‘I MUST BE DEAD’
Four decades later, army cadet shares horrific memories of moment a grenade exploded in his barracks, killing six
Michel Juneau-Katsuya was a 14-year-old cadet in 1974. He was at the CFB Valcartier summer camp on July 30 that year and in the barracks when a live grenade exploded and killed six cadets and injured more than 50 others — including him. Juneau-Katsuya, who went on to a career with the RCMP and CSIS, shared his memories of the fatal explosion with the Ottawa Citizen’s Chris Cobb.
We were roughly midway in sixweek summer camp. It was raining — pouring — and we had just lost a young cadet the week before who had been struck by lightning.
We were sitting in rows in the barracks — half circles — and the captain and a corporal came in with two boxes with various devices. The course was about the devices we could find doing exercises on the base. They wanted us to be aware of the devices we could stumble upon. We were told there were blue and red devices that were dummy and green and yellow. They were live.
They pulled the devices out of the boxes and we circulated them. We were three platoons of about 30 kids so it took a while before the devices came around. I was at the extreme end of a row.
Two live grenades somehow had made their way into the box, but what has never been explained, and is still a puzzle, is why two live grenades did not catch the instructors’ attention.
I was about six to seven feet away when one of the cadets pulled the pin and the grenade exploded. It went through the floor creating a crater — these were old wooden barracks.
I was sitting on the ground, but Mario Provencher stood up in front of me because he needed to go to the washroom. Mario got it all in the guts and died. He was the only one standing and he acted as a shield for the guys behind him. Mario was from the same cadet corps as me. We were friends.
One piece of shrapnel went through my left hand and another piece lodged in my right hand. It necessitated surgery after the camp to remove, because one of the nasty things about shrapnel is that it travels in the body.
After the explosion, I saw white smoke and I remember thinking: ‘I must be dead. Too bad, my parents will be sad.’ But I didn’t feel panic.
When t he smoke di s - appeared, the reality hit hard. I was literally covered with skin, blood, hair, and body parts. I wasn’t sure if the blood was mine or somebody else’s. It was both.
An officer came along. I saluted and said, ‘I’m injured.’ He said, ‘ Go to the infirmary.’ It was a 15-minute walk. I had a buddy with shrapnel in his butt and he couldn’t walk so I helped him get there. At the infirmary, we waited a long time before anyone treated us. They patched up those who weren’t too badly injured.
We had literally been walking in pools of blood and it took a long time before they allowed us to change. Many of us stayed like that into the middle of the night.
Our barrack had been totally destroyed, and was a crime scene, so they put us in another barrack. It was a night of thunder.
Next to me there was a pile of metallic double bunk beds — not neatly piled but like junk. It came down in the middle of the night and made the same sounds as the explosion we’d just been though. Until then I was OK, but at that point I wanted to dig into the mattress and hide.
The day after we were interrogated — not questioned, but interrogated. We were marched into a bunker one by one and had to answer questions in front of three military police. They were not nice about it because they were working under the assumption that one of us brought the grenade in. It was July 1974 — four years or so away from the October Crisis so I guess they were thinking it could be a repeat. We were ordered not to talk to anyone about it, even to our parents. I realized talking at a reunion of my fellow cadets that we had all kept our part of the bargain.
My mom reminded me later that when I got home I said, ‘I’ve been told not to talk about it but there is no way you will prevent me from returning.’
I wanted to go back. I continued until age 18, when you are mandated to stop and became a Lt.-Col. Cadet, which is the highest cadet rank. I joined the RCMP and finished my career with CSIS. Interestingly, many of us either had military or RCMP careers.
It impacted people differently. Some had nightmares for years and continue to do so to this day. Some have noise sensitivity — I’m one of them. Others had mood swings depending how much we saw and how badly we were injured.
They were grooming us to be little soldiers and we wanted to be little soldiers so we wanted to take it on the chin. What is sad is that the military bargained cheaply.
Parents had to bargain for the price of the sons’ caskets. Parents requested that their sons be buried in their uniforms and were refused. There was no consideration or decency. We were ‘just cadets’ and that is probably one of the greatest wounds that stays with you.
At 14, you count on your parents to help you, but we had been ordered not to talk or share information with them.
Several guys died of their injuries later, several guys have committed suicide along the way and many suffered permanent injuries — some of them brain injuries. I have permanent ringing in my ears. There is no silence for me any more but I’m one of the lucky ones.
It’s strange for me to talk about it because, until I was approached by the ombudsman, I never had talked about it. I have difficulties identifying my own feelings.
But we were good little soldiers at 14. It’s too bad that we were treated so indecently.