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Corporal Alana Zanchetta: My first time wrapping a block of C-4 and initiating it. My heart was pitter pattering. Eventually you get used to it. And I think it’s a part of the adrenaline that really knocks out the anxiety part of it because you just like: “This is so cool.”

Captain Adam Orton: Hi! This is Captain Adam Orton for the Canadian Army Podcast. Combat Engineers are known to ensure that troops can live, move and fight on the battlefield. And that needs a lot of work, people and equipment. Here to talk about everything combat engineer is Corporal Alana Zanchetta from 5 Combat Engineer Regiment. And she’s joining us from Valcartier. Welcome to the podcast.

Cpl Zanchetta: Hi, thank you for having me. It’s my first time ever being on a podcast. So this is an experience.

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Capt Orton: Great. Well, let’s make it a good one.

Cpl Zanchetta: Awesome.

Capt Orton: So let’s start with: what is a Combat Engineer? A lot of people maybe don’t know what that is. You think maybe people are disarming mines or something like that? What does that job actually look like?

Cpl Zanchetta: Yeah, absolutely. I’ll give you a little bit of a snip pic. So, combat engineers ensure the mobility of troops. And they also aid in the counter mobility of the enemy movement. So it could be by constructing bridges or clearing bridges, creating obstacles or clearing obstacles with explosives or heavy equipment. It is detecting and avoiding mines in the road for other troops to be able to push through. It’s also, like, environmental hazards—keeping an eye on them. But our secondary job is infantry. So we are trained in those skills as well.

Capt Orton: So I think we should go through a little bit of those one at a time.

Cpl Zanchetta: Yeah, absolutely. I know, there’s a lot to talk about. So we do have a very wide spread of different things we do as Combat Engineers, so totally understandable, we can break it down a little.

Capt Orton: Let’s talk about mobility a little bit. You know, it’s interesting, we have like our own military vernacular that we use quite effectively. But, to some people, it seems fairly obvious they want mobilities moving. But what does that look like on the battlefield?

Cpl Zanchetta: To go into the engineering job to ensure the mobility of troops, say we are on mission, and there is a huge gap, and we need to pass through this river crossing. And we have a battalion behind us of tanks, we have infantry, we have everybody going on. So we can’t just go through the water because it’s too deep. So we need to build the bridge. So that’s our job as combat engineers to construct the bridge. So it could be a MGB, a Medium Gerber bridge is like big Lego pieces. And you work together to connect them all. And then the outcome of itz—you get a bridge.

You can also do an NSB. An NSB is known for, like, an improvised bridge. So depending on what materials you have available to you—also, for mobility, we could also do so for the clearing of obstacles. So say there’s this route, and the enemy placed a bunch of cement blocks everywhere. So we can’t just drive over the cement blocks. So what are we going to do? We’re going to look at the cement blocks; we’re going to measure them; we’re going to see how thick they are—what kind of cement they’re even made out of. And if they’re reinforced. So if they’re reinforced, they have metal rods running through them, we’re going to do the calculations to see how much explosives we need to breach those to clear them out of the way. And then after we have heavy equipment which comes in, they get all the large pieces of the obstacle out. So the mobility of our troops can continue on.

Capt Orton: And so conceivably, counter mobility is putting those concrete blocks or other things to prevent the enemy from being able to move around.

Cpl Zanchetta: Absolutely. So if the enemy was coming from one direction, and we didn’t want them anymore, we could set up minefields to make it for the don’t go on the major routes, or we can even use it to our own advantage and to canalize the enemy, which means that we want to put the enemy somewhere. So say if we put a bunch of minefields north and south, that would make the enemy having to go in a certain direction, which would be more beneficial for us.

Capt Orton: So that’s kind of what combat engineers do. But I know, for example, I’m in the infantry. You have LAV gunners or paratroopers—there’s like all sorts of specialties. What kind of specialties do you have in the combat engineer trade?

Cpl Zanchetta: We have a bunch. To start off with, I’m gonna go into some of my favourites.

Capt Orton: Okay. Perfect.

