We went to the war as a Canadian task group. As Admiral Summers said, the interdiction was entirely successful. With 5% of the ships there, we did 25% of the boarding, with the aircraft. The seeking aircraft would challenge merchant ships, and we boarded the merchant ships. Then we moved into the central gulf area, where we were asked to coordinate the logistics efforts and the protection of the four United States aircraft carriers. My job was to assign the anti-air warfare escorts for those carriers. My job was also to assign escorts for all the shipping that came in through the Strait of Hormuz and to stop those that were sending ammunition to Iraq.

Our job was to pull out the USS Princeton, which had almost lost its fantail, from a minefield. There were injuries. We took that ship out of the minefield. If you can, imagine a ship being totally silent for 48 hours, with the crew wearing socks, wondering if we were going to hit a mine, knowing we had the best anti-mine sonar, we had the helicopter going overhead and we had the tug behind us that was eventually secured to the USS Princeton. She towed the Princeton down to Bahrain. We had to go there because we couldn't get to Dubai since the ship was damaged so heavily. Then we went off Kuwait City, again through minefields, to protect the hospital ship from missiles. That all happened.

I can tell you there was a sense of satisfaction with this naval operation, which had many facets to it, with live ammunition and watching on CNN every day the Tomahawk missiles going into Baghdad that were fired from the cruisers and the U.S. ships in the gulf. It was, indeed, a war.

We were there. We were right in the whole thing. We were right underneath it all and working it. Part of my job was to ensure that all of the ships there were refuelled and reammunitioned. We set up a grid system with the names of the provinces of Canada on one side and numbers 1 to 12 on the other side, so that every ship that came into “Manitoba 3” would know it was being controlled by a Canadian group. As Admiral Summers said, what else are you going to do during a war? You have a task group of personnel there who can organize all of this.

Having painted that picture, that was the most successful naval operation and naval air operation. It was remarkable. The CF-18s provided cover for us. Sometimes they asked us to—