From Calgary to Beirut: Having an impact as a Reservist

May 13, 2020 - Capt Julie Helferty, 41 Service Battalion

It’s a rainy Sunday afternoon in Beirut, Lebanon, as I contemplate how drastically different my life is today from a few months ago.

This past summer, I was Acting Sergeant Helferty of the Calgary Police Service’s District 6 Seasonal Mountain Bike Team. I patrolled the parks, pathways and streets of our community with my small team. We escorted students on bicycles on Bike to School Day, searched Fish Creek Park for a missing person, and assisted with crowd-control at events such as the Stampede and Pride Parade.

Now, here I am in Lebanon, half a world away from my Alberta home. In August, I traded my police badge temporarily to embark on a new kind of adventure: a military deployment to the Middle East.

In addition to being a police officer, I am a part-time Reservist with the Canadian Army, where I am known as Captain Helferty. Specifically, I’m a logistics officer with 41 Service Battalion, a Reserve unit that manages supply chains as part of military operations and exercises.

When the chance came up to go on a deployment, I put my hand up right away and, after a couple months of pre-deployment training, I landed in Beirut as part of Operation IMPACT.

Operation IMPACT, Canada’s training mission in the Middle East

Our mission is to build our partners’ capacity to help stabilize the Middle East. We have trainers and advisers in Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq, helping to improve these countries’ military capabilities. The work is important because these countries continue to face threats, such as Daesh (also known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS).

The Syrian Civil War has caused border-security challenges for Lebanon since 2011. In addition, Daesh controlled small parts of Lebanon between 2014 and 2017. Given these realities, Canada’s aim through Operation IMPACT is to help Lebanon defend itself.

Expertise in military logistics

As part of our mission, I work at the Logistics Brigade Headquarters of the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) with a team of eight Canadians, to advise and mentor Lebanese sustainment units. As a team, we are helping to strengthen the LAF’s abilities to manage inventories, track shipments and move items through supply chains—key requirements to maintain an army’s effectiveness during operations.

As the Training Development Lead, my role is to work with the Technical School at the Logistics Brigade to help them develop their capacity to provide courses that will help the LAF’s logistics soldiers to learn the fundamental skills they need to do their job. It is an incredible opportunity to leverage my expertise to help another military get stronger.

A few months into the tour, we are already celebrating important successes. We have formed a standing committee within the Logistics Brigade to guide the development of the Technical School. This multi-faceted effort will take place over five to 10 years, but a vision is in place and work has begun.

Our small team has also co-written a training plan for a Workshop Foundations course with the LAF, which will provide a basic level of training to all soldiers in the various workshops, including the weapons, vehicle, signal, and light equipment workshops. We used the Workshop Foundations course as an opportunity to mentor the staff at the Technical School on how to conduct a detailed job-analysis as the first step for developing a course that meets organizational needs. We are already in the planning stages of developing the next course on Item Management!

Aside from helping with training and learning, we are always looking for opportunities to support LAF efforts toward increased gender-integration and strengthening their senior non-commissioned officer corps. Re-evaluating the role of women and empowering leaders within lower ranks are significant opportunities for the LAF to maximize the use of available human resources and improve overall effectiveness.

I have gained an appreciation for the new Canadian immigrant trying to grasp our obsession with hockey or, on a more serious level, for the refugee who fears members of the Calgary Police. There is a discrepancy in how law-enforcement is viewed, because police forces operate differently in other places.

This learning mirrors the experience from my deployment to Afghanistan in 2013. I was then working as a staff officer for an American Lieutenant-Colonel who provided recommendations to the Afghans about logistics management. At the time, my contact with Afghans was limited to the contractors who worked on our base and the merchants in the bazaar. Those interactions were eye-opening for me, in that they offered a glimpse of what “normal” looks like in other cultures—and how different that can be from an Albertan’s perspective.

A police officer and a Reservist

I truly love what I do. I am a police officer and an Army Reservist, and have juggled these careers for over nine years. I am so grateful for the opportunity to serve both my community and my country. In fact, being a Reservist makes be a better police officer, and vice versa.

If I can manage these two careers, it is thanks to the excellent military-leave policy of the Calgary Police Service, and the support of the sergeants, staff sergeants and inspectors who enthusiastically supported me as I took time away for military training, courses and deployments over the years. As any Reservist would appreciate, I have been incredibly fortunate for this level of support from my civilian employer.

I am a proud Calgarian and Canadian; I have benefited greatly from the peace and prosperity that Canada offers. As a healthy and fit member of society, in a position where I am able to do so, I believe it is my duty to give back—a sentiment I share with many of my police and military brothers and sisters.