Cpl Zanchetta: So, I am intelligence specialtied, and it’s TIOC Tactical Intelligence Operations. That’s what I have for my qualification. I want to say it was an eight week course that I did. And this specialty I just actually used it in an exercise for the last two weeks. So what I did as a specialty is I looked at the map and I was trying to see where the enemy was coming from. And there was a massive river and we knew the enemy would have to cross the river. So I was examining where the best points for them to cross at. It depends on what terrain is on the other side, depending on what equipment they have, the bridging capabilities, and where would be the best routes for them to jump on to to continue on with their passing. So that’s a specialty that I took personally, to get myself a better knowledge of the military playbook and why people do things in a certain way.

Another kind of specialty that we have within the engineers is advanced search.

Capt Orton: What’s that about?

Cpl Zanchetta: Yeah, so we do occupied and unoccupied searches. So to go into that a little bit; occupied searches means that the residents are still inside the home.

Capt Orton: Right.

Cpl Zanchetta: So we approach the house—we could be looking for drugs, explosives, components, harmful weapons, etcetera. So we go up to the house. There’s an MP with us, so military police, they explain the situation that there’s a search warrant. We go inside, and we are trained to respect the people in the homes even if we are searching them—which is absolutely understandable. There could be children, there could be women, there can be men inside this house, who aren’t even understanding why we’re there.

So another part of advanced search is unoccupied search, which is my personal favourite. So, unoccupied search means that we do not know if people are living in a house—which means that it could potentially be booby trapped. So we can’t just touch and look through things. We don’t know what’s going on in there. So we call it a hook in line. It’s this kit that we have, and it has multiple different kinds of tools, such as clamps, hooks, ropes, etcetera. And we attach as many items inside that house together as possible. And we have this really big cord and we put ourselves at a safety distance in case there is something that does initiate it and explode then we are protecting ourselves. We don’t want to be sitting there all day long, just pulling one thing at a time, a washer, a dryer—no, no. We want to hook up as many items as we can as possible. And we pull it really hard. This one time, we grabbed a couch and we had to bring it outside of the window, but it was like in the middle of the living room flipped upside down and we weren’t allowed to touch it at all. So it’s a lot of creativity that comes into it when you’re kind of thinking of how you’re going to approach a scenario. And another reason why I personally really love search is because everybody thinks differently. But we could be able to intertwine our thought process together and see if we can make like a—maybe a better outcome.

Capt Orton: And that ties in pretty nicely with counter IED as well.

Cpl Zanchetta: Yeah, no, it definitely does. There’s lots of ways you can approach a situation especially for counter IED, the EOD team, which is explosive ordnance disposal. There’s multiple ways for you to approach different scenarios with that. I’ll give you a little snip pic from IDP2, my corporal qualification. I was clearing a road and had a metal detector and clearing away. And there’s wire detectors out on the outskirts. So we’re clearing this road because we don’t know if there’s mines or other like an IED, which is an improvised explosive device. We don’t know if someone’s going on the road. And we got a bunch of people behind us. They need to go on this road. But they can’t go on until we deem it safe. So our job is to search it. So now we’re searching the road. And I saw something in the distance about two hundred metres away on the right side of the road. And it was a black plastic bag—like a garbage bag. I was like: “Okay, like what’s going on here?” Obviously, you know, I want to see what’s going on. So we go up to it, I have my metal checked around, it’s dinging. So we definitely know there’s something inside that bag, but I just can’t go up and pull it apart. Even though I want to know what’s inside. We have to not put ourselves at harm. So what I did was I put an anchor point, which is 200 metres up the road. We had our vehicle which is a LAV, but we had it placed in front. So if there was an explosion, we’re able to hide behind it while we do our pull. So at that location, I had an anchor point. And then directly to the right side of that across from the road, beside of the ditch, I had another anchor point, I ran a chord through those anchor points running all the way through towards the situation, which is the black garbage bag, another anchor point there and then in front of the black plastic bag, I put a piece of tape with another anchor point. And then I put a clamp on the other side. So when I pulled the cord, the tape made one side of the plastic bag stay in place and the cord with the clamp, it ripped it open. So then I could see it was inside. But just that situation itself. There’s so many other scenarios that I could have done to open up this bag. And there’s so much creativity that you can think about when you’re approaching these situations.

Capt Orton: Yeah, creative problem solving all the way for sure.

Cpl Zanchetta: Absolutely.

Capt Orton: So then, you have also heavy equipment operators.

Cpl Zanchetta: Yes.

Capt Orton: What’s that about?

