Forgotten too easily
On Friday I was sitting beside four military wives at the Montreal airport restaurant as we waited for our flights. They were transitting somewhere, likely to or from their husbands. Ages ranged, but all were living off the income of a sub warrant officer level and it impossible not to hear them talking money (separate cheques, please). When I worked for the Assoc. Minister of National Defence, I recall that an entry level Private made something like $17,300.
Military wives are instantly recognizable if you’ve spent any time on a military base; and the Hon. Mary Collins made sure I saw 26 different ones during my 2 and a half years on her staff. Their sacrifice far and away surpasses that of the men they married. Months/years on end living somewhere far from urban life, in a PMQ with ancient window coverings and the daily fear that the next knock at your door will be the Chaplin and Base Commander.
Seeing them got me thinking about the lack of yellow ribbons on trees and cars, despite the fact that we actually have thousands of troops currently in harms way, defending our way of life. Here were four, largely forgotten, examples of courage.
Then, yesterday, Captain (ret’d) Dave Jennings of Top Aces sent along this story from our Motherland (published just after the friendly fire incident). While the pilots have never suffered like the grunts (Churchill once said he liked the RAF because “you could bring your man” — ie., your bulter, could come with you when you were posted to a base), Dave is still one of those people who put themselves out there for us. And no one thanked him, either:
Salute to a brave and modest nation
Kevin Myers,
The Sunday Telegraph
“LONDON – Until the deaths last week of four Canadian soldiers accidentally killed by a U.S. warplane in Afghanistan, probably almost no one outside their home country had been aware that Canadian troops were deployed in the region. And as always, Canada will now bury its dead, just as the rest of the world as always will forget its sacrifice, just as it always forgets nearly everything Canada ever does.
It seems that Canada’s historic mission is to come to the selfless aid both of its friends and of complete strangers, and then, once the crisis is over, to be well and truly ignored.
Canada is the perpetual wallflower that stands on the edge of the hall, waiting for someone to come and ask her for a dance. A fire breaks out, she risks life and limb to rescue her fellow dance-goers, and suffers serious injuries. But when the hall is repaired and the dancing resumes, there is Canada, the wallflower still, while those she once helped glamorously cavort across the floor, blithely neglecting her yet again.
That is the price Canada pays for sharing the North American continent with the United States, and for being a selfless friend of Britain in two global conflicts.
For much of the 20th century, Canada was torn in two different directions: It seemed to be a part of the old world, yet had an address in the new one, and that divided identity ensured that it never fully got the gratitude it deserved.
Yet its purely voluntary contribution to the cause of freedom in two world wars was perhaps the greatest of any democracy. Almost 10% of Canada’s entire population of seven million people served in the armed forces during the First World War, and nearly 60,000 died. The great Allied victories of 1918 were spearheaded by Canadian troops, perhaps the most capable soldiers in the entire British order of battle. Canada was repaid for its enormous sacrifice by downright neglect, its unique contribution to victory being absorbed into the popular Memory as somehow or other the work of the “British.”
The Second World War provided a re-run. The Canadian navy began the war with a half dozen vessels, and ended up policing nearly half of the Atlantic against U-boat attack. More than 120 Canadian warships participated in the Normandy landings, during which 15,000 Canadian soldiers went ashore on D-Day alone. Canada finished the war with the third-largest navy
and the fourth-largest air force in the world.
The world thanked Canada with the same sublime indifference as it had the previous time. Canadian participation in the war was acknowledged in film only if it was necessary to give an American actor a part in a campaign in which the United States had clearly not participated – a touching scrupulousness which, of course, Hollywood has since abandoned, as it has any notion of a separate Canadian identity.
So it is a general rule that actors and filmmakers arriving in Hollywood keep their nationality – unless, that is, they are Canadian. Thus Mary Pickford, Walter Huston, Donald Sutherland, Michael J. Fox, William Shatner, Norman Jewison, David Cronenberg, Alex Trebek, Art Linkletter and Dan Aykroyd have in the popular perception become American, and Christopher Plummer, British. It is as if, in the very act of becoming famous, a Canadian ceases to be Canadian, unless she is Margaret Atwood, who is as unshakably Canadian as a moose, or Celine Dion, for whom Canada has proved quite unable to find any takers.
Moreover, Canada is every bit as querulously alert to the achievements of its sons and daughters as the rest of the world is completely unaware of them. The Canadians proudly say of themselves – and are unheard by anyone else – that 1% of the world’s population has provided 10% of the world’s peacekeeping forces. Canadian soldiers in the past half century have been the greatest peacekeepers on Earth – in 39 missions on UN mandates, and six on non-UN peacekeeping duties, from Vietnam to East Timor, from Sinai to Bosnia. Yet the only foreign engagement that has entered the popular Canadian imagination was the sorry affair in Somalia, in which out-of-control paratroopers murdered two Somali infiltrators. Their regiment was then disbanded in disgrace – a uniquely Canadian act of self-abasement for which, naturally, the Canadians received no international credit.
So who today in the United States knows about the stoic and selfless friendship its northern neighbour has given it in Afghanistan? Rather like Cyrano de Bergerac, Canada repeatedly does honourable things for honourable motives, but instead of being thanked for it, it remains something of a figure of fun.
It is the Canadian way, for which Canadians should be proud, yet such honour comes at a high cost. This week, four more grieving Canadian families knew that cost all too tragically well.”
MRM
Canada had two home-grown heroes in the first World War. Colonel John McCrae, who wrote In Flanders Fields, and Billy Bishop, the ace who downed seventy-two enemy aircraft. After that, it took until the 1990s for two more national heroes of a different sort to emerge: Major-General Lewis Mackenzie, chief of staff of the United Nations protection force in the former Yugolslavia, and Lieutenant-General Romeo Dallaire, who led the United Nations mission in Rwanda and warned of genocide to an indifferent world. Both men became famous by dint of their own effort, running for Parliament, writing books, etc. I agree, Canada needs a yellow-ribbon mentality. Most of all, we need an up-from-the-bootstraps hero, someone like Pat Tillman, the former Arizona Cardinals player killed in 2004 in Afghanistan while on duty as an Army Ranger. Tillman hasn’t played in the NFL for almost five years but his jersey currently ranks among the top ten most popular sellers.