Dallaire was inspired by his parents to join the military. His father, Sergeant Roméo Louis Dallaire, was an officer from Quebec in the Canadian army His mother, Catherine Vermeassen, was a “war bride” (9) from the Netherlands, meaning she met his father while he was stationed in Europe during World War II. During the war, his father trained French paratroopers in Scotland.

Growing up, Dallaire heard his mother talk about the horrors of war she experienced while living in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands and the hope given to her when the Canadian soldiers arrived. Dallaire describes his parents as moral exemplars: “I saw in my parents a courage that had led them to look beyond their own self-interest, to offer their own lives to defeat an evil that had threatened the peace and security of much of the world” (12).

Dallaire grew up in a lower-class French-speaking (Francophone) neighborhood in Montreal that was heavily polluted by the local oil industry. The French-speaking and English-speaking (Anglophone) kids in the area organized into gangs and fought with each other. Since he could speak both English and French he had friends on both sides, which made him seem “possibly a traitor” (13). Hoping to have a career in the Canadian military, Dallaire started working hard in school so he could enter a military college, which usually only admitted the children of higher-profile officers in the army.