Cpl Zanchetta: So, heavy equipment operators—they are trained to drive the dozer, the bucket and multiple other different kinds of heavy equipment pieces. Say, there’s a road that’s washed out, we need to rebuild this. There are going to be the people who are going to be building the roads. Another scenario they could do; in September, we were doing our annual exercise for our regiment, we needed to build the camp. So luckily the camp was already built from multiple years ago. But after the spraying and the snow melts and everything like that, the dirt was moved around a bunch, it just wasn’t a great place for people to live for a couple of weeks. So the heavy equipment went in, they levelled everything out, they made sure it was easy for people to manoeuvre around.

Capt Orton: Okay, keep going. What else you got?

Cpl Zanchetta: To get into more other kinds of specialties. There’s Combat Divers. I understand that you guys did a podcast for the Combat Divers before, hey?

Capt Orton: Yeah, we have, which I’m pretty sure with season two, episode ten.

Cpl Zanchetta: I feel a little bit more comfortable above water personally. It is really cool their job that they do. They are able to do a lot of our job but underneath the water. And another specialty that we have is water purification. An example: our water purification team was going to resource all of the water for the camp that we’re using on exercise from the river. And that would make us fully dependable from the water source from the river and not from an outsource. So that would be beneficial to us, which would also benefit others. Let’s say that if we were on a mission, we could help civilians that need it.

Capt Orton: So, with all this, like you talked about, you know, your annual training exercise—what does a routine day look like in the world of Combat Engineers?

Cpl Zanchetta: During exercise, or at the Regiment?

Capt Orton: Yeah, at the Regiment.

Cpl Zanchetta: At the regiment, this could really have multiple things to do. Currently, for myself as the end position I am tracking of what’s going on in Ukraine and Russia. I make presentations to my commandant weekly about anything that’s impacting the world and if it could impact Canada. That’s what my job is. But prior to doing my specialty, I was in the field troops for multiple years. And our day-to-day life there, which is more typical for a Combat Engineer, is doing maintenance of our equipment. So it could be our tools, it could be our vehicle, it could be brushing up on our skills, redoing some of the mathematical equations that we need to do, brushing up on everything like that, if we just did a range, we have lots of cleaning up to do afterwards, weapons need to be soaked in cleaning solution, we could clean all of our axes that we had to use for the day like it really depends on what’s going on that week.

Capt Orton: That does actually pretty accurately capture your day-to-day in battalion or whatever. So that’s a good one. So we talked a little bit about routine activities. What are your bigger exercises like? What does that look like for you? Or, for Combat Engineers in general, which is probably more accurate, what does that look like for Combat Engineers?

Cpl Zanchetta: I’ll give a little snip pic for engineers on exercise, because there’s lots of different things that we could be implemented in. For example, there’s unit exercises, there’s brigade exercises. So everything’s also a little different depending on what it is. Unit exercises are made for us to practise our skills and to learn in an environment that is a little bit less stressful than working with other units because it is our time to kind of mess up, to fix our skills, and ask questions, and look at different things from another perspective. And that’s why we do the unit exercises. So, if you’re building a bridge, and we have less personnel than usual, what’s the outcome going to be of that? What’s going to affect the personnel? How’s this gonna affect the time of the bridge built? It could be as well for searches. If we were doing different kinds of occupied and unoccupied searches, we practise with some of our personnel, do OPFOR, which is enemy force, so they pretend to be the enemy. So then we actually get some experience with like, okay, what if you’re trying to search somebody, and they are not being cooperative? Like, what do you do? What’s a way for you can fully feel comfortable with approaching the situation? Obviously, it’s gonna be nothing like when you’re on mission—but, at least it kind of gives us some familiarity of what’s our trade is like when you’re not just practising and practising.

Capt Orton: Yeah. And it keeps you on your toes a little bit, too.

Cpl Zanchetta: Yeah, it definitely does. For an example, I just finished LION NUMÉRIQUE, it’s a brigade exercise. So what it means is all the units get together and we are approaching a situation together. So it was actually really cool. I was able to go in the back brief with the brigade commander and I listened in. It was my first time ever doing a brigade exercise. And I was really curious to see how the other elements took place with us as engineers, to seeing the inventories plans and the artillery plans with connections with our plans and seen how some of the infantry were down to a couple of guys so they wanted to borrow some of our people because our secondary duty is infantry and seeing how that intertwine with itself and seeing where our minefields were and how we need to make sure we had our safe lands open for our own personnel can be tracked and like trying to locate all that and like that communication that you don’t always get to see. And it was able to give me a better understanding of the military playbook and why we do things in a certain way, and how combat engineers can be implanted in that.

