A life in uniform
It’s a life women watched only from the sidelines as recently as a generation ago. But now, with Canadian troops still in Afghanistan, Arctic sovereignty on our radar and renewed investment in our forces at home, the first wave of Canadian female military leaders is stepping into command roles at a critical time. More spoke with four of them about the costs and the rewards of a life in uniform.
Engineering success
Maj. Julia Atherley-Blight didn’t become an engineer to save lives. But as she got into her car in a staff parking lot at Kingston, Ont.’s Royal Military College (where she is the college’s engineering officer), a soldier approached her and thanked her for doing just that.
“What do you mean?” asked Atherley-Blight, surprised. The soldier explained: He knew the 46-year-old major had been the lead engineer on the construction of the Canadian camps in Afghanistan in 2003. He’d been posted there and was in his tent when a rocket shell exploded nearby. In standard base construction, soldiers retreat to bunkers when a rocket lands, safely waiting out subsequent blasts, but soldiers near the initial blast may be injured or killed by flying shrapnel and debris. In an effort to keep soldiers safe from both first and later strikes, Atherley-Blight’s team had implemented an innovative system of “beehives” — surrounding each tent with a 1.4-metre-high wall to block shrapnel and limit deadly injuries.
“Those walls saved my life,” he said. “I just thought you should know that.”
“It meant a lot,” Atherley-Blight says now, simply.
Career detour
Military life wasn’t part of her career plan. But she got her university degree in engineering during the 1984 recession. When she had trouble landing a job, her mother suggested she try the military. Atherley-Blight looked into it, and signed on. Her early career was spent working on bases here in Canada, but as her three children got past toddlerhood, she decided to shift her career focus overseas, asking to take part in deployed operations.
She was expecting a change, but perhaps not of the magnitude that she got: In early 2001, she was posted to Kingston’s Joint Operations Group, the team that deploys first to a new mission and prepares the area for the forces that follow. Still, with Canadian military efforts at a lull, Atherley-Blight wasn’t anticipating much action. Then came Sept. 11. Within weeks, she was part of a reconnaissance team charged with finding a base location for two Canadian Air Force detachments in the Persian Gulf, then tapped to lead the team that would build it. When Canada committed approximately 2,000 troops to the International Security Assistance Force in Kabul a year later, Atherley-Blight was lead engineer on the construction of two Canadian base camps, Camp Julien and Camp Warehouse Extension.
