Nova Scotia/Nunavut Command of The Royal Canadian Legion www.ns.legion.ca 89 Editor’s note: Story as related to contributor by Curtis Faulkner. Curtis was born in 1932 in Truro Nova Scotia. His family didn’t have much money growing up and he left school at the age of 15 and started work at Crystal Springs bottling plant, a beverage company, for the next year. He then got a job at the Maritime Home for Girls and worked there for three years but got laid off every winter and during one of those layoffs he met an old friend, Leon Mingo. Leon was in an army uniform and looked very sharp. He was in the Special Force based in Chilliwack, B.C. and talked about life in the Canadian Forces. Curtis had never been out of Truro, and was laid off from his job in the spring of 1951. When he was eventually called back to work, he was in the vegetable cellar picking over potatoes and asked himself what was his future going to be like working there. He talked to the manager at the Home for Girls and he encouraged him to enlist in the military. Curtis thought that this was the only way he would get out into the world and do something. On April 28, 1951, he took the train to Halifax and took a taxi to the Recruiting Office where they signed him up and took him to the barracks. It took three days for the documentation to be finalized. Curtis was very proud to be part of a great team. He was sent to the Royal Canadian School of Military Engineering, in Chilliwack, BC, where he arrived in May 1951. When he walked into a room on base, he heard someone holler out “Curt Faulkner, it sure is good to see you.” It was Basil Armstrong from Truro, a guy who lived on Prince Street. He went through most of the training there with Basil who proved to be more than a good friend during the next few months of military training. The training was on how to build and demolish bridges, water systems, air fields, and laying traps and mines. There was a lot of training in explosives. Training in Chilliwack lasted for six months after which he was shipped to Edmonton, Alberta, for three weeks and then to Seattle, Washington by train. For someone who had never been anywhere, he was doing a lot of travelling. Curtis boarded the US Naval Ship “S. B. Buckner” in Seattle with Canadian and American soldiers bound for Korea. It was now late October 1951 and it was 18 days at sea before he reached Japan. For seven of those days, he was so sick he couldn’t eat anything at all. Curtis recalls that as soon as he walked up the gangplank, he started to feel sick, even though they were still tied up at the dock. After 18 long days the ship pulled into Yokohama, and then he boarded a slow troop train to Hiroshima. The Japanese still had some feelings of resentment against the Americans as it wasn’t very long since WWII had ended. In Hiroshima Curtis saw the devastation caused by the Atomic bomb dropped only 6 years earlier. There was a sign that read “Let this mistake never happen again.” Curtis spent a few days in Hiroshima getting outfitted for winter conditions and then on to Nagasaki where he boarded a converted ferry, the WhoSang, for Pusan Korea in the south and then north by train to the 38th parallel. It was snowing when he arrived - it was December 25. The next day, December 26, 1951, they were trucked off to their separate units. Curtis’s unit was 23 Field Squadron, attached to the Royal 22nd Regiment (the Van Doos) where he spent the next year. A lot of the work he did was laying mines, often at night. Curtis King Faulkner continued ...
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