Ed Storey (Primary Source)

I'm Warrant Officer Ed Storey, and I'm the IC of the Canadian Forces Map Centre. I started my military career in 1978 when I joined the Lanark and Renfrew Scottish, which is the infantry reserve up in Pembroke. I joined them when I was in college, and when the course transferred to Ottawa I switched over to the Governor General's Foot Guard, and I stayed with them for two years. So I was in reserves from 1978 to 1982.

During that time I had a couple of summer call-outs with mapping and charting establishment in Ottawa. Once I was in those call-outs, the unit asked if I wanted to join and be a member of the reg force, so I thought what the heck. I joined the reg force in 1982. So I've been with this unit – mapping and charting – since 1982.

I'm trained as a map reproduction technician, so that's handraulically drawing maps, doing all the camera work, and the press work. So you can imagine that all that technology's now gone by the wayside because it's been replaced by computers. The trade merged with the surveyor trade, and now I'm a Geographic Technician – a GeoTech – and everything's done with computers now.

Late 1980s, early 1990s, I took training in the States to become a Terrain Analyst. With that trade we looked at the terrain, combined it with the weather and the known effects of the enemy so we could give a full picture to a Division or a Brigade Commander on what he could expect in his area of operations. That resulted in my being posted to the United Nations Protection Force headquarters in Zagreb, Croatia. I was there from May 1993 to May 1994.

The best part of that job was that the geo-team got to travel everywhere, because the Colonel told us that to know the terrain and give proper assessments, we had to see it. So we had carte blanche to travel anywhere in theatre, so that was Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia. That was good because you got to see all aspects of the theatre.

As well, I also got to interact with all of our other UN partners at the time, and again that was an eye-opener because the wall had just come down in the late '80s. Now we were dealing with the Russians, the Poles, and the Czechs. People that before were Warsaw Pact enemies, now we were working with them in NATO, and I got to go and deliver maps to them and talk about geographic matters. Things we never would have discussed with those guys a couple of years previous.

On the terrain analysis side of things, we would get all sorts of specialist's tasks that were tied in with the military information people. One of the first tasks we got was that military information had heard that there was tunneling being done under the Sarajevo airport, so that the Bosnians could link up with the troops outside of the city, and the UN wanted to know if this was possible. We had with us large amounts of data on the soils and vegetation that we'd brought with us. We had a little look and we determined that the soil underneath the airport was conducive to tunneling, and we passed the information on. Sure enough, as we found out later on, there was a massive tunneling project underneath the runway, and eventually they had a small railroad network and power running underneath the airport. It was quite interesting to know the information that we had and could pass on was correct.