Penley - COLD WAR CONTROLLER : air force shenanigans

The Author at CFB Trenton in 1988

Introduction

Life for me began in 1950 as an air force brat. For my first eight years I lived with my family on air force bases in northern British Columbia, Manitoba, and Alberta. My father had enlisted the last year of the war, and though he never saw overseas duty in that war, was posted to western Canada and participated in the great pioneering work in the north conducted in the early postwar years by North West Air Command element of the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF). In the early fifties dad was seconded as a crewman on the Korean War airlift. The RCAF crews routinely hauled freight and troops across the Pacific to Korea in North Star aircraft. Such work was fraught with adventure, the airmen hopping from field to field in a great circle route from McChord AFB Washington, to Alaska, the Aleutian Islands, to Haneda airport in Japan, and return across the Pacific via Guam and Wake Island. The North Stars were crewed by a mix of brash young pipeliners and fearless young veterans whod flown Lancaster bombers over Germany or C-47s over the Burma Hump.

As a youngster I was directly exposed to my fathers work, frequently tagging along behind him to the flight line, sometimes helping to load aircraft, and occasionally going with the men on actual flights, wherein the pilots let me stand behind them on the flight decks of C47 and North Star aircraft to watch their work. These experiences were highly tactile, visual, and magic experiences, which inspired me to build my own future career around the air force. This is not surprising, for when I was young Canada was still celebrating honours gained as a nation in World War II. Amazingly our fledgling nation had, during the last year of the war and well into the postwar period, the worlds fourth largest air force. Young boys raised in the fifties idealized our military and were surrounded by an atmosphere of national pride in our armed forces, which continued at robust levels throughout the Korean War, early years of the Cold War, and the first UN peacekeeping campaigns in the fifties and sixties. For those of us who were base brats, the sound of aircraft engines was ever overhead. By age seven I could easily distinguish the engine sounds of a T33, F86 Sabre, C47, North Star, or C119. The air force influence was strong for young David Penley.

Having grown up with the military in my blood, it was perhaps inevitable that I took to uniforms throughout my youth in wolf cubs, boy scouts, Air Cadets, and as an infantry reservist with the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment before following in my fathers footsteps at age 19 to join the Canadian Air Force. Beginning with twelve years in the enlisted ranks as a Radar Technician rising to the modest rank of Corporal, I was eventually selected for commission as an Air Traffic Controller. Nine years later, at age 40 with 22 years of military service already behind me, I made another change and became a Social Work Officer, the discipline in which I would finish my service.

The years have passed quickly. As I write this memoir at age 63, I have completed my last full year in uniform five years ago after 38 years of military service. I will be the first to admit that by most measures my career successes were modest. Despite that, I feel lucky to have survived it all, and have nothing but gratitude for these experiences. Still, I feel the natural urge to look backward to try and make sense of it all: to gain perspective on just what the costs and benefits of my career choices have been.

With regard to psychological suitability, I was an unlikely candidate for the military from the get-go. I began with a genetically timid personality and in retrospect can say that delicate temperaments are not ideal foundations for military service. The fact that I succeeded was only by virtue of my unshakeable desire, having defined myself from an early age as a military man. In following that star I compensated for my limitations with some measure of self-discipline, perseverance, the ability to draw strength from my comrades, and a sense of humour. Armed with these strengths I was able to master many demanding training regimes through boot camp, radar maintenance courses, officer candidate school, high altitude jet training, Air Traffic Controller training, and two university degrees.

There have been both blessings and curses. Those of us who grew up with and later lived and worked in the Air Force through the fifties, sixties and seventies generally had strong work ethics, a sense of teamwork, and an irrepressible sense of fun; probably air force cultural legacies of wartime. The fun, camaraderie and strong work ethics were joyful to me. As a young man I was a bear for hard work, relishing every moment of it. I have been fortunate to learn many skills, travel, taste adventure and variety in my work, and meet a host of colourful characters throughout my career. I was also witness to a host of bizarre, comical, thrilling and amazing events. These were the blessings.

The inclination to fun however led many of us who served in the seventies to party hard, which sometimes became a curse. Also, in the early years of my career I served often in physically and psychologically challenging environments. That took its toll on me. Having started life as a sensitive, high-strung lad, I was burned by this toxic mix of high-risk activity and too much partying. This eventually led to big problems. My predispositions left me vulnerable. My heavy drinking exacerbated negative reactions to stress experienced on the job. I became overcome by anxiety. My early gusto for social drinking shifted into using unhealthy amounts of alcohol to relieve chronic anxiety. As my veneer of boyhood innocence and resiliency gradually eroded, these problems destroyed my self-confidence. Ultimately I couldnt handle the mix of partying and high stress work and ended up with a serious addiction, depression, and anxiety.

Initially I handled these problems in backward ways. Things got worse and I took a tailspin into near insanity, a crisis that nearly ended my life and certainly damaged my health. During those hard drinking years my career hung in the balance. I came within a hairs breadth of being drummed out of the service due to a trail of disciplinary charges, recorded warnings and rounds of counselling and probation. The inefficacy of how I, my supervisors and many professional helpers around me first responded to my growing list of problems were a reflection of the times and the fact that mental health treatment processes of the day were primitive compared to what we have now, which meant we were all blind to the actual roots of my problems and what should be done about them.

By the grace of God I finally began to turn things around by going to rehab (kicking and screaming, under pressure from medical officers) and drying out. Later, still psychologically fragile in the early months of sobriety, and with very little by way of professional follow-up, I got back to work and amazed myself (and many others) by earning sufficient merit to be selected for commission less than two years after the end of my second stint of counselling and probation.

As I write this account years later, I look back and feel grateful that Ive survived a near drowning, two divorces and associated near bankruptcies, alcoholism, paralyzing agoraphobia, several aviation emergencies and close calls, car accidents, motorcycle spills, a knife fight, street brawls, two falls from heights of 50 feet, sexual assault, dog attacks, and two devastating burnouts in my later career as a health care provider. Despite these challenges I learned to fly, scuba dive, and sail, and have functioned operationally as a radar technician, air traffic controller, crewed on search and rescue, maritime patrol, transport, helicopters, trainers, and high performance jet aircraft. Ive worked in construction, climbed steel towers, house painting, bar tending, truck driver, farm worker, and drop in centre counsellor in a high crime neighbourhood. In the worst year of drinking I was admitted five times to detox wards in the space of fourteen months. A tin badge displayed on my office desk during my later years as a Social Work Officer reads: Ive Survived Damned Near Everything! It made a wonderful conversation piece with my new clients entering into their own counselling.