Career-ending Menard a trios
Peter Worthington
The Calgary Sun
02 June 2010
What likely wrecked the career of Brig.-Gen. Daniel Menard -- and it is wrecked, regardless of what happens next -- was not his "inappropriate relationship" with a female soldier, but the accidental firing of his rifle at the Kandahar air base.
In wartime, generals and commanders are routinely replaced, without it necessarily affecting their careers. In peacetime, being replaced is fatal.
While Afghanistan is certainly a "war" for those there, there's still a peacetime flavour at home. Peacetime ethics preside at DND.
With Canada's strict "no touching" regulations between sexes in the military, a general flouting these ordinances is more serious than a non-commissioned rank violating them.
If Menard's indiscretions were obvious or well-known, he had to go -- if only as an example for others.
But his accidental firing of his weapon, in the presence of Chief of Defence Staff Gen. Walter Natynczyk, for heaven's sake, verged on unforgivable -- even though Menard paid a hefty $3,500 fine. The damage to his career was irreversible.
A sexual affair in wartime is not unusual and doesn't reflect on a soldier's fighting qualities, leadership, or ability to handle the job.
But peacetime standards are different.
The military's rules on sexual relations are as unrealistic as they are firm. The people who make the rules apparently don't understand the power of sex. Or, of sex and the soldier.
One sometimes wonders if the rule-makers are eunuchs or asexual.
Soldiers find a way around rules and when it comes to sex and wartime, hormones invariably find a way.
I recall an army padre in the Second World War who had an emotional breakdown because his commander in Italy acquired mistresses and he couldn't take it. Superiors didn't much care because the commander was successful and the war was being won.
The story is told -- possibly apocryphal, but still in character -- of two Canadian Second World War soldiers who returned from the disastrous day-long raid at Dieppe with venereal disease.
I remember being in the Congo when it got independence and Canadian signalers arrived to be quartered in a children's school in Leopoldville, with walls incongruously painted with pictures of Snow White, Bambi, the Seven Dwarfs, Grumpy and Dopey, etc.
Within their first week in Africa, a couple of entrepreneurial soldiers had taken over an empty mansion and were investigating setting up an off-limits brothel.
Just as in Kandahar, where free condoms are available for soldiers (presumably going on leave), in the Korean war there was controversy when condoms were issue to soldiers going outside the confines of the front lines.
Chaplains felt this was condoning, if not encouraging, promiscuity. But commanding officers wisely knew that even at the front, in the middle of a war, Canadian soldiers have an uncanny radar for getting into sexual mischief.
While Brig.-Gen. Menard had to be replaced for his indiscretions, his dalliance does not reflect on his competence as a soldier.
Failing to check the safety of his weapon does.
To some, it may seem unfair to fire Menard without a hearing. Yes, and no.
This is the army and a war. It is not civilian life.
More damaging to morale would be a senior officer getting away with what junior ranks would not.
