With Remembrance Day upon us, I was reading this article in the National Post entitled, "
Canada never one to back away from war."
The Canadian Encyclopedia online says peacekeeping is "Canada's special métier" - which it surely is - but that is only one of our military's specialities. In all, in our 141 years of nationhood, more than 116,000 Canadians have laid down their lives to protect our sovereignty and freedom. [...]
After the Germans and Japanese surrendered in 1945, we had the fourth-largest army in the world. Between 1939 to 1945, when our population was just over 12 million, nearly one million Canadians served in uniform. (To put that number in per-capita context, it was the equivalent of today's Canada fielding a military of almost three million - equivalent to the population of Montreal.)
We are not a country that seeks out war. Indeed, we have always let our military deteriorate between conflicts, focusing our public spending instead on domestic priorities. There was almost as much expert and media hand-wringing over the sad state of our Armed Forces between the First and Second World Wars as there was immediately before the recent round of spending by the Conservative government. Yet when called upon, we are always equal to the challenge with our combination of full-time soldiers, reservists and volunteers. Whether ensuring the first election in a nascent democracy goes off fairly, rushing aid and medical personnel into a disaster zone or engaging in old-fashioned combat, Canadian soldiers, sailors and airmen have long established that they are even-handed in policing trouble spots and tenacious fighters where someone else has started the battle.
For too long, our politicians, academics and educators have tried to bury or even deny our true military history, insisting we have never been a warrior nation. And while it is true that we have never as a culture glorified war, neither have we backed away.
Yes, Canada has been instrumental in developing the modern concept of peacekeeping, something of which we should be extremely proud. In Kashmir, Suez, Congo, Cyprus, Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda, Bosnia, Lebanon, Cambodia, Angola, Mozambique and dozens of other conflicts around the globe, we have over and over again proven ourselves equal to the complex and dangerous task of standing between two warring factions (or more) and keeping them from killing one another. And we have lost over 100 brave young men and women in 50 years of this service to mankind.
Still, we risk dishonouring those Canadians who have gone to war to defend our nation and its values when we seek to revise our history and downplay our contributions to wars fought in the name of freedom. This is especially true at a time when more than 2,500 of our soldiers are battling the Taliban and al-Qaeda on the plains and in the mountains of Afghanistan. Nearly 100 have lost their lives there in the past six years trying to bring stability to the people of that nation and deny terrorists a staging base from which to plot their attacks on the West.
I think it's interesting that the author points out that Canada does not glorify war, but we don't back away from it either. In my time in the US, I have noticed that people here are a bit too rah rah about their military. To illustrate the difference, when was the last time you watched a war movie featuring Canadians in a war conflict? Off the top of my head, I can only think of Hotel Rwanda where it highlights Canadian General Dallaire, and the Canadian involvement isn't really the main part of the story. American war movies, I can list off quite a few: Pearl Harbor, Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down, Band of Brothers, Patton, etc. In either case, I do prefer the Canadian approach to war making; we don't actively seek out war, but we will bring it if needed.
Remembrance Day used to be kind of abstract to me because I couldn't really internalize what it meant when someone talked about the sacrifices that soldiers make for their country. It only hit home a couple years ago when the headlines said that the US military was stretched really thin, and some politicians were pitching the idea of a draft. A draft usually involves recruiting able bodied citizens, which largely consists of my demographic.
I pondered the hypothetical situation of the things that one would have to give up should a draft actually be implemented. In my case, that would mean not being able to finish my schooling. It would mean being posted to anywhere in the world without my say. It would mean putting aspirations to go after that dream job on hold. It would mean not being able to spend time with that special someone as I could be thousands of miles away. It would mean wondering every day if this was my last day on earth.
With that in mind, I am grateful to those who volunteer to fight our wars, so that the rest of us can enjoy our freedoms as civilians. I end by applauding all those who have served their country to preserve our freedoms, our national interests, and our sovereignty.
