyone had earplugs, and we were joined by a small Korean diplomatic delegation, and frankly, I thought nothing else could possibly go wrong. The lead ship, the Dae Jo Yeong arrived on time, it's officers and crew lined up on deck in their blue uniforms and it fired the planned 11 shots from some small unseen saluting gun forward of the ship's 5" gun, and 3BAM got off 7 rounds in return before the SH_T hit the fan and we had a bloody MISFIRE! Short of the gun exploding and wiping out the detachment, there wasn't a whole lot that could have gone more wrong.
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The last shot before we misfired.
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| The combat support ship ROKS Hwa Cheon |
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| Cmdre Craig thanks Quebec's only "freelance" gun battery. |
The misfire drill is very clear and so the last four rounds went unfired as the ship sailed right past us. There wasn't much to do but stand there and salute in silence. Had we ben able to bring along two guns, there would have been no problem as the other gun could have fired the remaining rounds; We had prepared a spare and could still have fired 11 shots. But it wasn't so.
My mind raced back to an incident in 1986 where a salute had been fired at Quebec city by 6RAC for a
visiting Japanese vessel bearing a Japanese royal family member and in
which the officer in charge (not to mention his TSM) had miscounted the number shots fired and fired
only 18 or 19 of the requisite 21. A formal diplomatic protest had been
filed in this incident, and the officer in charge, a 6RAC lieutenant ended up with rather a long spell as duty officer at Camp Farnham that summer.
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| Sunray douses the dud before examining the charge. |
I digress. Misfires are a part of life in the artillery, especially when your guns are 70 years old and you load your own ammo. And therein lies the simple truth of the matter. For when the mandated thirty minutes were up and we unloaded the unfired cartridge from the breech, we could clearly see the primer had been fairly struck. The round was doused in a bucket of water, thoroughly soaked as per our procedures, and though found to have more than sufficient wadding, properly tamped down, there was not an ounce of powder behind that wadding. We had built, loaded and attempted to fire a dud round. Worse still, the culprit in this case, was our Sunray, CWO (ret) Aubé who had prepared all the ammo by himself. To his credit, he made no effort to mitigate it or blame it on circumstance, though I have never seen him so down as after he discovered the cause of the problem. Though one might be tempted to say we were cursed that day, that nothing went right because it was the 13th, the truth is that human frailty, not curses or demons or unlucky numbers were to blame for this mess. Move on and learn from your mistakes.
The navy of course, was still very appreciative and Commodore Craig came over and said a few kind words of thanks. We had done our best for them when no-one in the regulars or the reserves had been available or had the budget or whatever to come out this beautiful autumn day to come keep up this important tradition. But maintaining tradition is what 3BAM is all about. We'll do better next time.
Ubique!
Gary Menten
Photographer-Correspondent,
Sgt (ret)
Blogmaster-general, etc, etc