Capt Orton: So, speaking of that, have you had any experience integrating into a combined arms exercise where you’re mixed in with the infantry in the artillery and the armoured people and everybody’s rolling around together?

Cpl Zanchetta: Yeah, I did Common Ground in Gagetown in 2019. It was probably one of my favourite exercises I’ve ever done so far. So, I’ll give you an example of what was going on. And it’s like the clearest image in my brain right now. So we were clearing a minefield. So us engineers we’re up front—we were putting a safe lane in and there is a bunch of armoured tanks behind us. And they were pushing through behind us to make sure that it was cleared. And then once we’re able to put the safe lane through the minefield, the infantry convoy was able to push and continue on to their way to get to their objective—which was something really cool to see, because when we’re practising clearing minefields—like honestly, it just practise over and over and over again, you’re like: “Okay, I got this,” like, clear this minefield.

Capt Orton: That’s right.

Cpl Zanchetta: Sweet. I got the safe lane going on here. But actually seeing it being used in a military situation, made it feel like okay, yeah, actually, this is pretty cool. Like, I see why this is purposeful in my job.

Capt Orton: I’ve had that experience too where you’re doing like a vehicle checkpoint, and you're standing in this road in the middle of nowhere to practice doing vehicle checkpoints. I did air quotes for those that can’t see that. But there’s never a vehicle coming. But then when you actually start having vehicles, then it’s like: “Oh, yeah, this is real, it makes sense.” It gives something a little bit more tangible than just, you know, clearing a minefield in the middle of nowhere, that nobody’s ever gonna go there. And you just do it over and over and over again. But now there’s people waiting for you to clear the minefield, and they’re going somewhere, and maybe it’s time sensitive. And now you’re feeling a little bit more jazzed up about it.

Cpl Zanchetta: Oh, absolutely. It increases their morale insanely. You can see it throughout all the troops as well. Like, on day-to-day, we just practise our drills, we practise what we’re going to be doing, but when we actually get to implement them, it’s like: “Wow, okay, that’s cool.” Like all this practising paid off. And because you practise so much, you get the confidence of your job, like: “Yeah, okay, I’ve done this multiple times. You can do it this way, and that way.” So when you go to approach the scenario, you don’t have as much anxiety towards it. You’re like, Okay, I’ve done this last time. Let’s go, let’s do this. Like, it’s a good feeling. And you feel proud of yourself after you actually understand that your job was to do something beneficial.

Capt Orton: I had an experience. This was my, I’m glad I’m not a combat engineer today. The experience was, when I was in Afghanistan, we were coming up to a corner and there was a report that there was an IED on that corner, and we rolled up to it. And there was this giant pile of manure. So we’re like, oh, great, this is it. So we stopped, and we all dismounted. And I was like a private with a machine gun. And I went off and like did my, you know, cordon look back. And there’s an engineer going up to the giant pile of manure with a metal detector? And I was like: “Man, I’m glad I’m not a combat engineer today.”

Cpl Zanchetta: That is, yeah, that sounds like about my job.

Capt Orton: Yeah. And so you’re talking about, you know, like, it’s a dangerous job; you could get blown up by a pile of manure. You were saying, you know, practising those drills gives you that confidence. How do you deal with the reality that you’re directly interacting with explosives in pretty dangerous situations?

Cpl Zanchetta: A lot of it comes between the trust within yourself of knowing exactly what you’re doing and the trust within the people you work with. My first time wrapping a block of C-4 and initiating it, it was in a range, my master corporal is right there next to me. He was telling me exactly—you know, you’re doing good, you’re doing fine. But yeah, my heart was pitter pattering. And I was like: “What’s going on here?” And it’s normal, and eventually you get used to it. And I think it’s a part of the adrenaline that really knocks out the anxiety part of it, because you’re like: “This is so cool.”

Capt Orton: Right?

Cpl Zanchetta: So you work with the explosives throughout your training, you get comfortable with them, you understand exactly how they work and how they could be initiated. So every step that you take when you’re doing like a drill or whatever, you understand that you’re not in a huge safety risk at the moment—you’re going to be okay. And if there is a scenario that sometimes you are, for an example, when I did my DP2, my corporal’s qualification, you’d fully get qualified to handle UXOs. So like I got a motor, there can be rockets, missiles, grenades, etcetera.

