Posted on 11/10/2007 8:36:18 AM PST by Clive
Ibecame a full-time journalist 16 years ago. And every Remembrance Day since, it has been my honour to interview a veteran of one of Canada's past wars or the family and friends of someone who died fighting.
Also, as an Edmontonian I live near Canada's largest army base. "The Garrison," as it is known locally, has supplied more troops to our mission in Afghanistan than any other base. I have come to know more than my fair share of these brave men and women, and the one thing that has struck me is how much they are like the soldiers Canada has sent to earlier wars and peacekeeping missions.
Humble, restrained, practical, level-headed and devoted to Canada, courageous, intelligent, polite and, yes, even gentle. Canada's soldiers, sailors and airmen and women are in many ways the model soldiers and in other ways not at all what you might picture if told to conjure up an image of a fighting man or woman.
None I have ever met, whether veteran or serving soldier, has a blood lust or an obsession with war or killing. Most joined out of a sense of duty and commitment to defend Canadian values. If they can do that without killing, no one is happier.
As a very young corporal at The Garrison told me last winter, "No one is more interested in not getting killed in war, and not killing, than a well-trained soldier."
Their first instinct is to defend, not impose. They never see themselves as crusaders or evangelists for our way of life. They are not, and never have been, out to make the world safe for democracy -- just safe, so ordinary people can go back to doing ordinary things without fear of being blown up or shot while tending their fields or going to work.
In one way or another, most Canadians who have served in Afghanistan will give you a variation on the "make the place safe" answer when you ask them why they were over there. So the local school can open and kids can learn. So the women can feel safe going to the market to buy food. So the hospital can reopen. So ordinary people don't have to fear the Taliban.
Yes, if pushed, most will also add that they were there to keep the Taliban from reoccupying the country and giving al-Qaeda a safe haven from which to plan anti-Western attacks, perhaps even against Canada. Yet you can tell what touched them most was the impact our presence is having for good in the daily lives of ordinary Afghanis.
It has always been that way with our fighting men and women.
One of the first people I ever interviewed was Reggie Watts, a First World War veteran who was 99 when I met him in 1991. A short, slight farm boy from the Alberta town of Barrhead, Watts admitted to being "a very young 22" when he signed up in 1915.
His most vivid memory, even nearly three-quarters of a century later, was of the battle of Vimy Ridge. Reggie spent the winter of 1916-17 -- a winter so cold some veterans claimed their hot meals froze to metal trays before they could finish eating--15 kilometres southwest of "the Pimple," a heavily fortified German-held promontory near the front.
On the morning of April 9, 1917, Easter Monday, as sleet, snow and freezing rain lashed them from behind, Reggie and 40,000 other Canadian infantrymen, fighting together for the first time as a single Canadian corps under Canadian command, charged Vimy's machine guns and artillery pieces.
Previous British and French attacks had failed so spectacularly the ridge was thought to be impregnable. Yet after four days of continuous fighting (Reggie was sure he must have slept, but could not remember doing so), the quiet, determined Canadians captured it.
Then there was David Currie. I never met the Victoria Cross winner who served in the South Alberta Regiment in the Second World War, but I interviewed several men who served under him.
Two months after the D-Day landings the SARs were pushing south into France as part of the 4th Canadian Armoured Division. They were racing frantically to meet up with Americans pushing northward to close off the escape of more than 100,000 crack German tank troops who were being herded into this Canadian-American pincer by the British from the west.
What followed were three days of fighting so horrific the British War Office had to create a new official designation for the level-- "double intense."
Officially the Falaise Gap, the Germans called the tiny area into which four country's armies were pouring "The Cauldron," and the name fit. Daytime temperatures approached 40C -- 50C nearest the fighting. Into an region smaller than Greater Toronto, the opposing sides threw 3,000 piece of artillery and perhaps 200,000 men. So close where the combatants that as many as 400 Canadians died from friendly fire. Pilots flying over the battlefield reported being sickened by the stench of death.
By chance, "C" Squadron of the SAR wound up as the sole defenders of St. Lambert-sur-Dives. The town's main street being two German armies' last escape route. In 60 hours of fighting, the unit's 125 officers and men destroyed seven tanks, knocked out a dozen pieces of heavy artillery and killed, wounded or captured 2,900 enemy.
At the end, Currie was the squadron's last remaining officer. He had run all over the town repositioning defences and encouraging his men. When the fighting stopped, he fell asleep standing up.
And then there was Vic, a Korea war vet who I met in his modest Edmonton bungalow a dozen or more years ago. A short, stocky railroader, he and his wife Miriam had lived all over the Prairies, raised three kids, sent all of them to university --he was particularly proud of that. "On my pay? It was a miracle."
In the nearly 40 years between the time his war ended and our interview, Vic had seldom talked about the conflict. Even four decades later, the words came reluctantly.
"Are you sure they call Korea the Land of the Morning Calm?" he asked in response to one of my questions. "It never seemed very damned calm to me." Vic was on Hill 677 near Kapyong in late April, 1951 when a Chinese army "human wave" attacked.
"There was mortar and artillery exploding everywhere,'' Vic remembered, his head down, his voice barely a whisper. "And whistles. The Chinese were blowing whistles. It must have been their signal to attack or something. I guess they didn't have many radios.
"All night they just kept coming. One attack after another, after another. I don't remember time passing or being nervous. But I shook solid for three days after it was over."
From the Somme, Ypres and Passchendaele to Hong Kong, the Scheldt Estuary and Holland, through Cypress, the Congo and in the Medak Pocket in the Balkans in 1993 to Kandahar today, Canada has always sent into battle or peacekeeping or nation rebuilding smart, professional, even-keeled fighters who continue to be a great credit to Canadians. Thank you.
Tomorrow is Remembrance Day.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
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