OTTAWA–Canada's former top soldier waged war on many fronts during his long march to the post of chief of defence staff – but the most intense were the counterinsurgencies on Parliament Hill.

Gen. Rick Hillier has for the first time revealed his battle against Conservative officials who wanted him silenced and bureaucrats who tried to stifle his ambitious agenda to rebuild the military.

"We in the Canadian Forces and the Department of National Defence were at war but the rest of the government was not, and sometimes our war felt like it was in Ottawa, not Kandahar," he writes in his memoir A Soldier First: Bullets, Bureaucrats and the Politics of War, a copy of which was obtained by the Star.

Hillier recounts the rocky recent history of the Canadian military from the perspective of the ultimate insider.

The former tank commander was executive assistant to the vice-chief of defence staff, the country's No. 2 soldier, when two Canadian troops tortured and killed a Somali teenager in 1993, an event that shook the force and prompted the Liberal government to disband the airborne regiment.

Hillier was deputy commander of the army when Canadians first went to Afghanistan after 9/11, head of NATO operations in the country in 2003 and chief of defence staff when Canadian soldiers moved from Kabul into their current role in volatile Kandahar.

So deeply was Hillier involved in the efforts to rebuild the country, as the head of the International Security Assistance Force, that President Hamid Karzai turned to him before the 2004 Afghanistan elections for advice on a running mate.

Hillier steered clear of picking the country's vice-president, but personally warned Fahim Khan, a warlord and former defence minister, that his finances would be frozen and his passport rejected around the world if he turned against Karzai in response. Khan was picked as Karzai's vice-president in this year's national elections that have been marred by ballot-box stuffing.

A large part of Hillier's final years was spent shuttling between Canada and Afghanistan, but his legacy will be in Ottawa, where he is credited with single-handedly reviving the confidence of the Canadian Forces following what he termed the "Decade of Darkness" – the 1990s – that was defined by budget cutbacks and crushed morale.

His folksy manner and ease with the media masked a laser-guided vision for the Forces when he was selected chief of defence staff by former Liberal prime minister Paul Martin in January 2005.

But Martin's successor, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, wasn't as comfortable with Hillier's ease in front of the television camera.

Hillier says Harper was a "very quick study" when the two men first sat down to discuss the Afghan mission after the Conservative election victory of 2006.

"He grasped the military situation quickly and had obviously been following the mission, though he didn't have as many details as I was now giving him," he writes. "It quickly became apparent to me that he supported the mission and what Canada was doing in Afghanistan."

Gordon O'Connor, Hillier's former commanding officer, was a different matter. O'Connor had an "out-of-date understanding" of the military and went around senior officers when seeking advice "to get the answer he wanted."

While Hillier says they were able to resolve most of their differences, interference from officials in the Prime Minister's Office was a constant during his 3 1/2-year-term as chief of defence staff.

It began on March 4, 2006, after a series of newspaper and television interviews to promote the Canadian Forces and try to boost recruiting efforts. Hillier was pulled into O'Connor's office for a private chat.

"We want to see less of you," O'Connor told a stunned Hillier.

"While he was never specific about who had been complaining about my profile, there was no doubt in my mind this `request' was coming from the Prime Minister's Office staffers and that Gord was acting as the front man, loyal soldier that he was."

Hillier stuck to his guns, insisting on the importance of building the relationship between the military and the public and says he would rather have resigned than change course. He was never again asked to lower his profile.

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That didn't put an end to the pestering, however. He was regularly questioned about decisions to give speeches or grant interviews. But the biggest pushback came after a decision to hold a full and open ceremony when the bodies of soldiers killed in Afghanistan returned to Canada and make the sombre trek down Highway 401, now known as the Highway of Heroes.

"Our new policy faced a few hiccups, particularly when we had pressure from PMO staffers suggesting ... that we should keep the aircraft with soldiers' remains out of sight, or we should do it late in the evening or early in the morning," he writes. "This was a line in the sand for me."

He reserves a chapter of his book to rail against the military's "enemies throughout the Ottawa bureaucracy." He noted the huge flow of taxpayers' money for things like guns and equipment led to resentment in other departments.

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