Capt Orton: Basically, leftover bits, leftover explosive bits.

Cpl Zanchetta: Exactly. So you get taught how to control a scene and how to approach the situation or the explosive, and the BIP, which means Blow In Place. Or, you could have to make a reinforced position. Like depending what it is, it teaches you how to deal with a scenario and you get a block of C-4 with a det and you put it in while you’re right there next to it. You’re like: “Yeah, that looks pretty good!” Then you walk away. And after you initiate it and whatnot, you have some time. But, my first time doing it honestly, like there was some nervousness in me for sure. Whenever I got a little nervous, I just told myself that I did the training to do this. I know exactly what I’m doing.

Capt Orton: So with all this being said, where do you go from here? What’s the next step look like?

Cpl Zanchetta: I don’t know. I don’t know what I want to do with my life. Honestly, I’m a little lost in my twenties. I’m twenty-three and I joined the Army at seventeen. My dad actually signed for me to join because I couldn’t even sign for myself. So, I have some time in now; not a whole bunch, but enough to understand what it is like being in the Army. And people need to understand that the Army isn’t just a job—it is a lifestyle. You build relationships that you wouldn’t get from a civilian kind of job. And I think we can all agree, being in the Army, you definitely create those kinds of relationships. So I don’t want to ever get out of the Army until my twenty-five years or so because I want the pension, because I’d be forty-three. So my next step technically would go for my master corporal’s so I can start to become an instructor. But I don’t personally feel ready for that. So I don’t know exactly what I want to do—I love the engineers, I don't want to leave the trade but I don’t really know what’s next steps for me.

Capt Orton: Hey, I want to give you one quick piece of advice—you take this or leave it—unsolicited advice, here. But I will say this, with regards to career progressing and doing the master corporal thing and stuff. Most of the people that I know, including myself, when it was my time to go, didn’t feel ready. And the thing is, it was the best thing that could have happened to me. So don’t hold yourself back too long. Because what you’ll find is other people will get ahead of you. And then you have to deal with that, too. So master corporal’s a fine rank, you get to do tons of stuff still. And you just get to dip your toes into the meeting people thing. It’s not bad. So don’t hold yourself back too long.

Cpl Zanchetta: Understandable—you’re not wrong there.

Capt Orton: Tell me what it was like when you joined the Army and joined the engineers.

Cpl Zanchetta: When I joined the Army, I was at the recruitment centre. And I just finished my aptitude test. And I was sitting there with my dad. And I was trying to think about: “Okay, what do I want to do?” And I was sitting there with the officer, and he’s giving my options. And he said, combat engineer, and I was like: “Okay, that sounds pretty cool. Like, what’s a combat engineer?” He was like: “There’s not a lot of girls in it. It’s a guy’s trade. I don’t recommend it to women, I really don’t recommend it to you.” And I looked at my dad. And I was like: “That’s what I’m doing. That is my trade.” And, like I had not as much knowledge of what the engineers do today. Absolutely. But at that moment, but I’m really grateful. I definitely took that step. That was how my initiation of my combat engineering career started. I am really grateful that I continued on to it, though, I’m gonna be honest, like, there definitely were moments that it was physically demanding. But it also gave me really great strength and confidence within myself knowing that I was able to finish something and feeling proud of myself. And that’s something that I was able to take, within my experience with the engineers is that I never really experienced in civilian world is the opportunity to feel really proud of myself, because I am able to do opportunities that I never thought I’d be able to do and things that I didn’t think I’d be successful in.

Capt Orton: Yeah. And sometimes doing hard training stuff. When you get through it on the other side, you realize how much potential you have. And to see that laid out before you as you're tested to your very limits is a pretty unique experience.

Cpl Zanchetta: Oh, absolutely. Makes you see things within yourself that you didn't think were there.

Capt Orton: Okay, well, I think that’s—that’s the podcast.

Cpl Zanchetta: Nice.

Capt Orton: Thanks so much for being on the podcast.

[Music starts]

Cpl Zanchetta: Well, thank you for having me. Chimo.

Capt Orton: All right. Yeah, Chimo. Perfect. Ducimus.

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